How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder!

This is one of those beautifully inconspicuous bits of invention here. Jowls, normally a noun for one’s jaw or cheeks or hanging flesh, here becomes a verb, a verb like throw, perhaps. Jowl and throw having a couple of letters in common and a sound in common so we can work out what he means when he says the knave jowls it to the ground.
If I were going to use jaw as a verb, I’d use it to mean something related to the mouth, like chew or talk but that does not appear to be what’s happening here. We’re in a zone where a word appears out of its common usage and then poof! We’re also time traveling and this skull and/or jawbone is suddenly shifted to the opening bits of the bible. We get chewing and throwing and killing all at once – all from the actions of this one “knave” described by Hamlet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.