Shakespeare's writing style
William Shakespeare's style of writing was borrowed from the conventions of the day and adapted to his needs.
Overview
William Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.
Soon, however, William Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter with clever use of puns and imagery. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.[7] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:[8]
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well…— Prince Hamlet, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.2.4–8.[9]
After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".[10] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included enjambments, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.[11] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another in one of Lady Macbeth's well-known speeches:
Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?— Lady Macbeth, in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.VII.35–8.[12]
And in Macbeth's preceding speech:
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's Cherubins, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,— Macbeth, in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.VII.21–3.[14]
The audience is challenged to complete the sense.[11] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.[15][16]
Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre.
Form
In some of Shakespeare's early works, punctuation at the end of the lines strengthens the rhythm. He and other dramatists at the time used this form of blank verse for much of the dialogue between characters to elevate the poetry of drama.[22] To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet, thus creating suspense.[23] A typical example occurs in Macbeth as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan:
[A bell rings.
I go, and it is done: the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to Heaven, or to Hell. [Exit.— Macbeth, in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.I.62–4.[24]
His plays make effective use of the
Similarities to contemporaries
Besides following the popular forms of his day, Shakespeare's general style is comparable to several of his contemporaries. His works have many similarities to the writing of
Shakespeare often borrowed plots from other plays and stories. Hamlet, for example, is comparable to
Differences from contemporaries
Shakespeare's works express the complete range of human experience.
References
All references to Hamlet, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare Q2. Under their referencing system, 3.1.55 means act 3, scene 1, line 55.[44]
All references to Macbeth, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare second series. Under their referencing system, III.I.55 means act 3, scene 1, line 55.[45]
- ^ Clemen 2005, p. 150.
- ^ Frye 2005, pp. 105, 177.
- ^ Clemen 2005, p. 29.
- ^ Brooke 2004, p. 69.
- ^ Bradbrook 2004, p. 195.
- ^ Clemen 2005, p. 63.
- ^ Frye 2005, p. 185.
- ^ Wright 2004, p. 868.
- ^ Hamlet 5.2.4–8.
- ^ Bradley 1991, p. 91.
- ^ a b Empson 2004, pp. 42–46.
- ^ Macbeth I.VII.35–8.
- ^ Macbeth I.VII.21–3.
- ^ Macbeth I.VII.21–3.
- ^ Empson 2004, pp. 36, 39.
- ^ Keast 2004, p. 75.
- ^ Gibbons 1993, p. 4.
- ^ Gibbons 1993, pp. 1–4.
- ^ Gibbons 1993, pp. 1–7, 15.
- ^ Schoenbaum 2004, p. 13.
- ^ Meagher 2003, p. 358.
- ^ Jackson 2003, p. 64–68.
- ^ Boulton 2014, pp. 78–79.
- ^ Macbeth II.I.62–4.
- ^ Clemen 1987, p. 11.
- ^ Maurer 2005, p. 504.
- ^ Mahood 1988, p. 9.
- ^ Partridge 1947, p. xi.
- ^ Wells 2004, p. 1.
- ^ Wells 2004, pp. 19–20.
- ^ Kastan 2002, p. 14.
- ^ a b Holland 2013.
- ^ Edwards 1985.
- ^ Roberts 1902.
- ^ Foakes 1997.
- ^ Reich, Cunningham & Fichner-Rathus 2013, p. 354.
- ^ Webster 2012, p. 194.
- ^ Hunter 1997, p. 503.
- ^ Leggatt 1983, p. 121.
- ^ Collins 1989, p. 91.
- ^ McCarthy 1998, pp. 234–40.
- ^ Berryman 2001, pp. 114–16.
- ^ Frye 2005, p. 118.
- ^ Thompson & Taylor 2006.
- ^ Muir 1984.
Sources
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- ISBN 978-1317936145.
- ISBN 0-14-053019-3.
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- Clemen, Wolfgang (2005). Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays. ISBN 978-0415352789.
- Collins, Michael J. (1989). "Macbeth and Its Audience". In Dotterer, Ronald L. (ed.). Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context. ISBN 978-0941664929.
- Edwards, Phillip, ed. (1985). Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. ISBN 978-0521293662.
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- ISBN 978-0521616942.
- Brooke, Nicholas (2004). "Language most shows a man…? Language and Speaker in Macbeth". In Edwards, Philip; Ewbank, Inga-Stina; Hunter, G.K. (eds.). Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Cambridge: ISBN 9780521616942.
- Foakes, R.A., ed. (1997). King Lear. ISBN 978-1903436592.
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- ISBN 9780203359020.
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- McCarthy, Mary (1998). "General Macbeth". In Barnet, Sylvan (ed.). The Tragedy of Macbeth. Signet classics. ISBN 978-0451526779.
- McDonald, Russ, ed. (2004). Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Oxford: ISBN 978-0631234883.
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- ISBN 978-0631234883.
- Wright, George T. (2004). "The Play of Phrase and Line". In McDonald, Russ (ed.). Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Oxford: ISBN 978-0631234883.
- Empson, William (2004). "'Honest' in Othello". In McDonald, Russ (ed.). Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Oxford:
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