{"id":11528,"date":"2026-09-10T08:25:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T15:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/?page_id=11528"},"modified":"2026-09-10T19:16:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T02:16:52","slug":"olli-shakespeare-intro-fall-2026","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/olli-shakespeare-intro-fall-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"OLLI Shakespeare Intro Fall 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Al Drake’s Revised Introduction to Shakespeare: Genre, Metaphor, etc.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Introduction to \u201cShakespeare\u2019s Sonnets and Plays\u201d for Fall 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Course M\/O and Approach to the Plays<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll watch brief film clips and discuss the plays as drama and in terms of the insights they offer about life more broadly. Questions and comments are always welcome, but of course we should keep them relevant to the play or issue at hand. Please remember to raise your hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I treat Shakespeare\u2019s work as a text as much as a visual production. We hear<\/em> a Shakespeare drama as much as we see<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Shakespeare web at https:\/\/ajdrake.com\/shakespeare<\/a> offers journal-article-length commentaries as well as questions, guides, hyperlinks to other resources, and a dedicated OLLI page<\/a> where (among other items) you can find links to our course syllabus in WordPress and PDF formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brief Introduction to Shakespeare\u2019s Genres: History, Comedy, Tragedy, and Romance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to concentrate partly on how Shakespeare deals with the frames of experience we call \u201cgenre.\u201d Aside from the small number of sonnets we\u2019ll talk about next week, we will go on to cover one play from each of Shakespeare\u2019s subgenres: history (3 Henry VI<\/em>), comedy (Much Ado About Nothing<\/em>), tragedy (Coriolanus<\/em>), and romance (Cymbeline<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With regard to the history plays, while Shakespeare had access to the major English chroniclers\u2014Edward Hall, John Stowe, Polydore Vergil (an Italian writer) and especially Raphael Holinshed, those chronicles themselves favor Elizabeth\u2019s Tudor line, and Shakespeare himself semifictionalizes English history to adapt it to his imperatives as a dramatist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of his historical texts, Winston Churchill writes that if some things didn\u2019t happen exactly as he says, they should<\/em> have. Shakespeare\u2019s attitude doesn\u2019t appear to differ much\u2014I don\u2019t suppose he was overly concerned with whether, say, King Richard III was really<\/em> such a monster as the Tudor-based historians insisted he was, or whether some of the other great figures in English history and politics were as he depicted them. He was after a good story and compelling characters, not absolute historical truth. If we were to demand that everyone must know their national history with 100% accuracy from lengthy non-fiction works, the compliance rate would most likely be pretty disappointing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No doubt Shakespeare wrote his history plays for a variety of reasons. One would be to deepen the English people\u2019s love of their country and help them remember the greatest events in English history. Doesn\u2019t a film like Steven Spielberg\u2019s Lincoln<\/em> or a musical like Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s Hamilton<\/em> keep America\u2019s early history alive for us latecomers? Sure it does, at least in its own imaginative way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also part of the program\u2014even though we hardly think of Shakespeare as a didactic \u201cschoolmaster\u201d artist any more than we consider him a professional historian\u2014was a willingness to offer representations of English history and its characters (good and bad) that could instill moral lessons in the public. The great Renaissance courtier and critic Sir Philip Sidney said that literary artists provide us with \u201cspeaking pictures\u201d of virtue and vice, making us love the former and hate the latter. I think Shakespeare would agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I say this even though the great eighteenth-century moralist critic Samuel Johnson, whom I admire for his steady common sense and wisdom, lamented that Shakespeare\u2019s most wicked characters were sometimes too charismatic, and that his fondness for obscene quibbles interfered with his wonderful gifts as a storyteller. Shakespeare wasn\u2019t writing for eighteenth-century moralists; he was putting on plays for a somewhat \u201cwilder\u201d audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was also the imperative to turn English history into something memorable and exciting\u2014again as Philip Sidney points out (adapting a thought from the Roman critic and poet Horace), art doesn\u2019t just preach at us,<\/em> it teaches us by delighting us<\/u>.