What Is Hyperbole?
- Melchior Antoine
- Jan 1, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2025
Hyperbole, also known as overstatement, is a literary device that occurs when a writer uses exaggeration to make their point. We use exaggeration every day in our common language. For example, an example of overstatement or hyperbole is saying, after a particularly delicious meal:
Oh, the food was to die for!
It means that the food was so delicious, you would be willing to kill for it or die for it. This simply highlights how tasty the food was. No one realistically expects you to kill or die on behalf of food under normal circumstances.
Exaggeration can also occur in literature through dialogue in plays, novels, or poetry. In this article, we are going to look at a few examples of hyperbole and its effects, including from Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's famous play Macbeth.
What is hyperbole, and why do writers use it?
Hyperbole is defined as the use of exaggeration and overstatement for a specific effect. Writers use hyperbole for various reasons, such as expressing strong emotion, a character’s state of mind, and even humor. One of the most famous examples of hyperbole is in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Macbeth, Act 2, scene 2:
Whence is that knocking?
How is ’t with me when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here! Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
In this scene, Macbeth has just murdered Duncan, and his hands are red with blood from the act. He feels such an immense amount of guilt that the redness of the blood on his hand is "blinding" him, which is why he says “Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.”
The last four lines are an extreme example of hyperbole where Macbeth imagines that his guilt is so great that not even the ocean can wash the blood off his hands. This is an example of hyperbole being used to effectively express a character’s emotion and state of mind.
Examples of hyperbole
1. Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 4:
The character of Orsino in the Twelfth Night uses hyperbole to express his love or rather infatuation with Lady Olivia:
There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.
Orsino is claiming that no woman can love as well as he can. This is all nonsense because, by the end of the play, he forgets his love for Olivia after finding out his servant is a beautiful woman disguised as a man and falls in love with her in turn. Nevertheless, his extravagant metaphor describing his love "as hungry as the sea" is hyperbole that effectively describes his infatuation.
2. Macbeth, Act 1, scene 5:
Lady Macbeth’s behavior just before the murder of Duncan is also a good example of hyperbole. While Macbeth is full of trepidation before the murder and paralyzed with horror and guilt after it, Lady Macbeth suppresses her conscience and steels herself psychologically for what needs to be done.
The results are disastrous. She eventually goes insane from guilt and ends up killing herself before the play is over. However, immediately before the murder, we see her using hyperbole to mask her sense of trepidation and guilt in one of the most famous soliloquies of literature:
. . .Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever, in your sightless substances,
You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry 'Hold, hold.'
Lady Macbeth here is using hyperbole or overstatement by praying to demons to “unsex” her. She equates a good conscience with femininity and is praying to become a man. This is especially seen in phrases like "Come to my woman's breasts / And take my milk for gall." She knows that the crime that they are about to commit is foul, evil, and unnatural. Lady Macbeth uses hyperbole in an attempt to override her conscience and her own human nature:
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it.
Hyperbole notwithstanding, the attempt eventually fails. After committing the horrid act of murdering Duncan while he stays as a guest at the Macbeth home, her husband, Macbeth, becomes a murderous psychopath who goes on to kill even more innocent people. Lady Macbeth grows crazy from guilt and shame and goes on to commit suicide.
It would be useful to compare Lady Macbeth's soliloquy to a passage from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Let us set the scene. Young Jane describes the terror she feels while locked in the red room:
My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down—I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort.
The passage faithfully describes the emotions of a young person scared of the dark and the imaginary "monsters" that inhabit it. In particular, it does a good job of using hyperbole to explain the perspective of a child who is afraid of something that an adult would see otherwise as harmless. If the child were to recount these emotions to an adult, the child would be described as being hyperbolic.
However, since sincere emotions are being described, this description cannot be seen as true hyperbole. Instead, the passage can be seen as subtle foreshadowing of the events of the novel. Jane Eyre's life, when she grows up, will be disrupted by the insane wife of the man she falls in love with, an insane wife who eventually burns down the house of her future husband and maims him for life. It's almost as if the "rushing of wings" and the "something" near her was the malevolent spirit of the mad wife announcing itself from the future.
3. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2:
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
In this passage, Juliet employs a mixed metaphor, which is simultaneously beautiful and macabre. She is asking for the body of her beloved, when he dies, to be cut up by night and affixed to the night sky as little stars. This is both a foreshadowing of the fact that Romeo will soon die and a testament to the contradictory nature of love.
The language used in association with love in this play is typically hyperbolic and contradictory. The love between Romeo and Juliet seems both pure and a kind of immature infatuation. Macabre hyperbole of this sort, where a young lady is asking night to cut up the cadaver of her beloved to turn into stars, highlights how unhealthy and dangerous this type of love could be.
Hyperbole in "Go and Catch a Falling Star"
John Donne’s "Go and Catch a Falling Star" is a remarkable example of overstatement being used for extravagant effect. The poet uses hyperbole to mock the idea of a woman’s ability to stay true or faithful in love. In short, he is saying that women will always cheat:
Donne, "Go and Catch a Falling Star" (1633):
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
The poem is written in three stanzas. It begins somewhat mysteriously with a list of fantastic or supernatural feats. This includes catching a falling star; discovering where all past years went; and how to hear mermaids singing among others. It is only at the end of the second stanza that the poet reveals why.
He is saying that these fantastic things are more probable than a woman staying faithful or "a woman true, and fair." The poem does not simply use hyperbole to achieve humor. It also uses hyperbole to create compelling imagery. For example:
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
The catalog of weird and impressive images, such as a falling star, the devil's cleft foot, and mermaids singing, makes the poem rich and intriguing to read. They all amount to our modern hyperbolic saying of "You stand a snowball's chance in hell to achieve [insert impossible goal]. In short, "Go and Catch a Falling Star" is a good example of hyperbole being used for both humorous and artistic effect in terms of evoking imagery.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, December 3). What Is Hyperbole? https://www.eminentediting.com/post/what-is-hyperbole |