English Literature with Shakespeare

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Shakespearean’s Writing Style

Module 7
Shakespearean’s Writing Style

Course Learning Outcomes:

1. Understand the writing style of William Shakespeare
2. Compare and contrast Shakespeare and contemporary writing style
3. Measure the aesthetic value of Shakespeare writing style

Overview
William Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He
wrote them in a stylized language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of
the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate
metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim
rather than speak. For example, the grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of
some critics, often hold up the action, and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has
been described as stilted.
Soon, however, William Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own
purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of
Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks
forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a
change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two
throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the
mixing of the styles. By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer
Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural
poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama
itself.
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. 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

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 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.

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". In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted
many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular
pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. 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.

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.

The audience is challenged to complete the sense. 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.

Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all
playwrights of the time, Shakespeare dramatized stories from sources such as
Petrarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest
and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of
design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide
interpretation without loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he
gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of
speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In his
late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasized
the illusion of theatre.
 English Literature with Shakespeare
3
Shakespearean’s Writing Style

Form
In some of Shakespeare's early works, punctuation at the end of the lines strengthen
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. To end
many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet, thus creating suspense. 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.

His plays make effective use of the soliloquy, in which a character makes a solitary
speech, giving the audience insight to the character's motivations and inner conflict.
The character either speaks to the audience directly (in the case of choruses, or
characters that become epilogues), or more commonly, speaks to himself or herself
in the fictional realm. Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double
entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. Humour is a key element in all of
Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the
centuries for his use of bawdy punning, to the extent that "virtually every play is
shot through with sexual puns." Indeed, in the nineteenth century, popular censored
versions of the plays were produced as The Family Shakespeare [sic] by Henrietta
Bowdler (writing anonymously) and later by her brother Thomas Bowdler. Comedy
is not confined to Shakespeare's comedies, and is a core element of many of the
tragedy and history plays. For example, comic scenes dominate over historical
material in Henry IV, Part 1.

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 Christopher Marlowe, and seem to reveal strong influences from the
Queen's Men's performances, especially in his history plays. His style is also
comparable to Francis Beaumont's and John Fletcher's, other playwrights of the
time.

Shakespeare often borrowed plots from other plays and stories. Hamlet, for
example, is comparable to Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum. Romeo and Juliet is
thought to be based on Arthur Brooke's narrative poem The Tragical History of
Romeus and Juliet. King Lear is based on the story of King Leir in Historia Regum
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 Britanniae by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was retold in 1587 by Raphael
Holinshed. Borrowing plots in this way was not uncommon at the time. After
Shakespeare's death, playwrights quickly began borrowing from his works, a
tradition that continues to this day.

Differences from Contemporaries

Shakespeare's works express the complete range of human experience. His
characters were human beings who commanded the sympathy of audiences when
many other playwrights' characters were flat or archetypes. Macbeth, for example,
commits six murders by the end of the fourth act, and is responsible for many
deaths offstage, yet still commands an audience's sympathy until the very end
because he is seen as a flawed human being, not a monster. Hamlet knows that he
must avenge the death of his father, but he is too indecisive, too self-doubting, to
carry this out until he has no choice. His failings cause his downfall, and he exhibits
some of the most basic human reactions and emotions. Shakespeare's characters
were complex and human in nature. By making the protagonist's character
development central to the plot, Shakespeare changed what could be accomplished
with drama.

References and Supplementary Materials

Shakespeare's writing style;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_writing_style; May 2, 2020