It’s funny that hire and salary are words with such a long history. They seem so contemporary somehow or maybe a few decades ago, at the most.
In our freelance society, getting hired or getting a salary are increasingly Rare things. But I don’t know how these words meanings have shifted and changed over the years. I know that a while back people would hire coaches and horses and so on. Has a salary always been a regular payment system? Usually a yearly sum? Maybe it was once a little different.
Hire AND salary would suggest that Hamlet’s been FIRST, SELECTED to do the job of killing Claudius at prayer and also PAID for it.
This seems a tiny bit redundant but there is a slight raising of the idea with “AND salary”
It would seem that Hire and Salary wasn’t an everyday phrase. This is Shakespeare inventing.
It also would be a great name for a pub or a rock band.
The Hamlet Project 