Shakespeare’s Language and Art, Part 1 of 2
Themes and Scope of the Plays
We might expect an active playwright like Shakespeare to deal directly with the flow of modern life, but for the most part he doesn’t. London’s mercantile class was increasing, and nationalism was beginning to flex its muscles. So why don’t we find London’s social structure “ripped from the headlines” in Shakespeare? He deals with courtly environments and characters, and often at historical distance, spanning from ancient Greece and Rome to the late Middle Ages in Europe. He represents monarchs as nearly unconstrained. Kings and nobles are at the center of his plays. This may be due in part to his propertied station. There’s also the fact that censorship was part of life in England.
Method of Composition
Shakespeare wrote comedy, history, tragedy, and romance. He was probably aware of basic theories about what a comedy or tragedy ought to be like, but he doesn’t seem to have spent much time worrying about conforming to them. As Coleridge says in a lecture on Shakespeare, “No work of genius dares want its appropriate form….”
That’s romantic organicism: we respond to a work of art as we create it, so that it “creates itself” processively. Form and meaning aren’t merely imposed upon the material. They develop in accordance with the inner laws of the work itself.
The romantic theorists and poets understood the creative process well: imagine a sculptor facing his or her medium of blank stone. Soon, the first creative act is performed, and then the sculptor stands back and beholds the results in altered stone. This prompts another act, and on it goes in a sustained dialectic between mind and medium, until the demand for a “product” halts the process.
What does this mean for us, as readers and interpreters? We need not seek a facile coherency in the material. Rather, we should look to tease out potential of whatever sort we find in one textual location and connect it to other locations in the same or other plays, or indeed any relevant material. What drives WS’s plays is the sympathetic, imaginative connections he makes between character and character, event and event, predicament and predicament. His brand of realism is psychological, not the realism of historical happening.
Language: Grammar and Rhetorical/Literary Devices.
A. Inverted or Otherwise Altered Syntax:
“If’t be so, / For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind, / For them the gracious Duncan have I murdered…” (Norton Tragedies 930, Macbeth 3.1.64-66). Sometimes, just reordering the words can work wonders for comprehension.
B. Literary Devices Such as the Following:
Alliteration: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past….” (Sonnet 30, Norton Romances and Poems 666). The repetition of initial consonant sounds in words close to one another. There’s also consonance, in which the repeated consonantal sounds don’t have to be at the beginning of the words in question: “I acknowledge that Jack is back.” And there’s assonance, which involves repetition of vowel sounds rather than consonants: “Get it through your head that Freddy isn’t ready, Neddie!”
Allusion: “O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst / thou!” exclaims Hamlet in his mocking encounter with the king’s counselor Polonius.(Hamlet 2.2.329-30) The prince alludes to the Bible’s Judges 11-12. Jephthah of Gilead had promised Jehovah that if He would grant victory to the Israelites over the Ammonites, he would willingly sacrifice whatever exited his door first. Alas, “whatever” turned out to be his daughter, and he ended up having to sacrifice her just as he had promised. Hamlet is warning Polonius not to be like Jephthah.
Aside from biblical allusions, Shakespeare ranges from references to classical mythology, persons, and history to Gothic lore like that of the faerie lords Titania, Oberon and their helpers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There are allusions to various professions and practices: heraldry, hunting, falconry, horticulture, farming, moneylending, etc. Plenty of allusions to English history, too.
Another allusion worth noting is a classical Latin citation from Horace in Act 4, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s intense revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus. The boy Lucius delivers to the two sons of Goth queen turned Roman empress Tamora some weapons along with a scroll that reads, “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu” (Norton Tragedies 178, 4.2.20-21). Translated freely, this means, “He that is pure of life and free from faults / Has no need of any bow or Moorish javelin.” One of the Goth Queen Tamora’s sons, Chiron, says “Oh, ‘tis a verse in Horace. I know it well: / I read it in the grammar long ago” (Norton 178, 4.2.22-23).
This is interesting—that the old Roman general Titus would know Horace’s verses shouldn’t surprise us. But that two Goths and the Moor in this play are also familiar with them is interesting. Roman culture is common to them all, and the implication appears to be that there is no single, coherent history of Rome, no simple pitting of Barbarians against the civilized.
Metaphor: Metaphor clarifies or deepens the meaning of a first thing by ascribing to it or transferring over to it the qualities of a second, unrelated thing.
Example: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York,” as Richard Duke of Gloucester says to open Richard III (Norton Histories 385, 1.1.1-2). Here, discontentment, an emotional state or condition, borrows the qualities of a pensive season, winter, a season that threatens to deaden the soul. “Winter” is the figurative term, the vehicle, that Shakespeare uses to convey something important about the tenor, the thing to be understood, which here is “discontent,” an emotional state. It will soon become clear that Richard doesn’t align himself with the “we” he posits: everyone else has felt the profound transformation of spirit with Edward IV’s victory, but not Richard.
Metaphor grabs listeners’ attention, feelings, and even intellect in a way that less creative usages seldom do. If we were to write, “Now is our wintry discontent turned into summery satisfaction,” hearers would pelt us with rotten tomatoes.