<\/em> Shakespeare subjects the events and characters of history to the fires of art:<\/em> it has to be stirring, compelling, at times breathtaking or shocking, and at other times beautiful and endearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there is plenty of royalty in Shakespeare\u2019s history plays, there is also room for rascals like the rebel Jack Cade and the corrupt knight Jack Falstaff and his pals as well as for the poor, uneducated English people who fought in the wars stirred up by the \u201cgreat\u201d men and women of the kingdom. Shakespeare understood that poor folks suffered most from the age\u2019s brutish, terrifying conflagrations. While some people made money from wars that stemmed mostly from greed, ambition, and egotism, most participants didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comedy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In comedy, the world around us, or our \u201csociety,\u201d has a lot to do with how things turn out for us. Life may not convert all<\/em> our woe into \u201chey nonny, nonny\u201d like the song in Much Ado About Nothing<\/em> says, but it gives us a decent ride. There\u2019s an Italian saying that runs la vita \u00e8 bella,<\/em> and at least in comedy, life is<\/em> beautiful. If you\u2019re not too pretentious, massively greedy, or viciously selfish in your dealings with others; if you\u2019re generous, genial, and open to the experiences life brings, there\u2019s a place for you in the circle of happiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comedy doesn\u2019t take individuals too seriously. It doesn\u2019t insist on strong individuation at the expense of the pleasure principle because in comedy, pleasure is the main purpose of life. Have you ever noticed how many mistaken identities, mix-ups, and silly obstacles there are in comedy? Such things drive the genre. While we don\u2019t expect society (in the sense of a body of laws, rules, customs, and broad imperatives) to step in and directly resolve a given conflict, the things that have been blocking happiness in comic plays are possible, and often even easy,<\/em> to resolve. The characters don\u2019t need to be brilliant, incredibly strong, or amazingly accomplished or noble to end up unconflicted and happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In comedy, the disposition of the world, and time itself, is friendly. Because of this, many people can live happily, even if not \u201cever after.\u201d Should we say that some higher power<\/em> is making things better because unassisted, we would never get things right? Say, a species of divine grace in the form of the pansy-flower\u2019s juice, as in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream,<\/em> or the appearance of a god, like Hymen in As You Like It?<\/em> I don\u2019t know. Maybe sometimes we come up with our own social fix, and sometimes the gods do us a solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Northrop Frye wrote that the way comedy ends involves a \u201cmyth [i.e. story] of deliverance\u201d\u2014that is, comic resolution entails reaching a state of \u201cexpanded energy and freedom\u201d for the most successful characters in a given comedy. I like that reading, though as I\u2019ve mentioned, I don\u2019t know that we need refer to any deep state of enlightenment or interiority on the characters\u2019 part to get us there. More basic human capacities and endowments seem to do the trick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tragedy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for tragedy, it works from a very different perspective, one that refuses to accommodate even our most reasonable hopes for a stable, meaningful life. Moreover, we want<\/em> to lay the blame where, or with whom, it belongs so we don\u2019t have to affirm an unappealing principle rigidly opposed to comedy, like, say, la vita \u00e8 brutta,<\/em> \u201clife is ugly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t always blame Shakespeare\u2019s tragic protagonists, though: their ethical quality ranges from very flawed individuals to noble characters who get pulled down by unfortunate circumstances. Macbeth and Lear, for example, are responsible for their own downfalls, but can we really say that about Romeo and Juliet\u2019s tragic end? Or Hamlet\u2019s? Shakespeare clearly didn\u2019t put any stock in a unified concept of tragedy. Although in some respects his tragedies connect with Classical tragedy, he is by no means an Aristotelian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, we can say that Shakespeare is interested in a number of key things in his tragedies. Here is a non-exhaustive list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The first thing is the necessity, as Rhodri Lewis tells us in Shakespeare\u2019s Tragic Art<\/em> (2024), of stripping away life\u2019s guarantees, its illusions of sanity and security, even when that renders life unbearably bleak, as in King Lear.