Across the centuries, William Shakespeare has been admired for his genius with words and for a craft that can make the smallest repetition feel like a visual tremor. One of the subtler devices he employs is diacope.
What is Diacope?
The term names a pattern of repetition in which a word or short phrase returns after a few intervening words. The device is musical and implacable at the same time. It makes an utterance memorable and it tightens emotional pressure in the body of a line. The voice of the theatre suited diacope perfectly. Actors needed lines that could be thrown into the air and catch an audience whether they were in the galleries at the Globe or standing in the yard. Diacope becomes a tool for clarity and for emphasis. It can sound like grief that will not stop, like a thought that circles and returns, or like a command given twice so that it cannot be ignored. Modern textbooks define the device precisely and point to its repeated use by writers from Count Leo Tolstoy to contemporary speechwriters. Shakespeare stands among the earliest English masters of the effect.
Diacope in Shakespeare’s Plays (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello)
Consider the familiar instances that teachers and audiences still quote. In “To be, or not to be, that is the question” from Hamlet, written c. 1599 to 1601, the repeated verb makes existence itself feel like a choice. In “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day” from Macbeth, first performed c. 1606, the repeated word becomes a drumbeat of futility. The short cry “Out, out, brief candle,” also from Macbeth, compresses a lifetime into a single image. In Othello, written c. 1603 to 1604, an order becomes fatal in the line “Put out the light, and then put out the light” where the echo turns an ordinary command into an instrument of finality. These lines are not mere ornament. The repetitions are the engine of thought and feeling and they do work on the stage as sound and as sense.
Beyond Shakespeare: Marlowe, Kyd and Jonson
Shakespeare’s contemporaries used diacope in much the same spirit and sometimes in ways that show different theatrical priorities. Christopher Marlowe adopts pleading repetition in “But let me die, my love, yet let me die” in Tamburlaine the Great Part II, written 1587 to 1588, and makes the imperative circle back on itself until resignation is almost audible. Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy, written c. 1587, uses the Latin refrain “Vindicta mihi” to make the idea of revenge into a returning pulse, a motif that helps to shape the revenge play as a whole. Satirists and city playwrights could put the device to comic effect. Ben Jonson and others in the same generation turned repetition into ridicule by hammering a catchphrase until the motive sounded absurd rather than noble. These echoes helped actors and audiences alike to catch and to remember lines in a crowded and noisy playhouse.
There is a technical reason why diacope has such power. It places the repeated element around a narrow gap so that the intervening words can alter sense between the echoes. That shifting of meaning is where the rhetorical force lies. A repeated verb or name returns with difference and the difference is often decisive. On the Elizabethan stage the first instance registers in the ear and the second instance carries the weight of the first. For a crowd that loved quotation the device also served a mnemonic function. Lines became portable. They could be quoted in conversation and printed in broadsheets. In that way diacope is both an aesthetic device and a practical tool of early modern theatre.
Directors and critics continue to disagree about how best to deploy repeated words. Some argue that diacope shows a playwright moving quickly and cleanly to a dramatic point. Others prefer to linger on the repetitions and to savour their musicality. Both approaches are useful. The device is flexible enough to insist and to mourn, to cajole and to convict. It can be a whisper that draws a listener close and it can be a hammer that brings an audience to attention. That very malleability is part of its genius.
Modern Examples (19th–20th Century)
Later writers continued to turn the small machinery of repetition to powerful effect. Walt Whitman returns a pronoun to make the self insist upon itself in “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (“Song of Myself,” 1855). Charles Dickens uses a repeated clause to weld contrasting images into a single unforgettable line in “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (A Tale of Two Cities, 1859). In the twentieth century Dylan Thomas doubles an imperative to make defiance itself into a drumbeat in “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (“Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” 1951). Each of these examples shows how a short echo can broaden a thought or set it spinning.
The device also travelled into modern prose and the avant garde. Samuel Beckett compresses stubbornness and endurance into a tiny paradox with “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (The Unnamable, 1953). Poets and novelists use the repeated element to underline obsession, to turn a plea into a litany, or to make a moral or emotional pivot audible to the reader. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries diacope and its kin remained a favoured instrument for writers who wanted a handful of words to carry an argument, to haunt an image, or to lodge itself in memory.
What remains striking is how often diacope appears at moments of decision. Repetition gives a single word the authority to become an ordinance on the stage. It is no accident that some of the most quoted phrases in English use the form. Their power comes not only from meaning but from structure that embeds memory. For readers and for performers the lesson is plain. The repeated word is not repetition for its own sake. It is a small machine that converts sound into feeling and feeling into action. Shakespeare and his contemporaries made that machine sing and in doing so they ensured that a short return of a word can still move an audience after four hundred years.
Arup K. Chatterjee 