Costard upper-class. While mocking a pedantic schoolmaster, Costard uses the word "honorificabilitudinitatibus", the longest word by far from any of Shakespeare's works. Costard makes many clever puns, and is used as a tool by Shakespeare to explain new words such as "remuneration". He is sometimes considered one of the smartest characters in the play due to his wit and wordplay. Costard's name is an archaic term for apple, or metaphorically a man's head. Shakespeare uses the word in this sense in "Richard III". Costard Costard is a comic figure in the play "Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin,
What a piece of work is a man What a piece of work is a man "What a piece of work is man!" is a phrase within a soliloquy by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare's play of the same name. Hamlet is reflecting, at first admiringly, and then despairingly, on the human condition. The soliloquy, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, follows in its entirety. Rather than appearing in blank verse, the typical mode of composition of Shakespeare's plays, the speech appears in straight prose: Hamlet is saying that although humans may appear to think and act "nobly"