In all that he said, something other was meant. And I know where this had come from.
There had been a time, long before, when we did such two-time speech in play.
‘Let’s play Quoth.’
‘My go then. You tell me what I have to say and how I have to say it.’
‘Say “Come what may” so that it means “Death to you that denied a soldier’s honor!”’
‘Come what may!’
‘Ha ha! My go.’
But now it seemed we did this all the time.--from Paul Griffiths, let me tell you
The narrator is Ophelia, and the "he" is not Hamlet but Laertes, despite the gap between saying and meaning. (But that's as it should be; in Hamlet, too, everyone is splitting or doubling: Claudius is "like a man to double business bound," willing and failing to pray; and Hamlet cleaves Gertrude's "heart in twain" when he splits the arras and Polonius with his sword.)
The stricture of O's vocabulary wards off the grandiloquence of John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, with its golden goblets and lapis lazuli and all its other kingly pomp. O's closed lexicon is flexible: Beatles' songs are sung, and German and French are spoken or sung or quoted, and new character names hewn out of plain old monosyllables (Lord Mark, Lord Strong).
O and her brother "did such two-time speech in play," and not only in that they are ineluctably drawn toward their ends in the play. It isn't only O and her brother who play Quoth. We aren't limited to the closed lexicon of Shakespeare's play, but for us, too, we come late to words and not of our choosing.
"But now and again words come to me as if it rained words in my head--words given me by some other..." This is in one way the terror of being spoken in a play, a problem unique to literary characters, and especially those characters "to double business bound," cut free from one text and stitched into another. But if Ophelia and Laertes and even "some other" share this secondariness, this absence to their own words, then who doesn't share it?
"I may do nothing, held still by my own words--if they are my own. My words go on, but I cannot speak."