Shakespeare’s Language

Shakespeare’s Language

•  Shakespeare did NOT write in “Old English.”

•  Old English is the language of Beowulf (10-11th century):

Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum Þeodcyninga Þrym gefrunon Hu ða æÞelingas ellen fremedon!

(Hey! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes in the old days, the kings of tribes, how noble princes showed great courage!)

We redeth oft and findeth y-write—And this clerkes wele it wite—

Layes that ben in harping Ben y-founde of ferli thing… Sum bethe of wer and sum of wo, And sum of joie and mirthe also, And sum of trecherie and of gile, Of old aventours that fel while; (Sir Orfeo)

Often in books - and men of letters will vouch for this - we find tales that were originally intended to be sung and which have lying at their core some strange and wonderful things. Some deal with war and suffering, others with joyful events, some are concerned with treachery and still others with old adventures that happened a long time ago.

•  Shakespeare did not write in “Middle English” either.

•  Middle English is the language of Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Malory (14th century):

•  Shakespeare wrote in “Early Modern English.” •  EME was not very different from “Modern English,” except that it had some old holdovers. •  But remember: Shakespeare’s plays were not

intended to be read, but performed (80% of his original audience couldn’t read).

•  It does have some difficult words but only 5% of all Shakespeare's words are difficult for a modern audience to understand:

- some words have changed their meanings

- the original audience had a different educational and cultural background

Love of the Language

In Shakespeare’s time, everyone loved the English language.

There were no grammar rules, punctuation keys, OR spelling!

The language was evolving and everyday new words were being made up.

Shakespeare’s language reflects this freedom and experimentation.

Shakespeare’s words •  Shakespeare coined (or is the first recorded user of) many words we still use today:

•  Critical •  Majestic •  Dwindle

•  And quite a few phrases as well: •  One fell swoop •  Foul play •  Flesh and blood •  Vanish into thin air •  Dead as a door-nail•  An eyesore• Good riddance•  It’s Greek to me See http://www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm

In brief…

•  A mix of old and very new

•  Rural and urban words/images

•  Understandable by the lowest peasant and the highest noble

Shakespeare’s writing

•  3 speech forms: prose, rhymed and unrhymed verse

•  Prose: a theatrical rendition of everyday speech. It is the speech form that lower-class characters usually use (the Porter, the Scottish doctor and Lady Macbeth’s Waiting gentlewoman; Lady Macduff and her son and the witches form time to time). Upper-class characters can also speak in prose but they are consciously choosing this more colloquial type of speech (it means something)

•  Blank (unrhymed) verse: poetry written in regular metrical but unrhymed lines.

•  Origin: the Greeks and Romans started combining drama & poetry.

•  The English experimented with it, using verse and prose in their plays.

•  Blank verse is described as the most common form of English poetry since the 16th century” and in Shakespeare’s time, it was becoming the norm.

•  The English Language is harder to rhyme than French or Italian, and English is more heavily accented à the meter (poetic rhythm) is more important than the rhyme.

•  Blank verse is the type of speech noblemen use: it is stylistically heightened speech.

•  Rhymed verse, especially rhyming (heroic) couplets, is very heightened speech often used among noble characters: - to signal the end of the scene (no act and

scene division before the Folio) or important moments

- when songs or chants. Ex: Act IV, sc 1: the witches:

Double, double, toil and trouble Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

A little prosody… •  The foot is the basic metrical unit in English

poetry. A foot is composed of 2 syllables. •  The foot has a particular rhythmic or sound pattern.

The most common foot in English is the iamb: one unaccented (or unstressed) syllable followed by one accented syllable = daDUM x /

•  a trochee: DAdum / x •  a spondee: DADUM / / •  a pyrrhic: dadum x x

The Iambic Pentameter •  The classical English meter is the pentameter = a

combination of 5 feet (10-syllable lines).

•  Five “daDUM”s in a row make one line of iambic pentameter, which sounds like a heartbeat:

•  daDUM / daDUM / daDUM / daDUM / daDUM

•  So FOUL / and FAIR / a DAY / I HAVE / not SEEN (Macbeth, Act I, sc 3)

•  Close to the natural rhythm of the English language: he WENT to TOWN to BUY a COAT toDAY

Why go to all the trouble?

•  Using iambic pentameters kept things moving in the play (like a drum beat)

•  It made the words & play more interesting = any disruption in the foot or meter is meaningful (a gap, a trochee instead of an iamb, a rhyming couplet…)

•  It helped the actors remember their lines (like a song).

