1. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language
Rhetoric, Wordplay, Forms

2. Shakespeare’s Language
Source of pleasure or
Obstacle to appreciation?

3. Qualities of Shakespeare’s verse
Density and richness
Characters express thoughts through abundant, powerful images and metaphors
Figurative language: pleases the mind and senses - expresses one idea in terms of another
Connotative imagery: highly suggestive network of pictures and ideas resonating with other images, ideas, themes in play

4. Macbeth There’s husbandry in heaven,
Their candles are all out. Take thee that too. [Gives him his belt and dagger.]
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep. ( )

5. A reading Banquo speaks to his son Fleance
Heaven = an economical household in which all sources of light are extinguished
Powerful force (like lead) summons Banquo to sleep - but he cannot
Lines have resonance: husbandry, candles, summons, lead
Dagger appears in next few lines and later in the play

6. Foreshadowing
Banquo foreshadows the hallucinated dagger that appears in Macbeth’s soliloquy
Also the actual dagger Macbeth carries away from the murder
End of scene - ringing bell summons Macbeth to commit the murder
Lead - heaviness, foreboding the shadows the early scenes

7. Lady Macbeth Goes mad Fears the dark Carries a candle
Darkness - moral darkness -evil - principal theme of the plays

8. Early Modern English Technical difficulties for modern readers
verbs with inflected endings
hath, doth, goeth
forms were in transition from medieval to modern
pronoun problem - thee, thou, thy, thine
familiar vs.. formal - thou and you
Katherine and Petruchio

9. Vocabulary Another stumbling block for modern readers
Linguistic exuberance of the age
Lyle’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
Shakespeare’s vocabulary: 29,000 words (twice that of the average Am.college student)
Many of his words have since dropped/changed from common usage: bisson (blind), proper (handsome), cousin (kinsman), silly (innocent)

10. Sentences Syntax - arrangement of words in sentence
Influence of Latin grammar
Move toward “simplicity” - Bacon > Orwell
Shakespeare created stage pictures out of poetry - issues of verse and prosody
iambic pentameter
rhythm, emphasis
characterization

11. Let’s look at Hamlet The Ghost speaks: Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebona in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leprous distillment. ( )

12. Dangling modifier - or suspension?
Grammatically, the subject should be “I” but is in fact “thy uncle”
Error embodies initial problem: Claudius replace Old Hamlet
Suspensions heighten suspense - remember, young Hamlet is listening intently
Virtually every scene is enriched by such manipulations of syntax

13. Rhetoric
Renaissance playwrights were committed to eloquence and grounded in study of rhetoric
Richard Reynolds, humanist educator (1563)

14. But to whom nature hath given such an ability, and absolute excellency, as that they can both copiously dilate any matter or sentence, by pleasantness or sweetness of their witty and ingenious oration to draw unto them the hearts of a multitude, to pluck down and extirpate affections and perturbations of people, to move pity and compassion, to speak before princes and rulers and to persuade them in good causes and enterprise, to animate and incense them to Godly affairs and business, to alter the counsel of kings, by their wisdom and eloquence, to a better state, is a thing of all most noble and excellent.

15. Translating Latin passages
To English and back to Latin - had a profound impact on English versification
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy
Imitation led to creation in poetry of
Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Ben Jonson - and of course, Shakespeare

16. Shakespearean examples
Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew: Petruchio will dazzle Katherina with his verbal skills
Polonius, in Hamlet - vain about his rhetorical skills - Queen asks him to speak with “More matter and less art”
Portia’s famous speech in The Merchant of Venice
Mark Antony’s in Julius Caesar

17. C. S. Lewis
Rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The “beauties” which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice. This change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them.

18. Wordplay
Tropes and figures - their names and functions - were known to the average Elizabethan playgoer
Renaissance delight in language
taste for copiousness or elaboration
pleasure in verbal games

19. Much Ado About Nothing
Beatrice enters seeking Benedick - who has just been tricked into believing she is in love with him
Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner
Benedick returns to the audience
Against my will I am sent to bid you to come in to dinner--there’s a double-meaning in that.