<\/em> In tragedy, whether we have precipitated a crisis through our own mistakes, or circumstances beyond our control have brought us the unsettling news that\u2014as Matthew Arnold says in \u201cDover Beach,\u201d the world \u201cHath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, \/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain\u201d\u2014there\u2019s a strong drive towards understanding. Understanding must be gained at all costs, even at the price of what we hold most dear. That isn\u2019t true in comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Placing understanding aside, we can say that in tragedy, there is also an imperative to bear witness<\/em> to human suffering, whatever its cause. There is dignity in that imperative\u2014it lays a demand of strength upon us. I find this emphasis in Shakespeare wonderfully Classical in spirit\u2014which is also true of the first thing I mentioned, by the way (the stripping away of illusions until only harsh truth remains). It\u2019s fun to think of Shakespeare as a \u201cpoet of nature\u201d and to insist pointedly that he never went to Oxbridge,  but we should realize, too, that a little bit of Classical learning (\u201csmall Latin and less Greek,\u201d as Ben Jonson put it), especially in the mind of a person of Shakespeare\u2019s capacity, goes a long<\/em> way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. A number of Shakespeare\u2019s tragic protagonists show signs of a robust interiority, a depth of character and a complexity of consciousness that isn\u2019t required in comedy or the romance plays: Hamlet is obviously the prime example, but King Lear  and Macbeth meet this criterion, too, and we could defend the inclusion of others. It is in this regard that Harold Bloom says Shakespeare was for at least part of his career engaged in a project of \u201cinventing the human\u201d\u2014or rather he worked hard to learn how to represent<\/em> the workings of emotion, intellect, and consciousness more generally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. There\u2019s an interest in Shakespeare on how social<\/em> tragedy happens, too. He seems determined to show us what happens when a society no longer respects the values that once animated it. There are times when \u201cthings fall apart,\u201d as Yeats says, and \u201cthe center cannot hold.\u201d Shakespearean tragedy of this sort posits that once that happens, it is very<\/em> hard to put a society back together and live meaningfully and with sufficient regard for others. Making things right would involve more than a stiff penalty for one or a few persons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

King Lear<\/em> is probably the best example of Shakespeare\u2019s interest in the social dimension of tragedy. In some of his other tragedies (and not only the tragedies), he at least acknowledges the harm done to a society by its worst transgressors and villains. Who can forget Act 4, Scene 2 of Macbeth,<\/em> in which a group of the murderous, usurping king\u2019s henchmen slaughter his opponent Macduff\u2019s entire family?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The romance playsmight be called \u201ctragicomedies\u201d since they offer a mixture of the comic mode and sensibility with the tragic. Even so, romance\u2014a term that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have used in connection with any of his plays\u2014is not just a jumble of comic and tragic moments. It\u2019s more accurate to say that the five Shakespeare plays we call \u201cromances\u201d (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter\u2019s Tale, The Tempest,<\/em> and The Two Noble Kinsmen<\/em>) are grounded in a blending<\/em> of comic and tragic assumptions and conventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it\u2019s easiest to sum up romance this way: by the final act, some degree of bittersweetness will exist in the main characters\u2019 consciousness because their actions will have brought real, painful consequences. The romance world isn\u2019t as accommodating as the fully comic one is: characters can\u2019t take such a carefree or even reckless attitude as they can in comedy, at least without paying<\/em> for it in some way that is bound to make us all think twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider The Winter\u2019s Tale.