The Language of Shakespeares Plays

Shakespeare's language

That one play alone has inspired other writers in numerous genres, at far-flung ends of the literary spectrum. And what of Shakespeare's other plays? These catchy titles barely gesture to Shakespeare's influence on the minutiae of our lives. And did I mention that he invented the knock-knock joke in the Scottish play?

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His impact endures not only in the way we express ourselves, but how we experience and process the world around us. Victorian word expert F Max Muller estimated that Shakespeare used 15, words in his plays, a portion of which he invented himself by merging existing words and anglicising vocabulary from foreign languages. By contrast, Milton used a mere 8, and the Old Testament is made up of 5, Meanwhile, an unschooled agricultural worker of the day would have said all that he had to say in fewer than words.

Scholars have argued back and forth over just how many of these words and phrases Shakespeare actually coined, and how many he merely popularised by bedding them down in a memorable plot. In the past few years, quantitative analysis and digital databases have allowed computers to simultaneously search thousands of texts, leading scholars to believe that we may have overestimated his contribution to the English language.

The OED is coming to reflect this: 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. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.

Shakespeare's writing style

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.

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: 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….

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After Hamlet , Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A.

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Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". These included run-on lines , irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. 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?

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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,. The audience is challenged to complete the sense.

Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama. 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 emphasised the illusion of theatre.

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. I go, and it is done: 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.

His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, [28] to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns. For example, comic scenes dominate over historical material in Henry IV, Part 1. 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.

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Hamlet , for example, is comparable to Saxo Grammaticus ' Gesta Danorum. After Shakespeare's death, playwrights quickly began borrowing from his works, a tradition that continues to this day. Shakespeare's works express the complete range of human experience.

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. All references to Hamlet , unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare Q2.

Under their referencing system, 3.