shakespeare language essay

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> Shakespeare and Language
> Shakespeare and language: an introduction

Book contents

Frontmatter
List of contributors
Editor's note
1 Shakespeare and language: an introduction
2 Shakespeare's language and the language of Shakespeare's time
3 The foundations of Elizabethan language
4 Shakespeare's talking animals
5 Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation
6 Shakespeare and the tune of the time
7 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet : the places of invention
8 Shakespeare's thematic modes of speech: Richard II to Henry V
9 Hamlet and the power of words
10 The art of the comic duologue in three plays by Shakespeare
11 Hamlet's ear
12 ‘Voice potential’: language and symbolic capital in Othello
13 The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus
14 ‘Time for such a word’: verbal echoing in Macbeth
15 Household words: Macbeth and the failure of spectacle
16 Late Shakespeare: style and the sexes

1 - Shakespeare and language: an introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009

7 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: the places of invention

In ‘Shakespeare's talking animals’, Terence Hawkes makes a fundamental claim about language and Shakespeare's work. The plays, he says, contain ‘ideas about language’ which we neglect ‘because we are anaethetized to them by our own literacy’ (Hawkes: p. 69, this volume). Nothing could be more important in seeking to understand Early Modern ideas about language and use of language than becoming aware of our own narcotic unawareness of them. We are used to historicizing Shakespeare in every respect except his language, and, as Hawkes implies, our ignorance is matched only by our ignorance of our ignorance. But I would go further than Hawkes: as I will try to show in this introduction, there are not only ideas about language we miss; there are usages of language we misinterpret because we mistake the nature of language in the Early Modern period.

From the point of view of linguistics, and taken as a product of human cognition, language can be assumed to be the same thing in all cultures, and at all times in attested human history. However, taken as a cultural entity, within literary or cultural criticism, language changes radically between the Early Modern period and our own – as radically as other cultural entities such as government, religion, and duty change. In the first part of this introduction, I will try to make language strange, to give an idea of its different cultural status in the Early Modern period; in the second, I will examine the curious reality our culture has bestowed on ‘wordes’, and what this does to our readings of Shakespeare.

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Shakespeare and language: an introduction
By Jonathan Hope , University of Strathclyde
Edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander , Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Book: Shakespeare and Language
Online publication: 15 December 2009
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617379.002

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A Guide To Writing Shakespeare Essays, Including Pitfalls & Tips

William Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the most significant personalities of the world and culture in particular. This dramatist is considered to be an inventor of literary English language, an inventor of modern theater, and the greatest poet in the history of England. Starting in the 15th century, Shakespeare’s poems and plays have been published in a lot of countries and translated into almost all languages of the world. It is no wonder that students have to write a Shakespeare essay despite their disciplines and specialization. The assignments vary. You might get a task to analyze the sonnets or a play of a famous playwright and writer, write a book report, or say some words about his life in a Shakespeare biography essay. No matter what is your writing about, experts from ProHighGrades collected some ideas and essential tips that will help.

How to Write a Shakespeare Biography Essay

If you are to write essays about the background of a great author, you need to know his biography, and the peculiarities of the time he lived in. Here are some ideas:

Describe the town he was born and lived. Stratford-upon-Avon was a small English town, and his family was among the noble ones. You can analyze the primal education and the reasons to move to London.
Literature resources give a little knowledge of young Shakespeare. No one knows the real day of birth. The authors know he was baptized in April. History did not save much about his school or university education. The period which starts in the year 1585 and finishes in 1593 is called “the lost years of Shakespeare.” An excellent attempt to analyze and make suggestions concerning his real life and a search for additional facts will amaze the professors.
You can analyze the relationship between Shakespeare and other people. Some works and pages contain suggestions about his love, friends, etc. A good Shakespeare biography essay will try to study the stories related to the company surrounding him. Study the writers he mailed.
Finally, his last years and death are covered in mystery as well. You can try to find a reason why Shakespeare left a big part of his property to his daughter Susanna. Write about a real reason to move back to Stratford.

A good story about a simple man, people to follow him, the political and historical circumstances and terms, the rights of a human of Shakespeare’s society, popular suggestions, and references to his biography from other sources deserve to appear in an excellent Shakespeare essay.

How to Write an Essay About Shakespeare’s Works

Everybody read the author. Students compose tons of writings, where they give information about his collection of works. In order to claim some originality and score free points on exclusiveness, you need to consider many things:

All the essays about Shakespeare’s literature are written. People wrote about the classic plays after his sonnet or plots. Scholars read, search, and research the significance of his works in almost every paper. You need something contemporary. New plays and interpretations of the texts appear today (for example, a fresh Hamlet play with Benedict Cumberbatch). New movies come from Hollywood and other countries. Take them into account. Many original Shakespeare essay topics are reserved for you
If you are in despair, choose a way that worked for centuries. Analyze the title of a particular poem or play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the plays entitled by names ( Romeo and Juliet , Macbeth , Much Ado About Nothing and others are a reason to write a good, short essay about William Shakespeare.
A good idea is to analyze the characters of Shakespeare. His plays are not all full of action, but characters are deep. Conflicts, emotions, experience, and background stand behind every one. To make a Shakespeare paper better, reading work is not enough. Try to watch the performance of actors from plays and movies. Usually, they do not make an exact copy of the text but bring the new interpretation.
Good Shakespeare essay examples choose famous critics for referencing. A catchy quote or a properly referenced idea will make your essay worth money and effort. Remember that the question you ask in the Shakespeare paper must find its answer despite the length of a paper, and a number of essay pages needed.
Adjust your essay to a discipline. In every Shakespeare text, you can find something for a history, sociology, culture, linguistics, psychology, arts, mythology, and literature essay.