<\/em> In a fully tragic universe, King Leontes\u2019 insane jealously would flat-out kill<\/em> his innocent wife Hermione. That loss and the consequent guilt of it would destroy the foolish king of Sicilia. In a comic world, by contrast, some way would emerge to get Leontes and Hermione out of trouble without permanent damage or suffering. What Shakespeare\u2019s romance play gives us is neither of these outcomes: Hermione doesn\u2019t die, but she and Leontes are apart for many years. Their dear son Mamilius sickens and dies, and they miss out on their lovely daughter Perdita\u2019s childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The universe demands a good deal of humility<\/u><\/em> from Leontes, and only then does it grant him the feeling of wonder<\/u><\/em> that flows from seeing his beloved, wronged, older wife appear to turn from a statue back into a living, breathing human being. Were he not granted this gift, he would be a fully tragic figure. As it stands, our romance protagonist is filled with gratitude and astonishment at the reattainment of what would have been his to enjoy all along, but for his self-inflicted, soul-warping fit of jealousy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Act 5, Scene 4 of Shakespeare\u2019s Much Ado About Nothing,<\/em> Friar Francis, by way of conditioning the public\u2019s response to Hero\u2019s seemingly miraculous return to life, says elegantly, \u201clet wonder seem familiar.\u201d That\u2019s a good way to encapsulate what happens at the conclusion of a romance play: \u201cfallen\u201d human beings experience as little short of miraculous the recovery (even partial recovery, in some cases) of something precious that, in their foolishness or arrogance, they had thrown away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humility and self-restraint are required of The Tempest\u2019s<\/em> Prospero before he is granted what he desires, too: the return of his duchy of Milan and the successful entry of his daughter Miranda into the world beyond the enchanted island of their exile. In part, the cost of Prospero\u2019s early selfishness and inattention to his duties as a ruler entails the alienation of what we may presume should have been a much friendlier disposition of time.<\/em> When Prospero finally gets back what was his to begin with, he has already come to understand that death isn\u2019t far off. \u201cEvery third thought,\u201d he confesses in Act 5, Scene 1, \u201cshall be my grave.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The comments above are hardly meant to be exhaustive. Literary texts are complex, even messy,<\/em> historical, cultural, and authorial objects, so it\u2019s best to take them as you find them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\u2019s Language and Verse<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With regard to Shakespeare\u2019s dramatic verse, the following things are useful:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. It\u2019s blank verse,<\/em> mostly unrhymed. This is simple iambic pentameter, dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM dee-DUM with some substitutions, mainly DUM-dee, the trochee, and dee-dee-DUM, the anapest. (The \u201cdee\u201d is unaccented<\/em> or unstressed,<\/em> and the DUM is accented<\/em> or stressed.<\/em>) There are also feminine<\/em> endings and feminine<\/em> rhymes, which occur when a line ends with an extra unaccented syllable. (\u201cA woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iambic pentameter involves five beats or stressed syllables. Listen to conversations, and you\u2019ll hear iambic rhythms: \u201cToday I gave away a pair of jeans. \/ They never really fit me anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Shakespeare knits the words in his lines together with antithesis<\/em>. I\u2019ll read the opening of Richard III<\/em> so you can see how the language is made memorable in part by antithesis: \u201cNow is the winter<\/u><\/strong> of our discontent \/ Made glorious summer<\/u><\/strong> by this son<\/u><\/strong> (son\/sun<\/em>) of York, \/ And all the clouds<\/u><\/strong> that loured upon our house \/ In the deep bosom of the ocean<\/u><\/strong> buried.\u201d This is strong blank verse. One can speak it boldly without losing subtlety. Winter\/summer (and sun<\/em> as a homonymic pun); clouds high up in the sky\/ocean deep below the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Shakespeare writes to bring out the drama in a scene. Hamlet\u2019s advice to the traveling actors who visit him at Elsinore Castle is instructive. In Hamlet<\/em> 3.2.17ff, he tells them \u201cSuit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o\u2019erstep not the modesty of nature.\u201d So the actors shouldn\u2019t ham it up. Shakespeare would doubtless tell us that Hamlet\u2019s injunction to suit \u201cthe word to the action\u201d should be directed equally to the playwright: know the action, and craft your lines so that they clarify and enhance the action, the situation, the circumstances. Shakespeare himself honors this advice, even if, to modern sensibilities, his language sometimes sounds rather ornate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Even as Shakespeare suits characters\u2019 words to the action or the circumstances, he  combines this achievement with an astonishing facility in using figurative language, metaphor above all. Here\u2019s a good definition I\u2019ve seen: \u201cMetaphor clarifies or deepens the meaning of a first thing by ascribing to it or transferring over to it the qualities of a second, unrelated thing.