1. “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”
BW 14 August 2017
Quote Analysis—Analyze the quote. What is it saying in your own words? How can you connect this to reading a Shakespearian play? How can you connect it to your own life.
“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.”
How do we read a play? What are important things to do as you read? What is important to remember when you are reading a play?

2. Shakespeare’s Language
Objective: Students will classify and explain the ways that Shakespeare communicated to his audience.
Purpose: Unlike movies that use effects and music to communicate to its audience— books that use dialogue and description—plays, especially Shakespeare’s, communicate to audiences very differently. In order to gain a deeper understand Hamlet, you first have to understand Shakespeare’s language.

3. Shakespeare’s Language
Costumes
Many of the costumes were splendid versions of contemporary Elizabethan dress.
Some attempts were made to approximate the dress of certain occupations and of antique or exotic characters such as Romans, Turks, and Jews.
Some costumes indicated the wearer was supernatural.

4. Shakespeare’s Language
Gestures and Silences
Kneeling to show humility
Refusal to kneel…
Silence to show shock, fear, the inability to find words, etc.

5. Shakespeare’s Language
Poetry and Prose
Poetry: distinctive style and rhythm.
Blank Verse: Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter
What is Iambic Pentameter?
Meter
Foot
Iamb

6. Shakespeare’s Language
Poetry and Prose
Poetry: distinctive style and rhythm.
Prose:
literary imitation of speech—could be used for an important speech by a king in a play, could signal somebody giving advice.
Letters or proclamations, to sett off from poetic dialogue
Mad characters, to show normal thinking is gone
Comedy
Unimportant characters, or lower class
Dynamics—a scene may start in prose and work its way to verse as emotion is heightened

7. Check for Understanding
How many syllables does a foot have?
What is an iamb?
What is iambic pentameter?
Separate the following line into feet. Mark the accented and unaccented syllables.
To be, or not to be—that is the question:

8. Shakespeare’s Language
Costumes
Gestures and Silences
Poetry and Prose
Blank Verse
But occasionally he rhymes…
COUPLET
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight.
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. 

9. Shakespeare’s Language
So, what’s the purpose of a couplet? What’s the purpose of rhyming?
To convey emotional heightening at the end of a blank verse speech.
Characters sometimes speak a couplet as they leave the stage, suggesting closure.
Scenes generally conclude with a couplet.
Characters can be linked by rhyme, such as in when Romeo and Juliet first meet, and they exchange a sonnet—a poem in iambic pentameter that follows a specific rhyme scheme such as a b b a a b b a c d c d c d.

10. Shakespeare’s Language
Costume
Gesture and Silences
Poetry and Prose
Shakespear's Theater

11. Conventions of Shakespearean Drama
For Greek and Latin classical playwrights, the drama turned on how the protagonist would act, in the face of inexorable doom.
In Shakespeare, there is a real balance between fate and human choices, based on character flaws: Humans being are depicted as being in control of their own destiny. (Somewhat. Fate always plays a role!)
Renaissance playwrights also included many sub plots, and included scenes of comic relief in tragedies.
Another type of tragedy, de casibus tragedy, is a tragedy of fortune. Simple bad luck, or the will of God, gets the hero squashed. This type of tragedy is popular in the middle ages, as was a more fatalistic philosophy. The Book of Job is a example of de casibus tragedy.

12. Conventions of Shakespearean Drama
In classical tragedy, the action is limited to one place and one day. There are limits to the numbers of characters, as well. Shakespeare freely breaks these rules in his plays, while neoclassical playwrights in France, such as Racine, adhere to them strictly.
In the late 1800’s a literary critic named Gustav Freytag noted that Shakespeare’s plays were tightly structured by act into five separate plot segments.
This is now called, “Freytag’s pyramid” whereby in Act One there is Exposition; in Act Two, there is Rising Action; Act Three is Turning Point; Act Four is Falling Action; and Act Five is Resolution.

13. Conventions of Shakespearean Drama
Of course, in tragedy, the turning point of the play is where the goals of the tragic hero seem within reach. The catastrophe at the end spells disaster for the tragic hero, who is in some ways responsible for his own demise, although his plan was noble.
*Remember! “Romance” in this sense is not the lovey-dovey type of romance. It is a reference to medieval romance stories of knights on a quest who travel to a magical place and fight demons in the name of chivalry, and courtly love. Shakespeare’s romance plays are therefore not to be confused with his romantic comedies.