Shakespeare was not a simple person and now has a truly global identity. His impact on his and further times are great. Many people study him, and increasingly significant numbers will no doubt do so in the future. You can also count on the guys from EditProofRead to check out your paper to make sure it’s good.

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Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language

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Summer School
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Bibliography
Theatre and pronunciation
Further links

Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s language project brings a new method of language research – the corpus approach – into the heart of Shakespearean studies. It affords fresh insights into Shakespeare’s use of language at multiple levels – words, phrases, semantic themes, character profiles and more. In particular, it reveals what Shakespeare’s language meant to the Elizabethans through the analysis of millions of words written by his contemporaries. The two-volume encyclopedia will be published by Bloomsbury. The project will not only share the rich resources it produces to generate the encyclopedia, but enable users to deploy them for their own purposes.

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Reading Shakespeare's Language: As You Like It

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. Those who have studied Latin (or even French or German or Spanish) and those who are used to reading poetry will have little difficulty understanding the language of poetic drama. Others, however, need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words. More than four hundred years of “static”—caused by changes in language and in life—intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are no longer used, and many of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the theater, most of these difficulties are solved for us by actors who study the language and articulate it for us so that the essential meaning is heard—or, when combined with stage action, is at least felt. When we are reading on our own, we must do what each actor does: go over the lines (often with a dictionary close at hand) until the puzzles are solved and the lines yield up their poetry and the characters speak in words and phrases that are, suddenly, rewarding and wonderfully memorable.

Shakespeare’s Words

As you begin to read the opening scenes of a play by Shakespeare, you may notice occasional unfamiliar words. Some are unfamiliar simply because we no longer use them. In the opening scenes of As You Like It, for example, you will find the words misconsters (misconstrues, misunderstands), unkept (uncared for), ill-favored (ugly), misprized (scorned, despised), and quintain (a wooden post used for jousting practice or in rural games). Words of this kind will become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.

More numerous and more problematic are the words in Shakespeare’s plays that we still use but that we use with a different meaning. In the opening scenes of As You Like It, for example, the word profit has the meaning of “proficiency,” avoid is used where we would say “get rid of,” envious means “malicious,” and stubborn is used where we would say “ruthless, fierce.” Such words, too, will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language.

Some words are strange not because of the “static” introduced by changes in language over the past centuries but because these are words that Shakespeare is using to build dramatic worlds that have their own space, time, history, and background mythology. Shakespeare opens As You Like It on the estate of Oliver, heir of Sir Rowland de Boys. The language which constructs that world centers on inheritance, money, and what we would now call class structure. It is a world where horses are “taught their manage” and are “fair with their feeding,” where a “gentleman of birth” demands that he be “bred” properly and allowed his “exercises,” and where “the courtesy of nations” (i.e., the law of primogeniture) makes the eldest son “nearer to his [father’s] reverence.” When the action moves to the Forest of Arden in 2.1 , the language constructs a world “exempt from public haunt,” which views the “envious court” as a place of “painted pomp” and prides itself on confronting nothing more perilous than “the churlish chiding of the winter’s wind.” In this forest world of “antique roots” and brooks that brawl along the wood, courtiers dressed “like foresters” “moralize” natural spectacles and “gore” with “forkèd heads [i.e., arrowheads]” the “round haunches” of deer (“poor dappled fools,” “native burghers of this desert city”). These and other language worlds together create the complex terrain that Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, Duke Senior, and their companions and relatives inhabit.

As You Like It is constructed with yet one more set of unusual words. This play depends heavily on allusions. The life of Duke Senior and his men is in part constructed through allusions to Robin Hood and his merry men and to descriptions of the golden age in Hesiod and Ovid. Orlando alludes to the biblical prodigal son narrative to tell his own story. The wrestling match is given a mythological context through allusion to Hercules’ match with Antaeus. Rosalind and Celia describe their friendship through allusion to Juno’s swans. Biblical, mythological, and learned allusions abound in this play, introducing us to (or reminding us of) words and images that significantly enlarge the play’s scope.

Shakespeare’s Sentences

In an English sentence, meaning is quite dependent on the place given each word. “The dog bit the boy” and “The boy bit the dog” mean very different things, even though the individual words are the same. Because English places such importance on the positions of words in sentences, on the way words are arranged, unusual arrangements can puzzle a reader. Shakespeare frequently shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements—often to create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes to use a line’s poetic rhythm to emphasize a particular word, sometimes to give a character his or her own speech pattern or to allow the character to speak in a special way. When we attend a good performance of the play, the actors will have worked out the sentence structures and will articulate the sentences so that the meaning is clear. In reading for yourself, do as the actor does. That is, when you become puzzled by a character’s speech, check to see if words are being presented in an unusual sequence.

Look first for the placement of subject and verb. Shakespeare often places the verb before the subject (i.e., instead of “He goes” we find “Goes he”) or places the subject between the auxiliary and the main verbs (i.e., instead of “He will go,” we find “Will he go”). In As You Like It, we find such a construction in Charles the wrestler’s “Marry, do I, sir,” as well as in Oliver’s “Now will I stir this gamester.” Touchstone’s “yet was not the knight forsworn” is another example of inverted subject and verb.

Such inversions rarely cause much confusion. More problematic is Shakespeare’s frequent placing of the object before the subject and verb (i.e., instead of “I hit him,” we might find “Him I hit”). Orlando’s “My brother Jaques he keeps at school” is an example of such an inversion (the normal order would be “He keeps my brother Jaques at school”), as is his “the something that nature gave me his countenance seems to take from me.” Other examples are Celia’s “The like do you” (i.e., you do the same thing) and Rosalind’s “Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me,” where the normal order would be “Let me bear with me the knowledge of my fault.”