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing to be clarified or better understood is called the tenor,<\/em> while the \u201csecond, unrelated\u201d thing is the vehicle.<\/em> The latter, the vehicle, is like a delivery van loaded with deeper insight into something important. So when in his \u201cSonnet VII,\u201d John Milton writes, \u201cHow soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth, \/ Stoln on his wing my three and twentieth year!\u201d he is using \u201ctheef\/thief\u201d as the vehicle that will help us better understand the nature of the tenor, \u201cTime.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s use as our example for both #3 and #4 above one of the best dialogues in all of Shakespeare\u2014a passage in which the speaker\u2019s words movingly suit his circumstances and the play\u2019s immediate action, and in the course of accomplishing these things deploy several excellent metaphors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Act 2, Scene 4 of King Lear,<\/em> the king\u2019s wicked daughters Regan and Goneril have been engaged in a savage reverse bidding match to strip him of his hundred companion knights, with Goneril asking him why he needs 25, 10, or even five such men, and Regan capping things off with \u201cWhat need one?\u201d This is too much for Lear, who flies into a rage and speaks the following words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man\u2019s life is cheap as beast\u2019s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear\u2019st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,\u2014
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stirs these daughters\u2019 hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women\u2019s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man\u2019s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall,\u2014I will do such things,\u2014
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I\u2019ll weep;
No, I\u2019ll not weep:\u2014 [Storm and tempest.<\/em>]
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I\u2019ll weep.\u2014O fool, I shall go mad!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                         (public domain text)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used the term \u201crage\u201d above, but that doesn\u2019t capture the full meaning of the old king\u2019s performance, does it? He starts off with a fatherly observation that ought to show his daughters how wrong they are to invoke a principle like \u201cnecessity\u201d in the service of a cruel cause. Regan is scantily clad in cold weather, and he asks pointedly what her spicy fashion choice today had to do with nature,<\/em> at least in the sense she would give that term.<\/em> The skimpy outfit reminds us that people, unlike other creatures, mostly live by excess, artifice, and ego, not \u201cnature\u201d in the sense of bare, stark necessity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With respect to human beings, then, it is this generous excess that we should refer to as natural\u2014<\/em>not those things about our behavior that link us to bears, lions, cobras, and sharks. The metaphoric quality of this first part of Lear\u2019s speech runs so deep that we almost forget to call it that. Shakespeare is using a reference to fine clothing<\/em> as a metaphor to \u201cfigure forth\u201d the better element of human nature, which is our propensity for artifice,<\/em> which can be defined broadly to include the love of beauty, luxury, good manners, and, best of all, generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No doubt Regan doesn\u2019t see any of the clothes she wears in this metaphorical, spiritual light; but then, as readers and viewers of King Lear<\/em> will surely know, both Regan and Goneril, like the other bad characters in the play (mainly Edmund and Cornwall), are vulgar literalists. They are illiterate<\/em> when it comes to their own proper nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But once Lear has made this excellent observation, he quickly loses patience, and with it he loses control over his rhetoric. He calls upon the gods to fill him with righteous anger, and begins\u2014so impotently that it\u2019s hard to suppress a laugh\u2014to threaten these \u201cunnatural hags\u201d his daughters. Then, to judge from his words, he notices that those same \u201chags\u201d are looking at him with eye-rolling exasperation. (Perhaps they\u2019ve been treated to this kind of performance before?) Lear swears he won\u2019t burst into tears, and then does so (any good actor would play it