William Shakespeare
Even if you haven’t read Shakespeare there is a good chance you can quote it. Who hasn’t said,” To be, or not to be, that is the question.”? This famous opening of Hamlet could be one of the most famous lines in literature history. Most of Shakespeare’s works were created in the late 16th century. His stories have been re-envisioned many times and modernized in many forms. Though they are written for their time, the subjects of his work are timeless. His passion for writing tragedies, dramas, sonnets, and even comedies lives on and still inspires writers today.
William Shakespeare was born in the 16th century in England. William Shakespeare was married to Ann Hathaway and they had 2 daughters and a son who died at a young age. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a career in London as an actor and writer of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In 1613 at the age of 49, he retired to Stratford. This came after the Globe theatre burned down due to cannon fire during a performance of “Henry VIII” that started the fire. A film coming out this year called “All Is True” is a drama about him returning home to deal with his neglected family and how that might have went. He died three years later in 1616.
Shakespeare is famous for his sonnets, known as the Shakespearean or English sonnet. In the Shakespearean sonnet three quatrains and a couplet follow this rhyme scheme. The couplet plays an important part where there is usually a “turn” where a conclusion or twist is brought to the previous stanzas. In our text book, Sonnet 130 is a good example of his surprising and humorous perspective on beauty and love. He took the cliched goddess of a woman in love poetry and captured her true essence with a sense of reality that is not realized until the turn in the last couplet that takes the whole piece in a surprising direction:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Some of Shakespeare’s first plays were written in a stylized language that does not always roll off the tongue for today’s reader. His work consisted of elaborate metaphors and rhetorical language. He eventually revised the traditional style with a freer form of poetry that can be seen in his works “Romeo and Juliet”. Within “Romeo and Juliet” we see multiple writing styles that he used throughout his writing career. He wrote the prologue in Shakespearean sonnet form, with fourteen lines and in iambic pentameter. It has a rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet:
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
However, the play itself is written in Shakespeare’s standard poetic form of blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. This means that his verse was frequently unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The speech by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet is a good example of his blank verse:
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
This blank verse style of writing has been used over and over through time because it is a versatile form that works. It can be seen in the well-known poem “The mending wall” by Robert Frost:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Whether you enjoy his work or not, I would bet you know his name and you can quote something he has written. Who hasn’t uttered, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” or “To thine own self be true.”? William Shakespeare’s stories and poetry of comedy, drama, tragedy, and romance show just how versatile, funny, and surprising he can be. A talent such as Shakespeare is rare and should be recognized in his own right.