Some recurring difficulties in Shakespeare’s language

•  Thou vs You In Tudor England the older generation made a distinction between the informal “thou” (+ derivatives: thee / thy / thine / thyself) and the formal “you” (+derivatives your / yours / yourself”) denoting a status or reverence for authority. = tutoiement / vouvoiement in French. Soon after Shakespeare’s lifetime, the older form passed away! Whenever a character switches from one to another, it is meaningful!

•  Ay = Yes •  Adieu / Farewell = Goodbye

•  Sirrah = Sir or Mister •  V+-eth = 3rd person present tense marker

“He hath” means “he has”

•  Art = Are •  Absence of auxiliary DO in negative sentences,

questions and imperatives: “know you not?” = “don’t you know?, This difference accounts for the unfamiliar word order in some Shakespearian sentences. •  ….

Dramatic Features

•  Drama is a genre that is deliberately written for performance so it needs the stage to arrive at full interpretation of its meaning.

•  The audience’s understanding of the characters and plot will therefore depend on the skill of the writer, the actors and director whose task it is, to bring those words on the page, to life (staging).

•  Staging includes the choice of actors, their position on stage, their intonation, the scenic background, the props (and their symbolism) and costumes, the lighting and sound effects…

•  A play contains 3 types of speech:

-  Characters’ names written in capital letters

-  Stage directions, written in italics: they include directions about movement on stage and details about the actor’s physical actions and psychological intentions. They may refer to lighting, musical or technical changes too.

-  Dialogue spoken by the characters

•  The playwright only expresses him/herself through characters’ speech and the stage directions but has no liberty to comment on the action.

•  Therefore there is no direct insight into characters’ minds. Playwrights must find other ways of allowing an audience to see into the minds and motives of their characters.

•  - thanks to subtext

•  - thanks to two unrealistic dramatic techniques: asides and soliloquies (monologues) in which characters freely express their minds to the audience’s benefit à theatricality

Subtext•  Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play,

musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters or author but is implicit (understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds).

•  Meaning may be derived from the language used (representing social status, nationality, education, emotional state, the intentions of the characters), body language, intonation, a disruption in the style…

The Act and Scene Division

•  The division wasn’t always indicated. In the case of Macbeth, it appeared only when the first Folio was published.

•  These have dramatic significance as they signal the beginning or ending of a situation or climax of some kind.

•  They may also indicate a change of physical setting e.g. Inside a room changes into an outdoor scene.

Dramatic structure •  Drama is always about conflict of some sort (which may

be below the surface). In Macbeth, it is an inner conflict between Macbeth’s ambition and guilt.

•  The classic dramatic structure is the following:

1. Exposition The first part of the structure is the exposition, where background information is given to the audience through a narrator or dialogue. This information sets the tone of the story and lets the audience know the setting, the characters and the conflict.

2. Rising Action During the play, the conflict will be complicated by several subplots or various other conflicts preventing him/ her from reaching his/ her goal. 3. Climax This is the turning point in the story where things begin to change for the protagonist. 4. Falling Action where we will finally see the confrontation between the protagonist and the main antagonist. This confrontation will take different forms, depending of the type of story. By the end of this section, we will either have a resolution to the conflict or we will be left in suspense as to the outcome.

5. The Denouement (or conclusion) It is in this act that we will see whether the protagonist is better off than when the story began (in the case of a comedy), or worse off (in the case of a tragedy). •  Another way to analyse the action that take place in a story is to use the actantial model (also called the actantial narrative schema) developed by semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas. The model considers an action as divided into six facets, called actants.

Technical Features of Drama

•  Sound Effects – SFX •  Music •  IT Technology

•  Lighting Effects - LFX

•  Costumes •  Set (scenery) •  Make-Up

The main features of Tragedy •  Classical Tragedy: According to Aristotle's

Poetics, tragedy involves a noble and heroic protagonist who falls from prosperity to misery as a result of a tragic flaw (hamartia): a moral weakness (hubris: excess) or human error.

•  This flaw inevitably leads the protagonist to his/ her tragic fate.

•  Tragedy evokes pity and fear in the audience, leading finally to catharsis (the purgation of these passions).

•  Medieval tragedy: A narrative (not a play) concerning how a person falls from high to low estate as the Goddess Fortune spins her wheel.

•  à Renaissance tragedy derives less from medieval tragedy than from the Aristotelian notion of the tragic flaw. Unlike classical tragedy, however, it tends to include subplots and comic relief.

The End