that way). He does it pitifully enough so that by the end of his outburst, he seems like a confused, frightened, out-of-control child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More to the point, Lear\u2019s sputtering diatribe suggests that Shakespeare is familiar with the way an aged person with incipient dementia speaks and behaves. The king is right about his two evil daughters, but his disordered manner and speech underscore his extreme frailty and vulnerability, and reinforces our understanding that it\u2019s way<\/em> too late to fix this situation. He has surrendered control; he won\u2019t get it back, and he couldn\u2019t wield it competently if he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have already given some thought to one excellent metaphor in the above passage, but there are of course others. One is implied in the phrase \u201cwomen\u2019s weapons, water-drops,\u201d but the second stands out as particularly brilliant. Just as Lear finishes his tirade, he utters the line, \u201cthis heart \/ Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws \/ Or ere I\u2019ll weep.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFlaws\u201d here means something like \u201cshattered pieces of glass,\u201d so the old king, who has rejected the shedding of tears as an effeminate weakness (pardon the term), is picturing his heart as a brittle, hard vessel that will fracture into tiny pieces under the stress his daughters have caused him. He will break<\/em> before he melts<\/em> into water, he is telling us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, it\u2019s obvious that Lear does<\/em> fall to weeping. He, too, is subject to the wet, wild, thunderous storms figured by the tempestuous skies above him, which obviously function as yet another powerful metaphor, this time for the emotion and mental distress shaking Lear\u2019s being to the core. By his words and gestures, Lear seems to be suggesting, \u201cI\u2019ll handle this my way, like a man,\u201d but as Shakespeare\u2019s metaphors of sky and glass bring home to us, the aged king\u2019s brittle state and vulnerability could scarcely be more extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s Lear\u2019s refusalto go the way of the storm, to open himself to the risks and consequences of being human, that has been the greater part of his troubles up to the present. That\u2019s why Shakespeare makes the wicked Regan and Cornwall order Gloucester, \u201cShut up your doors.\u201d Lear is to be sent out into the storm, to suffer and feel what he must, even if it drives him mad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All good poets work excellently with figurative language\u2014for them, it isn\u2019t merely decoration or teacherly explanation, but a fundamental way of perceiving and expressing reality. Still, Shakespeare takes figuration to another level. See also shakespeare-online\u2019s list of metaphors<\/a>. Before we leave the issue of metaphor, it\u2019s worth suggesting that even similes (as in, \u201cthis is like<\/em> that\u201d) often take on the power of metaphor in Shakespeare. When in King Lear<\/em> Act 4, Scene 1 the despairing Gloucester observes, \u201cAs flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, \/ They kill us for their sport. It would be a mistake to allow the word \u201cAs\u201d here to keep us from registering the full significance of this utterance and put it down only for a fanciful statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Easy Stuff about the Language.<\/strong> Pronouns and verb conjugations. Thou\/thee\/thy\/thine. Est\/eth in third-person singular. Odd verbs: have (hast, hath), be (art), do (doth, dost), say (saiest or sayest, saieth or sayeth). Syntax inversions (\u201cHe to England shall along with us\u201d), and anthimeria (\u201cWhat seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?\u201d), etch\u2026. Visit Shakespeare Resource Center\u2019s page: https:\/\/www.bardweb.net\/content\/grammar\/grammar.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adjusting our Expectations.<\/strong> We moderns tend to be utility-minded or instrumentalist when it comes to language. Shakespeare\u2019s audiences made more room, I think, for imaginative and figurative language. But we can<\/em> appreciate Shakespeare\u2019s words, even 400+ years on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difficulty is often due to the author\u2019s command of the language of flowers, folklore, heraldry, hawking, law, early modern medicine, tradesman\u2019s lingo, and so forth. But most of all, it\u2019s probably due to the quality that most distinguishes poetry from prose: compression.