Inversions are not the only unusual sentence structures in Shakespeare’s language. Often in his sentences words that would normally appear together are separated from each other. (Again, this is often done to create a particular rhythm or to stress a particular word.) Take, for example, the First Lord’s lines describing the place where “a poor sequestered stag / That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt / Did come to languish”; here the clause “That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt” separates the subject (“stag”) from its verb (“Did come”). Or take his description of the deer itself: “And thus the hairy fool, / Much markèd of the melancholy Jaques, / Stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook,” where the normal construction “And thus the hairy fool stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook” is interrupted by parenthetical material. In order to create for yourself sentences that seem more like the English of everyday speech, you may wish to rearrange the words, putting together the word clusters (“stag did come to languish,” “fool stood on th’ extremest verge”). You will usually find that the sentence will gain in clarity but will lose its rhythm or shift its emphasis.

Locating and rearranging words that “belong together” is especially necessary in passages that separate basic sentence elements by long delaying or expanding interruptions. When Rosalind tells Duke Frederick that she is innocent of treachery (“I never did offend your Highness”), she uses a construction that delays the main sentence elements until subordinate material is presented:

If with myself I hold intelligence

Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,

If that I do not dream or be not frantic—

As I do trust I am not—then, dear uncle,

Never so much as in a thought unborn

Did I offend your Highness.

( 1.3.49 –54 )

In these lines, note that the main sentence elements (“Never did I offend your Highness”) are themselves interrupted with additional material, as is the clause “ If that I do not dream or be not frantic, then . . . ,” in which the “if-then” structure is significantly qualified by the interpolated “As I do trust I am not.” In some of Shakespeare’s plays ( Hamlet , for instance), long, interrupted sentences and sentences in which the basic elements are significantly delayed are used frequently, sometimes to catch the audience up in the narrative and sometimes as a characterizing device. They appear only occasionally in As You Like It, where sentences tend to be structurally straightforward.

Finally, in many of Shakespeare’s plays, sentences are sometimes complicated not because of unusual structures or interruptions but because Shakespeare omits words and parts of words that English sentences normally require. (In conversation, we, too, often omit words. We say, “Heard from him yet?” and our hearer supplies the missing “Have you.”) Frequent reading of Shakespeare—and of other poets—trains us to supply such missing words. In some plays ( Twelfth Night , for example), omissions are rare and seem to be used to affect the tone of the speech or for the sake of speech rhythm. In others (especially plays written very late in his career), Shakespeare uses omissions both of verbs and of nouns to great dramatic effect. As You Like It is a play with relatively few omissions, many of them like Rosalind’s “is there any else longs to see this broken music” (where “one” is omitted after “any” and “who” is omitted after “else”) and like Orlando’s “Thus must I from the smoke into the smother” (where “go” is omitted after “I”). Occasionally, however, one finds interesting omissions, such as in Celia’s “I was too young that time to value her” (where “at” is omitted before “that time,” the omission creating a regular iambic pentameter line and giving a secondary meaning to Celia’s memory of “that time”). Equally interesting is Charles the wrestler’s description of Celia’s love for Rosalind—“her cousin so loves her, being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile or have died to stay behind her.” Here the compression is rather severe. The full phrases would read, “have followed her [into] exile or have died [if she had been forced] to stay behind her.” What’s more, the compressed phrasing is also part of an interrupted structure that separates the elements of “so loves her that” with the memorable “being ever from their cradles bred together.”

Shakespearean Wordplay

Shakespeare plays with language so often and so variously that entire books are written on the topic. Here we will mention only two kinds of wordplay, puns and metaphors. A pun is a play on words that sound the same but that have different meanings (or on a single word that has more than one meaning). In As You Like It, for example, when Amiens sings that the winter wind is not “so unkind as man’s ingratitude,” the word “unkind” means both (1) unnatural and (2) inconsiderate. Touchstone’s comment that “the truest poetry is the most feigning” plays with “feigning” as (1) imaginative and (2) deceitful, while Jaques’ comment that Touchstone is a “material fool” puns on “material” as (1) full of good sense and (2) earthy or coarse. When Corin asks Touchstone “how like you this shepherd’s life?” Touchstone replies “as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach,” playing on “stomach” as (1) inclination and (2) belly. When Rosalind describes the remarkably sudden love of Celia and Oliver, who, she says, “have . . . made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage,” she plays with “incontinent” as (1) at once and (2) unchaste, sexually unrestrained. And Celia’s request “I pray you bear with me” elicits from Touchstone the response “I had rather bear with you than bear you. Yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think you have no money in your purse,” a response that plays not only with multiple meanings of “bear” but, more interestingly, puns on “cross” as the name of an Elizabethan coin stamped with a cross and on the familiar biblical verse “whosoever doth not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

Many of the puns in As You Like It occur in elaborate combinations. For example, in the following dialogue about a poem found hanging on a tree, Celia and Rosalind pun on “feet” (as divisions of a verse), “bear” (as “allow” and “carry”), “lame” (as “crippled” and “metrically defective”), and “without” (“in the absence of” and “outside of”):

CELIA Didst thou hear these verses?

ROSALIND O yes, I heard them all, and more too,

for some of them had in them more feet than

the verses would bear.

CELIA That’s no matter. The feet might bear the

ROSALIND Ay, but the feet were lame and could

not bear themselves without the verse, and

therefore stood lamely in the verse.

