Social Hamlet: Time and Culture in the W. Shakespeare’s Tragedy

Sociocultural factors affect language lexis directly contrary to its phonology and grammar structure where such influence is moot. The tragedy Hamlet by Shakespeare, as a specimen of discourse, reflects the various aspects of the social environment ranging from medieval cosmology to pastimes and entertainments. A detailed statistical and semantic analysis of the original Hamlet text (First Folio) has been done by mixed method research. All the items related to the cultural background have been thoroughly gleaned from the text, interpreted, and studied by their semantics, structure, and figures of speech. The research reveals that the most numerous semantic group under consideration refers to ‘special areas of activity’ (31.75%), which includes such domains, as hawking, hunting, sea, military, pastime (games), theater, law, and arrow shooting. This group is followed by that of cultural references to customs, traditions, realia of the time, and historical events (17.46%). Then in the descending order, go the notions that refer to scientific views of the time (11.9%), those of superstitions (11.11%) and prejudices (10.32%). The group of medieval cosmology and that of religion are less numerous – 9.52% and 7.94% correspondingly. Structurally, communicative units, sentences and sets of those (58.73%), prevail over lexical units (35.71%) and idioms (5.56%). Among figures of speech, animal metaphor, transfer of different human qualities and that from concrete to abstract notions, along with flower symbolism as metonymy are most numerous. Keywords: cultural environment, Hamlet, medieval belief, obsolete sense, reference, Shakespeare’s language