<\/em> Poetry is very compressed language: it packs a lot of meaning into few words. That makes it harder to understand than prose, so we shouldn\u2019t expect transparency from poetry\u2014it will often challenge our understanding, startle us out of stale truisms, and so forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prose does more work for<\/em> us, while poetry expects more work from<\/em> us. I think the payoff is worth the effort. I\u2019m not sure who said that poetry is where language goes to be most fully itself\u2014meaning something like \u201cleast reducible to a tool that we use to get things done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look over your Shakespeare edition\u2019s notes. You can supplement them with guides such as Ben and David Crystal\u2019s book Shakespeare\u2019s Words,<\/em> or older lexica such as the Shakespeare Glossary<\/em> by OED editor Charles Talbut Onions, which you can find online at Tufts University\u2019s Perseus Project. There\u2019s also Alexander Schmidt\u2019s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary,<\/em> and as with Onions\u2019 book, you can find it both online and in print. The Links<\/a> page of my website at www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare<\/a> connects to many such resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nettlesome Authorship Question<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See James Shapiro\u2019s 2011 book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?<\/em> He investigates not so much the alternative-authorship theory itself as whysuch a theory gained traction around 200 years after Shakespeare\u2019s death. There has long been some disappointment regarding the evidence that has come to light about Shakespeare as a man\u2014what little there is pretty much suggests a businessman intent upon making a good living, like his father John Shakespeare before him. Did the ordinary-seeming Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually create all those awesome plays? Wasn\u2019t he too busy lending money, collecting rents, suing people over debts, and hoarding malt to do anything \u201cgeniusy\u201d like that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As time went by, an epistemological shift around the beginning of the nineteenth century led critics and readers to start positing deep connections between Shakespeare\u2019s personal life and the characters and actions in his plays. Both \u201cbardolatry\u201d (near-deification of Shakespeare) and, more generally, biographical literary criticism came into vogue by the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Shapiro explains that these developments helped to generate and spread the so-called authorship question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did bardolatry or hero-worship of Shakespeare put the authorship of the plays in question? Well, when you turn an author into a god, some people will insist on saying, \u201cGod is dead.\u201d Or more prosaically, \u201cThis guy doesn\u2019t look or behave the way we think a towering genius should, so he can\u2019t be Shakespeare.\u201d Shapiro points out that those who came to espouse what many of us would today call conspiracy theories about Shakespeare\u2019s relationship (or non-relationship) to the plays now have a ready method for promoting their view: the post-romantic expressive habit of turning the play-texts into a rich field for connections to something other than the plays\u2019 immediate situations and characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as one could use biographical, expressive criticism to promote<\/em> Shakespeare as a transcendent genius, one could \u201cunlock\u201d all sorts of references to, say, external, real-life political events, social conditions, and so forth\u2014coded messages\u2014that might be interpreted as suggesting Shakespeare the man from Stratford did not, in fact, write the plays we have been claiming he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My view? We live in an age wherein conspiracy-slinging is a primary mode of thinking, so it isn\u2019t surprising that Shakespeare is in the crosshairs of authorship conspiracies. I think it\u2019s fair to point out that no actual evidence has ever<\/em> been adduced to prove that the \u201cStratford Man\u201d did not<\/em> write the plays we call \u201cthe works of Shakespeare.\u201d Stratford-Dude was in fact a man of the theater, who owned part of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, led the Lord Chamberlain\u2019s Men and The King\u2019s Men, and was manifestly much respected and at times envied by his contemporaries. Ben Jonson was his friend and wrote a memorial poem for the 1623 First Folio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, I wish Shakespeare had written some critical treatises and taken pains to supervise a manuscript-based edition of his plays, but those things are not strictly necessary to establish authorship, and most artists in Shakespeare\u2019s day didn\u2019t do them either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Document Timestamp: 9\/10\/2026 5:31 PM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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