( 3.2.166 –73 )

Another interweaving of puns supports Celia’s charge that “the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster. They are both the confirmer of false reckonings.” The truth of Celia’s second sentence here depends on complicated puns on the words “confirmer” ([1] establisher, ratifier, and [2] encourager) and “reckonings” ([1] bills and [2] expectations). As a “confirmer of false reckonings,” the tapster, she claims, is an establisher or ratifier of inaccurate tavern bills; the lover is an encourager of false expectations.

To take one final example: Touchstone’s comment to Audrey, “I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths,” is an elaborate and learned joke that compares Touchstone in the forest to the Roman love poet Ovid exiled among the Getae, often confused in Shakespeare’s day with the Goths (pronounced, at that time, “gotes”). It has been suggested that there is not only a pun on goats/Goths, but also that “capricious” may here mean “lascivious, goat-like,” from wordplay on the Latin caper —i.e., goat. Because puns occur often and in complex combinations in As You Like It, the language in this play must be listened to carefully if one wishes to catch all its meanings.

A metaphor is a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which it shares common features. When Rosalind describes herself as “one out of suits with fortune,” she is using metaphorical language, speaking as if she were a servant no longer allowed to wear Fortune’s livery. Orlando, unable to speak to Rosalind, explains his sudden muteness with a metaphor, asking himself, “What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?” The old servant Adam uses metaphor to convey his sense that Orlando’s very strengths have placed him in a dangerous situation: “Your virtues, gentle master, / Are sanctified and holy traitors to you.” In turn, Orlando uses a gardening metaphor to say that, if Adam shares his savings with him, the money will probably be wasted: “poor old man, thou prun’st a rotten tree / That cannot so much as a blossom yield / In lieu of [i.e., in exchange for] all thy pains and husbandry [i.e., thrift].”

Often in As You Like It metaphors are rather straightforward. Human life is “a wide and universal theater” presenting “woeful pageants.” Time is a horse that “travels in divers paces with divers persons.” The pains of love are “wounds invisible that love’s keen arrows make”; to be in love is to be a “prisoner” in a “cage of rushes,” or to be “fathom deep” in an ocean that “cannot be sounded” [i.e., whose depth cannot be measured] because it “hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.”

Sometimes, however, the play’s metaphoric language is richly complex or highly allusive. Take, for example, Oliver’s “Begin you to grow upon me? I will physic your rankness.” This statement of Oliver’s malign intent upon Orlando draws simultaneously from the worlds of gardening and of sixteenth-century medicine, so that Orlando is, for Oliver, both an overgrown plant in need of cutting down and an illness that must be cured through bloodletting. In quite a different kind of complex metaphor, Silvius declares his adoration for Phoebe by translating his “poverty of grace” into physical poverty:

So holy and so perfect is my love,

And I in such a poverty of grace,

That I shall think it a most plenteous crop

To glean the broken ears after the man

That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then

A scattered smile, and that I’ll live upon.

( 3.5.106 –11 )

Silvius’s extended metaphor, in which he is a poor man living off scattered ears of grain left behind by the reapers, draws on two biblical passages, one in which the Israelites are told by the Lord that, when reaping the harvest, they are to leave some grain unharvested for the poor and the stranger, and one in which Ruth asks to “glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves.” In this allusive metaphorical context, Phoebe’s smiles, loosed like broken ears of grain, become Silvius’s sustenance.

In most of Shakespeare’s plays, metaphors tend to be used when the idea being conveyed is hard to express, and the speaker is thus given language that helps to carry the idea or the feeling to his or her listener—and to the audience. In Romeo and Juliet , for example, Romeo’s metaphors of Juliet-as-saint and Juliet-as-light employ images from the poetic tradition that seem designed to portray a lover struggling to express the overpowering feelings that come with being in love. In As You Like It, metaphors occasionally have this kind of power. More often, though, they are simply one of many ways that characters converse, one kind of language-thread in the intricate weave of words that creates this play.

Implied Stage Action

Finally, in reading Shakespeare’s plays we should always remember that what we are reading is a performance script. The dialogue is written to be spoken by actors who, at the same time, are moving, gesturing, picking up objects, weeping, shaking their fists. Some stage action is described in what are called “stage directions”; some is suggested within the dialogue itself. We must learn to be alert to such signals as we stage the play in our imagination. When, in As You Like It, Orlando says to Oliver, “Wert thou not my brother, I would not take this hand from thy throat till this other had pulled out thy tongue,” it is clear that Orlando has seized Oliver by the throat. Again, when, in the course of the wrestling bout, Duke Frederick says “No more, no more,” Orlando replies “Yes, I beseech your Grace. I am not yet well breathed,” and the conversation continues with the news that Charles “cannot speak” and the order to “Bear him away,” one knows that Charles has been thrown down.

At several places in As You Like It, signals to the reader are not quite so clear. When, for example, Adam offers his life savings to Orlando with the words “Here is the gold. All this I give you,” the dialogue does not indicate whether the actor playing Orlando should take the purse. Again, when Orlando and Adam are on their journey to the woods, it is clear that, in his exhaustion, Adam lies down. (He says “Here lie I down and measure out my grave.”) However, at the end of the scene, when Orlando says “Come, I will bear thee to some shelter” and the Folio text has them exit, the fact that the word “bear” has several meanings creates ambiguity about the stage action, allowing the director (and the reader, in imagination) either to have Orlando “pick up Adam” (as some editions say) and carry him off or to have Orlando simply support him as they walk off together. Learning to read the language of stage action repays one many times over when one reads the play’s final scene, with Touchstone’s bravura performance of dueling punctilio, with the unexpected entrance of Hymen “bringing” Rosalind, the yet-more-unexpected entrance of the Second Brother, and the final dance. Here, as in so much of As You Like It, implied stage action vitally affects our response to the play.

