Editing William Shakespeare (section)

==Style==
{{Main|Shakespeare's writing style}}

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.{{sfn|Clemen|2005a|p=150}} The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in ''[[Titus Andronicus]]'', in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in ''[[The Two Gentlemen of Verona]]'' has been described as stilted.{{sfn|Frye|2005|pp=105, 177}}{{sfn|Clemen|2005b|p=29}}

[[File:WilliamBlakePity.jpeg|thumb|''[[Pity (William Blake)|Pity]]'' by [[William Blake]], 1795, is an illustration of two similes in ''Macbeth'':<poem>
"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air."{{sfn|de Sélincourt|1909|p=174}}
</poem>]]

However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening [[soliloquy]] of ''[[Richard III (play)|Richard III]]'' has its roots in the self-declaration of [[the Vice|Vice]] in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.{{sfn|Brooke|2004|p=69}}{{sfn|Bradbrook|2004|p=195}} No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.{{sfn|Clemen|2005b|p=63}} By the time of ''Romeo and Juliet'', ''[[Richard II (play)|Richard II]]'', and ''[[A Midsummer Night's Dream]]'' in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was [[blank verse]], composed in [[iambic pentameter]]. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the [[End-stopping|end of lines]], with the risk of monotony.{{sfn|Frye|2005|p=185}} Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as ''[[Julius Caesar (play)|Julius Caesar]]'' and ''[[Hamlet]]''. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:{{sfn|Wright|2004|p=868}}

{{blockquote|<poem>Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well&nbsp;...</poem>
|
|''Hamlet'', Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8{{sfn|Wright|2004|p=868}}}}

After ''Hamlet'', Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic [[A. C. Bradley]] described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".{{sfn|Bradley|1991|p=91}} In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included [[enjambment|run-on lines]], irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.{{sfn|McDonald|2006|pp=42–46}} In ''[[Macbeth]]'', for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...&nbsp;pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air&nbsp;..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.{{sfn|McDonald|2006|pp=42–46}} The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.{{sfn|McDonald|2006|pp=36, 39, 75}}

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.{{sfn|Gibbons|1993|p=4}} Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as [[Plutarch]] and [[Raphael Holinshed|Holinshed]].{{sfn|Gibbons|1993|pp=1–4}} He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting, and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.{{sfn|Gibbons|1993|pp=1–7, 15}} As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In [[Shakespeare's late romances]], he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.{{sfn|McDonald|2006|p=13}}{{sfn|Meagher|2003|p=358}}