Laughter and tears can be dangerous things – especially when juxtaposed, as they are throughout this book, and also in the lines that serve as the epigraph to this brief epilogue. Shakespeare's lines have a bearing on the range of ambiguity explored in the foregoing chapters: they are spoken by the Player King in the play-within-a-play that (perhaps) proves the guilt of Hamlet's uncle. They are doubly part of a performance; the whole episode is a send-up in which not only Hamlet and the fictional audience but also the real audience in the theatre are encouraged to be complicit: Shakespeare parodies the cliches and conventions that were the inheritance of the late sixteenth century from the Renaissance and its Graeco-Roman hinterland. Within that parodied context, the cliche can still be dangerous. The purpose of the character played by the Player King is to seduce the character played by the Player Queen, as a prelude to the murder of her husband. The speech continues:

The lines about grief and joy turn out to have been part of a rhetorical (and hardly logical) argument that even the most intense feelings are subject to change and perhaps were never sincere in the first place:

As the editors of this book set out clearly near the start of their Introduction, neither laughter nor weeping is an emotion in itself. Tears or laughter may constitute either the spontaneous, physiological manifestation of that emotion, or its performance, or ‘the enactment of elaborate social processes’ (see p. 5) – or indeed all three together.