20. Much Ado About Nothing
Benedick is mistaken - Beatrice means what she says and no more
But in a larger sense he is right - Beatrice has yet to acknowledge her attraction to Benedick - and that she has been sent by the same pranksters who fooled him
Double meanings - pranks and wordplay - are common in Shakespeare

21. Other examples of wordplay
Romeo and Juliet
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but ay,
And that bare vowel I shall poison no more
Henry IV, Part 1
Falstaff’s incessant punning
Macbeth
gild/guilt, surcease/success, done/Duncan
None of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth

22. Forms of dramatic language
Two primary forms: prose and poetry
Dominant form of verse: blank verse
Example of Shakespearean prose
Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man”
rhythmic power from patterns of verbal repetition
Bottom’s suggesting how to frighten the ladies in the audience with a lion on stage
Nay, you must not name his name

23. Shakespeare’s prose
Early in his career Shakespeare rarely wrote in prose
Richard III - 50 of 3500 lines are prose (2%)
Later, Shakespeare uses much more prose
Hamlet lines of prose (30%)

24. What distinguishes poetry from prose?
Music and rhymed music
Rhymed couplets often end scenes
the play’s the thing,/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” -- Hamlet
Rhyme fills A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Helena’s first soliloquy ( )
Oberon’s chant as he applies magic lotion to Titania’s eyes ( )

25. Blank verse
Sir Philip Sidney thought it especially suited to rhythms of English speech
Titania, speaking in blank verse, refuses to surrender the Indian boy to Oberon

26. The fairy land buys not the child of me.
His mother was a vot’ress of my order,
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gosipp’d by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands,
Marking th’embarked traders on the flood;
When we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)

27. Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,
And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.
( )

28. Effect of these lines Five-beat structure works on the ear
Smooth musicality of the meter
Regular repetition of unstressed and stressed sounds
Combines with other repetition (words, phrases, consonants, vowels) to create a mood of intense emotion - even awe

29. Bending of the iambic pattern
v / v / v / v /
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me
v /
your ears! [regular]
/ / v / v / / v
your ears! [irregular]

30. Language as theme
Shakespeare’s early plays - candid look at how he uses language
1592 or he discovers the power of language - an epiphany
Love’s Labor’s Lost and Richard III
sudden explosion of rhetorical ability
sense of exuberance

31. Richard III - master of language
Usurper, hunchback, infanticidal psychopath
He both attracts and repels us
Words speak louder than his actions
Richard gets what he wants with words
gets others to do his killing for him
heroic villain with an unparalleled gift for language
Richard is unforgettable because his words are unforgettable

32. Richard’s opening soliloquy
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,

33. Richard’s opening soliloquy
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag’d War hath smooth’d his wrinkled front,
And now, in stead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

34. Richard’s opening soliloquy
But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a woman ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

35. Richard’s opening soliloquy
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt be them--
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on my own deformity.

36. Richard’s opening soliloquy
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
( )

37. Richard’s opening soliloquy
Rhetorical fireworks - show Richard’s
self-conscious wit
Pleasure in patterns
taste for performance
Sweeping contrasts
war > peace, Lancaster > York, winter > summer
Stichomythia - he brags to his adversaries
tells Queen Elizabeth he will marry his daughter, whose husband he has killed

38. Richard
An actor
Also a kind of artist/playwright who writes a script to win the crown
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous (1.1.33)
Creature of great yet perverted imagination
his descendant - Iago in Othello
We admire his wicked creativity and use of words - yet condemn his evil deeds

39. A lesson in Richard Rhetoric, wordplay - power used for dangerous ends
Theatre creates the opposite - the positive and living power of language
Richard is an illusion, created out of historical material to please and frighten the audience
Language - beauties, power, weaknesses, dangers, pleasures - paradox of WS’s thinking