It is immensely rewarding to work carefully with Shakespeare’s language so that the words, the sentences, the wordplay, and the implied stage action all become clear—as readers for the past four centuries have discovered. It may be more pleasurable to attend a good performance of a play—though not everyone has thought so. But the joy of being able to stage one of Shakespeare’s plays in one’s imagination, to return to passages that continue to yield further meanings (or further questions) the more one reads them—these are pleasures that, for many, rival (or at least augment) those of the performed text, and certainly make it worth considerable effort to “break the code” of Elizabethan poetic drama and let free the remarkable language that makes up a Shakespeare text.

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Shakespeare and the Essay

Essays: we’ve all written them, whether as school projects or as university assignments. (For those going through esay trauma, we’ve even compiled a list of some of our favourite tips for writing a good English Literature essay .) But where did the essay form come from? It was effectively invented by one man, the French writer Michel de Montaigne (usually known just by his surname): in 1580 he published a volume of 107 pieces on various subjects, and he labelled these pieces Essais (from the French meaning ‘trial’ or ‘test’). The word ‘essay’ is linked to the word ‘assay’, which refers to the weighing or testing of gold for quality.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the essay as a ‘composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch of a subject; originally implying want of finish, “an irregular undigested piece” ([Doctor] Johnson), but now said of a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.’ In the wake of Montaigne, these short prose pieces took off: Francis Bacon became the first person to publish essays in English (1597), while Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, gave us the first recorded use of the word ‘essayist’ (1609).

Clearly, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed the birth and growth of the essay form, although it didn’t really catch on in any meaningful sense until the likes of Dr Johnson took it up again in the eighteenth century. But the arrival of the essay form was also the time of William Shakespeare , and numerous critics and literary historians have drawn a link between Shakespeare and the essay. Although the Bard never wrote essays, his work is suffused with the influence of this new form.

As James Shapiro points out in his acclaimed 2005 book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare , something happens to Shakespeare’s soliloquies (that is, the monologues spoken by characters when left alone on the stage; usually a voicing of their innermost thoughts) around the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. This is also the time when Shakespeare most probably first encountered Montaigne’s essays. We see this in Hamlet , written around 1600-1. As Shapiro writes, ‘The breakthrough is one that Shakespeare might have arrived at sooner or later, but it was given tremendous impetus at the time that he was writing Hamlet by his interest in a new literary form: the essay.’ Shapiro goes on, ‘Shakespeare cared less about appropriating Montaigne’s language or philosophy than about exploring how essays – with their assertions, contradictions, reversals and abrupt shifts in subject matter and even confidence – captured a mind at work’. Indeed, Montaigne’s new form had such an impact in England that Ben Jonson even has a character in his play Volpone quip that English writers were stealing from poets ‘Almost as much as from Montaigne’.

We can see what we might call the ‘spirit of the essay’ in Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy – Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech – in the way that Hamlet is chewing over the issue by considering the two opposing sides of the argument (should I die, or carry on?). The internal wrestling, turnabouts, contradictions, and disagreements which follow – ‘Ay, there’s the rub’ and so forth – exhibit all the classic hallmarks of the essay form as originated by Montaigne. So, next time you go to write an essay, mark one, or read one, remember that we may never have had half of Shakespeare’s greatest lines if the form had never been invented.

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The Shakespearean

The authorship question and more

The Language of Shakespeare

Take the fear out of Shakespeare by learning a few generalities of Early Modern English – the language of the Renaissance.

Students of the sonnets and plays of Shakespeare often dread reading his works because of the language barrier between Early Modern English and Modern English. Learn to get the gist of Shakespeare by appreciating his word play and the syntactical (word order) differences of Early Modern English.

The Evolution of the English Language

Part of the genius of Shakespeare was that he was writing at a time when the language was rapidly changing. Early modern English was evolving into the language that we speak now, Modern English. Shakepeare took advantage of this situation by using a lot of wordplay that incorporated the Great Vowel Shift within many of his famous puns. The Great Vowel Shift was the transformation of the old vowel sounds of Early Modern English into the new vowel sounds (a,e,i,o,u) that we know today in Modern English.

Elizabethan Pronunciation

Because of the difference in vowel sounds during the 16th century, the accents of Elizabethan England were radically different from the accents of modern British English speakers. There were also regional differences in dialect during this era. This is why many words made rhyming sense back in this time period, such as love and prove, which make no rhyming sense today.

The Difference in Syntax

Students of Shakespeare often have trouble understanding the sentence structure in the plays. Shakespeare quite frequently wrote sentences in inverted, or backwards, order:

Shakespeare: Break off thy song, and haste thee quick away. Measure for Measure Act (4.1.7)
Translation: Stop singing and leave quickly.
Shakespeare: How like a fawning publican he looks. The Merchant of Venice (1.3.38)
Translation: He looks like an overly flattering tavern keeper.
Shakespeare: The clock struck nine when I did send the nurse; In half an hour she promised to return. Romeo and Juliet (2.5.1-2)
Translation: I sent the nurse at nine o’clock; she promised to return in a half an hour.

This object before verb structure is found in Germanic languages, and the inverted sentence structure reflects the English language’s Germanic roots.

Shakespeare and Acting

The words of Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be spoken aloud. A play is a dynamic thing where all the action takes place on a stage, instead of taking place inside your head as when reading a novel. Take the time to read the plays aloud, and you will gain new insights into the language of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s Puns

Shakespeare made great use of what people knew and what they didn’t know. Shakespeare essentially wrote for two audiences: those who were educated, and those who were not. The educated classes, who included the nobility and the university educated, would understand the subtle jokes about politics, international affairs, and the court, which would fly right over the penny paying groundling’s heads. On the other hand, the groundlings would appreciate the bawdier jokes within the plays, as would everyone else.

