The Writing Style of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare created the majority of his popular plays and stories in the late 16th century. For many years he enjoyed writing comedies and historical plays until he found his true love: writing tragedies and dark dramas, such as Hamlet and Macbeth.
The playwright, poet, and actor, William Shakespeare, was born in Elizabethan England in the 16th century. He wrote plays that appealed to both the commoner and the queen, and he wrote as well as performed in his plays. His plays were performed in London at the Globe Theater and in Stratford at The New Place Theater. He is referred to as William Shakespeare, Shakespeare, or the Bard by countless fans of his work around the world.
Shakespeare wrote his earlier plays in the traditional style of the time. He relied heavily on using drawn out—sometimes extravagant—metaphors and narcissisms. His style often sounded pompous and pretentious. Shakespeare’s first original comedy called “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” (1590) shows an undeveloped and conflicting writing style.
Iambic Pentameter
Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. The results were plays and sonnets that had ten syllables per line and with his plays, these lines were unrhymed. The simplest way to describe the rhythm of iambic pentameter is to liken it to a heartbeat, which means a series of stressed words, then unstressed words. In the case of the heartbeat, it would sound like bump BUMP, bump BUMP. Using an example from Shakespeare’s sonnets, this would be:
When I do count the clock that
tells the time
This style of writing lent itself to the theatricality of a play, which was as much about using the language beautifully as it was about telling a good story or furthering the plot.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II in the late 16th century, Shakespeare gradually developed and changed his writing style from the traditional form to a more self-expressive style. He progressively used his metaphors and tropes to the desires of the melodrama itself.
The Soliloquy
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
These famous lines from Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” are the opening lines to his most famous—although not the only—soliloquy. The soliloquy or monologue was a common device that the famous playwright used to tell his stories. This monologue served to reveal the character’s thoughts—as in the “Hamlet” example—as well as to create the play’s setting or advance the plot. It serves to bring the audience into the story and let it in on secrets that the rest of the characters in the play may not know.
The narrator character in the play “Our
Town” by Thornton Wilder uses monologues extensively to let the audience in on the secrets of the town and to set the stage since typically this play features a mostly empty stage with the actors creating the settings with their words. This shows Shakespeare’s strong influence as his plays relied on the same devices and often through the soliloquy of a single character, although not always.
Hamlet Latin edition
After completing Hamlet, Shakespeare adopted a more centered, swift, distinct, and non-repetitive writing style. He began to use more run-on lines, uneven pauses and stops, and excessive alterations in sentence length and structure. Macbeth, his most darkest and dynamic plays, shows this refined writing style in which Shakespeare used wording that sprinted from one unconnected analogy or metaphor to a different one, forcing the reader to complete the “sense” and subliminal meaning.
Depth of Character
Shakespeare wrote about people who seemed real instead of using stock characters as was common in the theater during his days and in the generations that came before it. This literary device allowed him to make characters like MacBeth or Hamlet sympathetic even though they did some terrible things throughout the course of the play. It is because the Bard made them seem real and human, but flawed that he was able to do this. This influence can be seen in works from the 20th
Comments
Post a Comment