It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with theatrical declamation, – as it now appears to me, something like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third, – and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 4. Mr. Wopsle is a pompous church clerk in Pip’s village who loves the sound of his own voice. In the novel he is served up to the reader as an object of comic relief and social satire. Pip describes how the officious Wopsle says grace at Pip’s family dinner table as if it was a theatrical Shakespearean production. Dickens makes effective use of hyperbole and parody here to take a poke at the self-importance of English Victorian churchmen. The “Ghost in Hamlet” and “Richard the Third” are allusions to characters in William Shakespeare plays.