Shakespeare's Poetry

Shakespeare's Poetry

Study Guide suggestions:
1. Make use of both the Cliffs Notes series and the detailed annotations in the Signet Classic editions to help you translate Shakespeare’s language.
2. Using the "Functions of Rhyme in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse," note examples of those functions in the play.
3. Analyze the imagery and figurative language in key speeches in the play.
4. Analyze the role of imagery and figurative language in the Shakespearean effect of "unity in multiplicity."

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

L. P. Hartley’s novel is narrated by an elderly man who recalls the events of a hot summer in 1900 when he had acted as the innocent go-between in a love affair. His observation of Edwardian England from the modern perspective of the 1950’s can be made most emphatically by modern readers of Shakespeare looking back some four hundred years into the past. For beginning readers of Shakespeare, the plays represent not only a foreign country but one using a foreign language as well. The language is difficult not only because it is the vocabulary of a historically distant culture, but also because much of the language of the plays is in verse.

Vocabulary:
In his excellent A Short Guide to Shakespeare, Sylvan Barnet provides an account of the difficulties posed by Shakespeare’s language: "Shakespeare has an immense vocabulary – something near 30,000 words -…. drawn from a wide range of life, and it is partly his ability to call upon a great body of concrete language that gives his plays the sense of being in close contact with life." But it is a life some 400 years removed from our own. Thus "one conspicuous difficulty in reading Shakespeare is rooted in the fact that some of his words are no longer in common use – for example, words concerned with armor, astrology, clothing, coinage, hawking, horsemanship, law, medicine, sailing, and war…. Less overtly troublesome than the technical words… are the words that seem intelligible to us but whose Elizabethan meanings differ from their modern ones." For example, abuse meant deceive, accident meant occurrence, disaster an evil astrological influence, excrement an outgrowth of hair, starve meant to die, and wink to close both eyes (65-66).

Verse:
William G. Leary continues the statistical analysis of Shakespeare’s language in his excellent Everyman’s guide to the making and performance of Shakespeare’s plays, entitled appropriately Shakespeare Plain. "The 37 plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare contain approximately 104,000 lines," with the longest, Hamlet, containing a rounded 3,700 lines and the shortest, A Comedy of Errors, 1,750. "About 28% of those lines are in prose, 7% in rhymed verse, and 65% are in blank verse – proportions that, interestingly, coincide… with those in Hamlet. Richard II (1595) is "composed entirely in verse" and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) "almost entirely in prose."
    Shakespeare inherited a tradition of verse drama. "Until a few years before Shakespeare began to write, all popular drama in England was composed in verse…. This tradition stemmed from notion of art in general and drama in particular… as well wrought idealizations, not photographically faithful reproductions, of life… Such an art form, it follows requires an artful language. Thus verse – more measured as well as more memorable than prose – seemed the appropriate medium"(178).

Rhyme:
As for Shakespeare’s use of rhyme, it is interesting to note that those plays that contain the highest percentage, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, were written during the period in Shakespeare’s career when he was writing his great sonnets (1594-1596). The functions of rhyme in Shakespeare’s dramatic verse:

dramatic underscoring, such as to "heighten" the emotional intensity at the end of a speech, poetic duets between characters, or speeches of great significance;

to signal a character’s exit or the opening but more often the closing of a scene;

to set off addendums to the flow of dramatic action, such as prologues, epilogues, songs, plays-within-the-play. (See Barnet’s "Overview" in the Signet Classics editions of Shakespeare’s plays xl-xli.)

Blank Verse: {Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, five metric feet of         one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. It is generally accepted as the
      verse form best adapted to the rhythms English.}
By Shakespeare's day in the theatre, Barnet points out, "rhyme no longer dominated poetic drama; a finer medium, blank verse, had been adopted. The Earl of Surrey introduced it into English around the middle of the sixteenth century in his translation of parts of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the authors of an early English tragedy, Gorboduc, applied it to drama just a few years before Shakespeare was born. It was then picked up by dramatists of the [fifteen] eighties, chief among them Christopher Marlowe," who became Shakespeare’s model. Here is an example of "Marlowe’s mighty line," which illustrates the limited and fixed characteristics of the blank verse line that Shakespeare inherited.
   The stresses and pauses are without variation and the lines are end-stopped.*