Eternal Themes in the Plays

Shakespeare wrote for a diverse audience who sometimes understood the layered meanings within the plays and sometimes did not. He understood his varied audience and tried to write something for everyone, reflecting back not only the diversity of human experience but the eternal themes within that experience. That is why as the English language continues to evolve the themes within the plays will always seem modern – an observation which led Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright of Shakespeare’s, to affirm, “He was not for an age, but for all time.”

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Essays on William Shakespeare

What makes a good william shakespeare essay topic.

When it comes to crafting an exceptional essay on the works of William Shakespeare, the choice of topic is paramount. The right topic can breathe life into your essay, making it captivating, unique, and unforgettable. Here are some innovative tips to help you brainstorm and select an essay topic that will mesmerize your readers:

- Research and Immerse Yourself: Begin by immersing yourself in the vast repertoire of William Shakespeare's works. Dive into his plays, poems, and sonnets. This deep exploration will provide you with invaluable insights into his themes, characters, and writing style.

- Personal Passion: Opt for a topic that ignites a genuine spark of interest within you. When you are truly passionate about the subject matter, it will shine through in your writing, captivating your readers and making your essay more compelling.

- Unveiling the Unexplored: Seek out uncharted territory and lesser-known aspects of Shakespeare's works. Instead of treading the well-worn path of common themes or characters, venture into the hidden gems that lie within his literature.

- Contemporary Connections: Explore the relevance of Shakespeare's works in today's society and connect them to modern-day issues. Examining the timeless themes and their impact on the present can render your essay thought-provoking and engaging.

- Characters and Relationships Under the Microscope: Shakespeare's characters are multifaceted and intricate. Choose a topic that allows you to analyze their motivations, relationships, or character development within his plays.

- Comparative Analysis: Engage in a comparative exploration of Shakespeare's works alongside other literary pieces, historical events, or even contemporary movies or plays. This fresh perspective will make your essay stand out from the crowd.

- Social and Cultural Context: Delve into the social and cultural milieu that shaped Shakespeare's plays. Discuss how his works were influenced by the Elizabethan era and how they mirror the society of that time.

- Unveiling Symbolism and Imagery: Shakespeare's works are a treasure trove of symbolism and vivid imagery. Select a topic that allows you to analyze and interpret these literary devices, offering profound insights into the text.

- Controversial Contemplations: Shakespeare fearlessly explored contentious themes such as power, love, and morality. Choose a topic that tackles these provocative issues, sparking a lively debate among your readers.

- Unconventional Interpretations: Present a fresh and unconventional interpretation of a particular play, scene, or character. Challenge conventional ideas and encourage critical thinking with your unique perspective.

Remember, a remarkable Shakespeare essay topic should be captivating, original, and thought-provoking. By considering these recommendations, you will be able to select a topic that will enrapture your readers and showcase your exceptional analytical skills.

Essay Topic Ideas for William Shakespeare

Prepare to be dazzled by these outstanding essay topics on William Shakespeare:

The Empowerment of Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies
Fate and Its Grip on Romeo and Juliet
The Fine Line Between Madness and Sanity in Hamlet
Love's Intricacies and Deception in Much Ado About Nothing
Unraveling the Allure of Power and Ambition in Macbeth
Exploring the Dark Depths of Evil in Othello
Shakespeare's Brave Confrontation of Racism in The Merchant of Venice
The Mighty Influence of Language and Wordplay in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Revenge and Justice Collide in Titus Andronicus
The Greek Mythology Odyssey within Shakespeare's Plays
The Symbolic Tapestry of Nature in King Lear
Gender Roles and Identity in Twelfth Night
Time's Elusive Spell in The Tempest
The Supernatural's Sinister Dance in Macbeth
The Illusion of Appearance versus the Reality of Truth in Measure for Measure
The Complexities of Love's Dominion in Antony and Cleopatra
The Intricate Weaving of Politics in Julius Caesar
Jealousy's Venomous Touch in Othello
The Struggle between Duty and Desire in Hamlet
A Profound Exploration of Human Nature in Troilus and Cressida

Provocative Questions for Your William Shakespeare Essay

Prepare to embark on an intellectual journey with these thought-provoking essay questions on William Shakespeare:

How does Shakespeare challenge traditional gender roles in his plays?
What is the significance of the supernatural elements in Macbeth?
How does Shakespeare explore the theme of power and its corrupting influence in his tragedies?
Analyze the portrayal of love and relationships in Shakespeare's comedies.
To what extent does fate play a role in Romeo and Juliet, and are the characters responsible for their own destinies?
Discuss the concept of madness and its impact on the characters in Hamlet.
How does Shakespeare employ symbolism and imagery to convey his themes in The Tempest?
Analyze the role of loyalty and betrayal in Julius Caesar.
How does Othello's race affect the outcome of the play?
Discuss the portrayal of revenge in Shakespeare's plays.

Creative William Shakespeare Essay Prompts

Ignite your creativity with these captivating essay prompts on William Shakespeare:

Imagine you are a director staging a modern adaptation of one of Shakespeare's plays. How would you interpret the setting, costumes, and overall production to make it relevant to a contemporary audience?
Write a heartfelt letter from one of Shakespeare's characters to another, expressing their deepest desires, fears, or regrets.
Create a powerful monologue from the perspective of a minor character in any of Shakespeare's plays, unveiling their untold story or hidden emotions.
Write a riveting dialogue between Shakespeare and a modern-day playwright, discussing the enduring appeal and relevance of his works.
Imagine you are a literary critic tasked with analyzing a previously undiscovered Shakespearean sonnet. Interpret its meaning and discuss its significance within the context of his other works.

