I Could Be Bounded In A Nutshell

Definition of in a nutshell in the idioms dictionary.

So for his original aud. O god i could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that i have bad dreams. It is used by shakespeare in hamlet. Thackeray used it in print in the second funeral of napoleon 1841.

Not just the obvious. Mcewan s garrulous and unnamed hamlet could have taken his cue from any number of lines from the play but oh god i could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were. The figurative use of in a nutshell to mean specifically in few concise words didn t emerge until the 19th century. In the play the context is hamlet s failure to inherit the throne from his late father.

Someone who could think of it as infinite space would not be ambitious. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that i have bad dreams. In a nutshell phrase. O god i could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that i have bad dreams william shakespeare hamlet read more quotes from william shakespeare.

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You cannot understand or make good sense of that nutshell line without the line that comes right after it. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that i have bad dreams. Which dreams indeed are ambition for the very. Hamlet says if i were in a nutshell a nutshell is empty then he would have nothing.

It s subtle in the play because elizabethans would have simply assumed that a king s son would become king after his father s death. A nutshell is tiny. Definitions by the largest idiom dictionary.