TEXT:
OSRIC
Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him.
HAMLET
The concernancy, sir? why do we wrap the gentleman in our more rawer breath?
OSRIC
Sir?
HORATIO
Is't not possible to understand in another tongue? You will do't, sir, really.
HAMLET
What imports the nomination of this gentleman?
OSRIC
Of Laertes?
HORATIO
His purse is empty already; all's golden words are spent.
HAMLET
Of him, sir.
OSRIC
I know you are not ignorant…
HAMLET
I would you did, sir; yet, in faith, if you did, it would not much approve me. Well, sir?
NOTES:
Concernancy
There is no other use of the word in all of Shakespeare. Indeed, there’s very little use of it anywhere else, either!
Really
The only other time that the word really appears in any Shakespeare play is in The Two Noble Kinsmen, when the Jailer wishes that “I would I were really that I am delivered to be.” Here it has the meaning of actually, or in reality - he’s wishing that he was in real life the way that he’s been reported. Bear in mind, of course, that Shakespeare was a co-author of this play. It’s entirely possible that he didn’t write this portion of the play. The word really seems very emphatic there - but here in Hamlet, it’s less useful or direct. It sounds like a very contemporary throw-away word (“Oh REALLY, Osric…!”) but since Shakespeare uses it nowhere else, I think it’s worth considering that perhaps it’s a publishing error and that the phrase might have been ‘rarely’.