Reading Shakespeare, Part 2 (handout from class--just in case you lose it!)

READING SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE, PART 2

 

Three Different Kinds of Verse

 

(A) HAMLET (Iambic Pentameter Soliloquy/Intimate, Conversational):

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all his visage waned,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit—and all for nothing!

For Hecuba! (2.2.p.117)

 

(B) HAMLET’S LETTER TO OPHELIA (rhyming couplets, love poem):

            Doubt that the stars are fire,

               Doubt that the sun doth move,

            Doubt truth to be a liar,

               But never doubt I love. (2.2.p.89)

 

(C) FIRST PLAYER’S SPEECH (epic/bombastic iambic pentameter—parody?):

Anon he finds him

Striking too short at Greeks. His antique sword.

Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,

Repugnant to command. Unequal matched,

Pyrrus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide;

But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword

Th’ unnerved father falls. (2.2.p.111)

 

The Freedom of Prose

 

(Lines can be long or short, controlled by the thought, not the rhythm)

 

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

HAMLET: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET: Why, then, ‘tis none to you, for there is nothing, either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ: Why, then, your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.

HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, where it not that I have bad dreams. (2.2.p.99).