William Shakespeare Essay FAQ

Q: How should I begin my essay on William Shakespeare?

A: Commence with a captivating introduction that sets the stage for your essay and introduces your thesis statement. You can start with a compelling quote, an intriguing fact, or a thought-provoking question.

Q: Can I choose a lesser-known play by Shakespeare as my essay topic?

A: Absolutely! Exploring lesser-known plays can provide a fresh perspective, allowing you to delve into unexplored themes and characters. Just ensure that you provide enough context and background information for your readers.

Q: Should I include direct quotes from Shakespeare's works in my essay?

A: Including quotes can enhance your analysis and provide evidence to support your arguments. However, make sure to seamlessly integrate and analyze the quotes, rather than using them as mere filler.

Q: Can I incorporate modern examples or references in my essay on Shakespeare?

A: Yes, incorporating modern examples or references can help readers connect with the themes and relevance of Shakespeare's works. Just ensure that the examples are relevant and enhance your analysis, rather than overshadowing it.

Q: How can I make my Shakespeare essay stand out from others?

A: To make your essay shine, choose a unique and thought-provoking topic, offer fresh interpretations, and employ engaging language and writing style. Support your arguments with evidence and provide a well-structured analysis.

Remember, writing a Shakespeare essay is an opportunity to showcase your critical thinking and analytical skills. Embark on a thrilling journey through the world of Shakespeare and let your creativity illuminate your writing!

Deception in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: a Critical Analysis

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Depths of Despair and Redemption in Sonnet 29: a Close Analysis

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"As You Like It" and "A Midsummer Night"s Dream": Feminine Homoeroticism

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Racial Discrimination and Sexism in William Shakespeare's Plays

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April 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom - April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Playwright, Poet, Actor

English Renaissance

Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing,Twelfth Night, Macbeth, etc.

William Shakespeare, widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in history, possessed a unique and influential style of writing. His works demonstrate a mastery of language, poetic devices, and dramatic techniques that continue to captivate audiences centuries later. Shakespeare's writing style can be characterized by several distinctive features. Firstly, his use of language is rich and vibrant. He employed a vast vocabulary and crafted elaborate sentences, often employing complex wordplay and puns to create layers of meaning. Shakespeare's writing is renowned for its poetic beauty, rhythmic verse, and memorable lines that have become ingrained in the English language. Secondly, Shakespeare excelled in character development. His characters are multidimensional, with complex emotions and motivations. Through their soliloquies and dialogues, he explores the depths of human nature, delving into themes of love, jealousy, ambition, and morality. Each character's speech and mannerisms reflect their unique personality, contributing to the depth and realism of his plays. Lastly, Shakespeare's dramatic structure and storytelling techniques are unparalleled. He skillfully weaves together intricate plots, incorporating elements of comedy, tragedy, romance, and history. His plays feature dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and powerful climaxes that keep audiences engaged and emotionally invested.

One of Shakespeare's major contributions was his ability to delve into the depths of human emotions and the complexities of the human condition. Through his plays, he explored themes such as love, jealousy, ambition, revenge, and moral dilemmas, offering profound insights into the human psyche. His characters, like Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, and Othello, are iconic and have become archetypes in literature. Shakespeare's language and wordplay revolutionized English literature. He introduced new words, phrases, and expressions that have become an integral part of the English lexicon. His plays are a testament to his mastery of language, employing poetic techniques such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and iambic pentameter to create rhythm, beauty, and depth in his writing. Moreover, Shakespeare's plays transcended the boundaries of time and place, showcasing universal themes and resonating with audiences across cultures and generations. His works continue to be performed and adapted in various forms, including stage productions, films, and literary adaptations, further solidifying his contribution to the world of literature.

Film Adaptations: Many of Shakespeare's plays have been adapted into films, bringing his stories to life on the silver screen. Notable examples include Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" (1968), Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989), and Baz Luhrmann's modernized version of "Romeo + Juliet" (1996). TV Series and Episodes: Shakespeare's works have been featured in TV series and episodes, either through direct adaptations or by incorporating his themes and characters. For instance, the popular TV show "The Simpsons" has parodied Shakespeare in episodes like "A Midsummer's Nice Dream" and "Tales from the Public Domain." Shakespearean-Inspired Films: Some films draw inspiration from Shakespeare's works without being direct adaptations. Examples include "Shakespeare in Love" (1998), which explores the fictionalized romance between Shakespeare and a noblewoman, and "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), a modern-day adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew." Literary References: Shakespeare is often referenced in literature, showcasing his enduring influence. For instance, Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel "Brave New World" features characters who quote Shakespeare, and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" includes a clandestine resistance group called "Mayday," derived from "May Day" in Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

1. Shakespeare is known for writing 39 plays, including tragedies like "Hamlet," comedies like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and histories like "Henry V." 2. Shakespeare is credited with introducing over 1,700 words to the English language, including popular terms such as "eyeball," "fashionable," and "lonely." 3. Shakespeare's works have been translated into more than 80 languages, making him one of the most widely translated playwrights in history. 4. Shakespeare's plays continue to be performed and studied worldwide, with an estimated 17,000 performances of his works every year. 5. Despite his literary fame, little is known about Shakespeare's personal life. There are gaps and uncertainties surrounding his birthdate, education, and even the authorship of his works. 6. The Globe Theatre: Shakespeare's plays were performed at the famous Globe Theatre in London, which he co-owned. The reconstructed Globe Theatre stands in London today and offers modern audiences a glimpse into the world of Elizabethan theatre. 7. In addition to his plays, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, which are celebrated for their lyrical beauty and exploration of themes such as love, time, and mortality.

William Shakespeare is an essential topic for essay writing due to his immense significance in the world of literature and his enduring influence on various aspects of human culture. Exploring Shakespeare's works provides a rich opportunity to delve into themes of love, tragedy, power, and human nature. His plays and sonnets continue to captivate readers and audiences with their universal themes and timeless relevance. Studying Shakespeare allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the English language itself, as he contributed numerous words and phrases that are still in use today. Additionally, his innovative use of language, poetic techniques, and complex characterizations showcase his unparalleled mastery as a playwright. Furthermore, Shakespeare's impact extends beyond literature. His works have been adapted into numerous films, theater productions, and other art forms, making him a cultural icon. His plays also provide a valuable lens through which to analyze historical and social contexts, as they reflect the values, beliefs, and conflicts of the Elizabethan era.

"All that glitters is not gold." "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!" In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge.

1. Shakespeare, W., Shakespeare, W., & Kaplan, M. L. (2002). The merchant of Venice (pp. 25-120). Palgrave Macmillan US. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-07784-4_2) 2. Shakespeare, W. (2019). The tempest. In One-Hour Shakespeare (pp. 137-194). Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429262647-9/tempest-william-shakespeare) 3. Johnson, S. (2020). The Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765). In Samuel Johnson (pp. 423-462). Yale University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300258004-040/html?lang=de) 4. Denvir, J. (1986). William Shakespeare and the Jurisprudence of Comedy. Stan. L. Rev., 39, 825. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/stflr39&div=38&id=&page=) 5. Demmen, J. (2020). Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of early modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare. ICAME Journal, 44(1), 37-68. (https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/icame-2020-0002) 6. Liu, X., Xu, A., Liu, Z., Guo, Y., & Akkiraju, R. (2019, May). Cognitive learning: How to become william shakespeare. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6). (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3290607.3312844) 7. Xu, W., Ritter, A., Dolan, W. B., Grishman, R., & Cherry, C. (2012, December). Paraphrasing for style. In Proceedings of COLING 2012 (pp. 2899-2914). (https://aclanthology.org/C12-1177.pdf) 8. Craig, H. (2012). George Chapman, John Davies of Hereford, William Shakespeare, and" A Lover's Complaint". Shakespeare Quarterly, 63(2), 147-174. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41679745) 9. Zhao, Y., & Zobel, J. (2007, January). Searching with style: Authorship attribution in classic literature. In Proceedings of the thirtieth Australasian conference on Computer science-Volume 62 (pp. 59-68). (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3973ff27eb173412ce532c8684b950f4cd9b0dc8)

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications



is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach it Like One	?	: Divine Providence and Social Determinism

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide?

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all.

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical.

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem.

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]).

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live.

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar.

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Essay on William Shakespeare

500 words essay on william shakespeare.

William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping one hundred fifty-four sonnets. So let us take a peek inside the life of this genius with this essay on William Shakespeare.

Essay On William Shakespeare

Early Life of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the world’s pre-eminent dramatist and according to many experts is the greatest writer in the English language. Furthermore, he is also called England’s National Poet and also has the nickname of the Bard of Avon. Such a worthy reputation is due to his top-notch unmatchable writing skills.

William Shakespeare was born to a successful businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April in the year 1564. Shakespeare’s mother was the daughter of a landlord and came from a well-to-do family. About the age of seven, William Shakespeare began attending the Stratford Grammar School.

The teachers at Stratford were strict in nature and the school timings were long. One can say that William Shakespeare’s use of nature in his writings was due to the influence of the fields and woods surrounding the Stratford Grammar School on him.

Warwickshire was an interesting place to live, especially for those who were writers. Furthermore, the river Avon ran down through the town and because of this Shakespeare later got the title ‘Bard of Avon’. At the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman who in age was eight years older than him.

Illustrious Career of William Shakespeare

After his education, William Shakespeare became engaged in theatrical life in London. Furthermore, it was from here that his career likely took off. Moreover, by the year 1592, the popularity of William Shakespeare had grown to be very much.

Shakespeare became a member of one of the famous theatre companies in the city. Moreover, this company was ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. Also, the theatre companies during that era were commercial organizations that were dependent upon the audience who came to watch the plays.

From the year 1594, Shakespeare became the leading member of the acting group and remained that for almost the entire rest of his career. By the year 1594, the production of at least six plays had taken place by William Shakespeare.

Evidence shows that Shakespeare became a member of a well-known travelling theatre group. After joining this theatre, Shakespeare did plays in the presence of many dignitaries in various places.

Shakespeare, throughout his life, came up with some outstanding pieces of English literature , involving memorable timeless characters with human qualities. Furthermore, the human qualities and struggles of Shakespeare’s characters are such that one can relate with them even today. Shakespeare retired from his acting profession in 1613 and became completely devoted to writing many excellent plays.

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Conclusion of the Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is, without a doubt, one of the greatest writers of all times. Furthermore, his excellence in story writing, narrative building, and character development is of the highest order. Individuals of such a high calibre appear once in a century or are even rarer than that.

FAQs For Essay on William Shakespeare

Question 1: Why is William Shakespeare so famous?

Answer 1: William Shakespeare’s story writing skills are of an extremely high-quality. Furthermore, his works are characterized by outstanding narrative building around the topics of jealousy, mystery, love, magic, death, murder, life, revenge, and grief. That is why William Shakespeare is so famous.

Question 2: What are some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare?

Answer 2: Some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare are as follows:

Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
Much Ado About Nothing

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A Guide To Writing Shakespeare Essays, Including Pitfalls & Tips

How to Write a Shakespeare Biography Essay

How to Write an Essay About Shakespeare’s Works

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