Was this the face/ that launched/ a thousand ships,//
And burnt/ the topless towers of Ilium?// Dr. Faustus

The following speech of Richard, who later murders his way to the throne, is taken from 3 Henry VI (1588-1592). The blank verse lines show the influence of Marlowe: the iambic pentameter lines show little variation and all the lines are end-stopped.*
                Why I can smile./ and murder whiles I smile,//
                And cry "Content!" to that which grieves my heart,//
                And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,//
                And frame my face to all occasions.// (III, ii)
However, in the later Richard III, Shakespeare enjambs* the line and varies the stresses. Richard is now Duke of Gloucester and soon to be the king:
                Deformed,/ unfinished,/ sent before my time
                Into this breathing world,/ scarce half made up,//
                And that so lamely and unfashionable
                That dogs bark at me as I pass by them -// (I, i)
    William G. Leary observes, "From this somewhat rigid and repetitive pattern of regular pauses and stresses, Shakespeare was to depart in a number of ways so as to create and master a poetic stage line of great flexibility and power." Here is Barnet’s list of Shakespeare’s chief techniques for varying the blank verse line: varying the metric feet:

enjambment (units of thought run beyond the end of a line to overcome the anticipated pause)

varying the stresses in a line

"varying the position of the chief pause (the caesura) within a line,

adding an occasional unstressed syllable at the end of a line

beginning or ending a speech with a half line." (See Barnet’s "Overview" in the Signet Classics editions of Shakespeare’s Plays xlii)

The following speech by Theseus, Duke of Athens, which opens A Midsummer Night’s Dream, illustrates many of these techniques. Here Shakespeare employs enjambment, varies the stresses as well as the position of pauses, and places an unstressed syllable at the end of the first line:
                Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
                Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
                Another moon; but, O, methinks, how slow
                This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
                Like to a stepdame, or a dowager,
                Long withering out a young man’s revenue. (I, i)
*end-stopped line: the unit of thought coincides with the poetic line; in contrast to enjambment where the unit of thought rune beyond one poetic line onto the next.

Figurative language: {A figure of speech occurs whenever language departs
    from the denotations of words and moves language from the realm of
    the literal to the realm of the figurative.}
Attendant to Shakespeare’s verse drama are the difficulties that most readers encounter when reading poetry: 1) the dislocation of meaning in the syntax {word order} of the poetic line, and 2) the demands of figurative language. An explanation of selected forms of figurative language is required.
    The most central poetic use of figurative language is metaphor. All metaphoric language involves the comparison of two logically unlike things: simile is a stated comparison indicated by such connectives as "like," "as," "than," or a verb such as "resembles"): metaphor is a comparison indicated by a statement that one thing is something else; and implied metaphor is an implied comparison of two unlike things. The comparison is composed of the subject of the comparison and the vehicle which carries the description of the subject. When Lear denounces the ingratitude of his daughters, he rages,
                How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
                It is to have a thankless child.
The subject of this invective is "a thankless child"; the pain of ingratitude is compared to the bite of a serpent. The connection is not a literal one in which the daughters physically sting their father; the connection is in the figure created by the language, which is connotative (the overtones or associative meanings that words carry.) Like the "serpent’s tooth" words and actions can be felt as sharp, biting, piercing, venomous. The power of the metaphor lies in the translation of Lear’s emotion into corresponding physical sensations.
    William G. Leary describes Shakespeare’s use of metaphor as, at times, "a torrent of figurative language well beyond the reader’s ability to work out the details of the comparisons…revealing the speed of Shakespeare’s thought," and certainly one quality of Shakespeare’s genius.
    {Other less common figures of speech include:

overstatement or hyperbole {the language of a poem implies less than is said literally; exaggeration}; understatement {the language of a poem implies more than is stated literally}.
paradox {a statement that literally is self-contradictory but on another level of meaning is not}
pun {a play on words which involves a single sound and at least
two different denotations.}}

Imagery: { a word or sequence of words that refers to any sensory experience}
Inseparable from Shakespeare’s figurative language is his use of imagery A summary list from William G. Leary’s Shakespeare Plain follows; Shakespeare uses of imagery:

to embody abstract ideas in concrete terms

for theatrical functions: a) to paint scenes, b) to create atmosphere

to define and differentiate characters

to create thematic patterns within and between scenes (172-76).