(a) Horatio. It would have much amazed you.
Hamlet. Very like, very like.  Stay’d it long?

(b) Polonius. What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet. Words, words, words.

(c) Polonius. My honourable lord, I will most humbly take
my leave of you.
Hamlet. You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I
will more willingly part withal:  except my
life, except my life, except my life.

(d) Ophelia. Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?
Hamlet. I humbly thank you, well, well, well.

Is there anything that Hamlet says or does in the whole play more unmistakably individual than these replies?[69]

(2) Hamlet, everyone has noticed, is fond of quibbles and word-play, and of ‘conceits’ and turns of thought such as are common in the poets whom Johnson called Metaphysical.  Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words and ideas chiefly in order to mystify, thwart and annoy.  To some extent, again, as we may see from the conversation where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern first present themselves (II. ii. 227), he is merely following the fashion of the young courtiers about him, just as in his love-letter to Ophelia[70] he uses for the most part the fantastic language of Court Euphuism.  Nevertheless in this trait there is something very characteristic.  We should be greatly surprised to find it marked in Othello or Lear or Timon, in Macbeth or Antony or Coriolanus; and, in fact, we find it in them hardly at all.  One reason of this may perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet, and that Shakespeare’s own fondness for this kind of play, like the fondness of the theatrical audience for it, diminished with time.  But the main reason is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet, betokens a nimbleness and flexibility of mind which is characteristic of him and not of the later less many-sided heroes.  Macbeth, for instance, has an imagination quite as sensitive as Hamlet’s to certain impressions, but he has none of Hamlet’s delight in freaks and twists of thought, or of his tendency to perceive and play with resemblances in the most diverse objects and ideas.  Though Romeo shows this tendency, the only tragic hero who approaches Hamlet here is Richard II., who indeed in several ways recalls the emasculated Hamlet of some critics, and may, like the real Hamlet, have owed his existence in part to Shakespeare’s personal familiarity with the weaknesses and dangers of an imaginative temperament.

That Shakespeare meant this trait to be characteristic of Hamlet is beyond question.  The very first line the hero speaks contains a play on words: 

A little more than kin and less than kind.

The fact is significant, though the pun itself is not specially characteristic.  Much more so, and indeed absolutely individual, are the uses of word-play in moments of extreme excitement.  Remember the awe and terror of the scene where the Ghost beckons Hamlet to leave his friends and follow him into the darkness, and then consider this dialogue: