Entertainment / Literature / Hendiadys: As Arthur Quinn defines the term in Figures of Speech, hendiadys is a peculiar type of polysyndeton involving 'the combination of addition, substitution, and usually arrangement, the addition of a conjunction between a word (noun, adjective, verb) and its modifier (adjective, adverb, infinitive), the substitution of this word's grammatical form for that of its modifier, and usually rearrangement so that the modifier follows the word' (Quinn 102). This process sounds complicated, but it is a very simple way of artificially splitting a single idea into multiple subdivisions by sticking the word and in an unusual spot in a sentence. Some examples will help in understanding. For instance, medieval chroniclers might write 'by length of time and siege' instead of writing 'by a long siege.' Instead of talking about 'the furious sound' of an idiot's impassioned speech signifying nothing, Macbeth might talk about its 'sound and fury.' Quinn suggests that if Christ meant to say, 'I am the true and living way,' Christ might spruce the phrase up by saying 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.' In Genesis, when God announces to Eve that he will 'greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception,' the King James translators are using hendiadys to refer to a single thing--the pain of childbirth--as a list of two items. Instead of simply saying God has a powerful and glorious kingdom, Matthew states, 'For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen' (Matt. 6:13). In Hamlet, we read how one character states, 'But in the gross and scope of my opinion, / This bodes some strange eruption to our state' (Hamlet 1.1.68). We would expect to read something like, 'in the scope of my gross opinion' in normal speech of the day. Likewise, Cymbeline mentions 'The heaviness and the guilt within my bosom' when we would expect to hear of 'the heavy guilt within my bosom' (Cym.5.2.1). For these and other examples, see also Quinn 16-17 and 25.
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