Lingue e Linguaggi Lingue Linguaggi 27 (2018), 285-305 ISSN 2239-0367, e-ISSN 2239-0359 DOI 10.1285/i22390359v27p285 http://siba-ese.unisalento.it, © 2018 Università del Salento This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 “THE LITTLE O” Signifying Nothing in Shakespeare DAVID LUCKING Abstract – This chapter analyses some of the ways in which the crucial concept of Nothingness weaves its way throughout Shakespeare’s work, and those in which the various meanings of the word “nothing” are systematically investigated and set off against one another. The tragedies Hamlet and King Lear come in for especially close attention, although a number of other Shakespearean works are also considered. Particular emphasis is placed on the idea that something might arise out of nothing, and on the implications for Shakespeare’s writing of the new mathematics based on the symbol zero that had been introduced relatively recently into England. The opposition between Being and Nothingness – or more precisely between the different ways these can be conceived in relation to one another – is in a number of plays subject to processes of poetic negotiation as Shakespeare illustrates the various ways in which things can issue from nothing even as they inexorably return to nothing. “Nothing” becomes a profoundly paradoxical concept in Shakespeare’s drama, as it is shown to possess aspects that are potentially generative – though not necessarily in a positive sense – as well as destructive. Keywords: Shakespeare; Hamlet; King Lear; The Tempest. 1. Talking of Nothing As Mercutio becomes increasingly caught up in the momentum of his rhapsody about dreams and their origins in Romeo and Juliet, lashing himself into a frenzy of words that seems ungovernable, Romeo abjures him to break off with the exclamation: “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace. / Thou talk’st of nothing” (1.4.95-96). 1 There are words that reverberate with particular intensity in the Shakespearean universe, shifting between the various meanings and implications with which they are invested with a volatility that is sometimes disconcerting. One of the most arresting of those words is that employed by Romeo at this juncture. “Nothing” is in some respects an anomalous term, one which by its very nature seems to embody a paradox. As a noun denoting what by definition does not exist, it has significance of a 1 All references to Shakespeare’s works throughout this discussion are to the single volume Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (Shakespeare 2001).