All-Eating Shame

Symbol Analysis

One thing Shakespeare is a master of is the intense adjective. He can take an idea that you're pretty familiar with, like shame, and tack on another word to make you understand it in a new way. Have you ever been so embarrassed about something that you wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear? That's the sort of twisting, queasy, awful feeling we're talking about here.

  • Line 8: This is kind of a fun one. We imagine "all-eating shame" being like Cookie Monster, just gobbling up everything around it. There's a little bit of personification here, since Shakespeare gives shame a human or animal quality to suggest that it is powerful and dangerous.