Simile: “This old car balks like a horse trader’s mule.” Or, “Frank is as fearsome as a lion.” This device compares one thing to another. It isn’t as radically transformative or creative as metaphor in that it involves a mere comparison, not an equation or mingling of two things. A Shakespearean example: When Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII realizes that his downfall is certain, he says, “I have ventured, / Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, / This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth” (Norton Histories 930, 3.2.358-61). The great cleric compares himself to carefree little children playing in the water.
Metonymy: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (Norton Tragedies 320, 3.2.71), as Mark Antony says to the plebeians in Julius Caesar. This figure entails replacing a word with another word closely related to the thing it stands for, but not simply a part of it. Here, “ears” replaces “attention.” Or how about, “Let’s run it by the suits in corporate headquarters.” The word “suits” is not a part of a corporate attorney the way an arm or a leg would be, but it is something we associate with attorneys.
Synecdoche: Synecdoche substitutes the part for the whole. “All hands on deck!” The Monty Python players would represent that sentence by showing us a row of hands moving across a ship’s deck. Here, “hands” stands in for “sailors.” Another well-worn synecdoche would be “twenty sail” for “twenty ships.”
Elliptical expressions: “And he to England shall along with you,” says Claudius to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet (Norton Tragedies 408, 3.3.4) The verb “go” is omitted: “shall go along” would be the standard way to say it.
C. Grammatical Irregularities:
Anthimeria. One part of speech is often substituted for another. This happens especially with nouns and verbs. For example, in the first act of The Tempest, Prospero asks Miranda, “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” (Norton Romances 400, 1.2.49-50.) The word “backward” is an adverb, but it is used as a noun here, producing an apt, elegant verse.
Archaic pronoun and verb forms: The familiar or intimate second-person singular forms are thou/thee, as in, “I tell thee (direct object) that thou (subject) art mistaken.” The possessive form is often “thy/thine” (and “my/mine” for first person): “thy book is before thine eyes.” As for verbs, the second-person familiar suffix is often (e)-st, as in “Thou speakest or speak’st, while the third person singular is often -eth, as in “He/she speaketh.” Key verbs like “to be,” “to have,” “to do,” and “to say” can have odd forms: “thou art, he/she is”; “thou dost, he/she doth; thou sayest, he/she saith; “thou hast, he/she hath.” Example: “O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!” (Norton Tragedies 414, Hamlet 3.4.157.)
Antithesis: This quality of Shakespearean verse is critical to its overall impact. Shakespeare consistently uses it to lend emphasis and shape to his characters’ speech. Hamlet characterizes antithesis as “setting the word against the word.” For example, Brutus says in Julius Caesar that he killed the dictator not from personal spite or envy, but from patriotism: “not that I loved Caesar less, / but that I loved Rome more” (Norton Tragedies 319, 3.2.20-21).
The effect of antithesis (implied or direct) is to render an utterance emphatic. Consider the following part of Richard, Duke of Gloucester’s opening soliloquy in Richard III, which offers multiple antithetical pairings to strengthen its appeal: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York, / And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried” (Norton Histories 385, 1.1.1-4).
This quality is partly what makes Shakespeare’s verse memorable: the words are knit together by antithetical imagery and concepts. This is strong verse, the sort of stuff one can speak boldly without losing sensitivity and psychological subtlety.
Rhyme: Rhyme is another way of lending shape to verse and making it memorable. The end of a scene is a good place to serve up a rhyme, as in Hamlet’s summative lines, “The play’s the thing, / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (Norton Tragedies 394, Hamlet F1/Q2 3.1.523-24), or his wicked uncle Claudius’s anguished conclusion to a prayer for absolution, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (Norton Tragedies 410, 3.4.97-98). Such rhymes often have the effect of medieval moral sayings known as sententiae, summations of a moral principle or lesson.
Further Observations on the Distinctive Qualities of Shakespeare’s Language:
Shakespeare’s language is growing increasingly remote from us. It isn’t as distant as Chaucer’s middle English, or the Old English of Beowulf, but it’s sufficiently far from today’s standard “newspaper English” to turn our heads.
Every reader of Shakespeare has probably had the sensation of being perfectly able to scan all the words of a passage for their modern sense and yet not being able to understand the passage as a coherent sentence or expression.
This difficulty may be partly due to the quality that critics often say best distinguishes poetry from prose: compression. Good poetry is remarkably efficient language. People who don’t like poetry sometimes accusing it of being “flowery,” but the truth is that poetry is often sparing, even stark, in its approach. Compared to prose, verse packs a great deal of meaning into very few words.
We don’t expect prose-like transparency from poetry—we expect it to challenge our understanding, startle us out of stale truisms, and so forth. Prose usually does more of the work for us, while poetry expects more work from us.
Under extreme pressure, a character’s speech may break down and become evasive or fragmented, as does Lear’s towards the end of King Lear. Indeed, Shakespeare’s ability to capture the fleeting processes of the mind under pressure in its relation to speech is praised highly by Harold Bloom. There is even a deliberately hollow, brittle eloquence to note, particularly that of Macbeth as his life winds down and his only remaining strategy is to deaden his soul to the evil he has done: “My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, / And that which should accompany old age, / As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, / I must not look to have” (Norton Tragedies 963, Macbeth 5.3.22-26).
Shakespeare often seems to revel in the beauty of language in a way that seems almost foreign to modern sensibilities, but he does not exempt himself from chronicling the many ways this crowning glory of the species, language, often fails to keep us fully human, or even “indifferent honest.”
Edition for Quotations. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Set of Four + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-26546-0.