6.1 Shakespearean Conventions and Elizabethan Language

Part B Blueprint Focus: The ELA 30-1 Information Bulletin lists Shakespearean drama among the text types for Part B: Reading. You will not know which play or scene appears, so the skill to build is reading any unfamiliar Shakespeare excerpt closely. That means decoding Early Modern English, interpreting dramatic conventions, and inferring motive beneath rhetoric.

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Shakespeare on Part B

Part B excerpts may come from any of Shakespeare's plays, including tragedies, histories, comedies, and romances. Your class study of one play gives you transferable skills, but the passage on the exam may be new to you. Headnotes, character lists, and footnotes on archaic words are part of the reading, so use them.

Shakespeare questions can come from any part of the blueprint:

• Reporting Category 1 (construct meaning from content and context): the meaning of archaic words in context, untangling inverted syntax, and literal relationships between characters.
• Reporting Category 2 (relate forms, elements, and techniques to purpose and effect): the function of a soliloquy or aside, a shift between verse and prose, or an image pattern.
• Reporting Category 3 (connect self, culture, and milieu): values such as honour, loyalty, order, or gender roles, and how the play's world frames a character's choices.
• Thinking levels B and C: most questions ask you to infer motive and subtext or to generalize about a character's values and the play's ideas, rather than to recall stated facts.

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Verse vs. Prose: Sociolinguistic and Psychological Codes

Shakespeare never wrote in verse or prose by accident. The formal architecture of a character's speech provides an immediate theatrical signal regarding their social station, intellectual poise, or psychological equilibrium.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                SHAKESPEAREAN SPEECH MODES                               |
|                                                                                         |
|   BLANK VERSE (Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter)           PROSE (Unmetered Text)             |
|   • 10 syllables per line (da-DUM da-DUM...)         • Runs margin-to-margin            |
|   • Noble characters, royalty, aristocracy           • Commoners, rustics, servants     |
|   • Formal, public, or philosophical topics          • Comedic banter, farce, satire    |
|   • Heightened emotion and moral gravity             • Letters, official proclamations  |
|   • Sign of psychological control and poise          • Madness, delirium, loss of control|
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Blank Verse (Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter)

Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines containing ten syllables structured into five iambic feet (an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /). Shakespeare reserves blank verse for aristocrats, monarchs, and figures engaged in serious moral, political, or philosophical contemplation. When a character speaks in fluent, balanced iambic pentameter, they project social dignity, intellectual clarity, or rhetorical authority.

Prose (Unmetered Language)

Prose appears as ordinary continuous text extending to the page margins. In Elizabethan theater, prose fulfills three primary functions:

1. Social Classification: Lower-class characters, servants, rustics, and comedic figures (such as the Gravediggers in Hamlet or the Porter in Macbeth) speak in prose, reflecting their mundane social reality.
2. Utilitarian Communication: Written letters, legal proclamations, and pragmatic military briefings are rendered in prose.
3. Psychological Breakdown and Feigned Madness: When an elite character undergoes acute psychological collapse or adopts a facade of insanity, they abandon poetic meter. In Hamlet, the Prince speaks elevated blank verse in his existential soliloquies but drops into biting, erratic prose when performing madness before Polonius or Ophelia. Similarly, in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth speaks blank verse throughout her calculated pursuit of power, but in Act V, Scene 1, as her fractured conscience collapses under unbearable guilt, her sleepwalking confessions deteriorate into fractured, circular prose.

Diploma Strategy: Whenever an excerpt displays a sudden shift between verse and prose, expect a question targeting the underlying psychological or relational disruption causing that transition.

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Theatrical Conventions: Accessing Character Interiority

Because Elizabethan public theaters (such as the Globe) lacked digital amplification, darkened auditoriums, and cinematic close-ups, playwrights relied on distinct theatrical conventions to broadcast characters' secret motives directly to the audience.

1. The Soliloquy

A speech delivered by a character who is alone on stage (or who genuinely believes themselves to be unobserved). In dramatic theory, the soliloquy is a convention of absolute psychological transparency: while a character may dissemble, flatter, and lie to other onstage figures, they cannot deceive the audience during a soliloquy. The soliloquy dramatizes the internal crucible—exposing raw grief, unholy ambition, crippling hesitation, or spiritual agony (e.g., Hamlet contemplating suicide in "To be, or not to be" or Macbeth hallucinating the dagger).

2. The Aside

A brief comment or confidential observation spoken directly to the audience (or shared covertly with a single chosen companion) while other characters remain on stage. By theatrical convention, the other characters cannot hear the aside. The aside establishes instantaneous dramatic irony, revealing hypocrisy, private reservations, or impending betrayal (e.g., Macbeth's dark aside: "The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap").

3. The Monologue

An extended, uninterrupted speech delivered by one character in the presence of other listening characters. Unlike the soliloquy, a monologue is an act of public rhetoric. Characters use monologues to persuade, intimidate, eulogize, or justify their actions (e.g., Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen" in Julius Caesar). When you read a monologue, evaluate it critically: ask what agenda the speaker is advancing and what truths they are strategically suppressing.

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Navigating Elizabethan Language and Inverted Syntax

The primary stumbling block for students on Part B is not Shakespeare's vocabulary, but rather his flexible, Latinate syntax.

Pronoun Shifts: Thou vs. You

Early Modern English distinguished between informal and formal second-person pronouns:

• Thou / Thee / Thy / Thine: Singular, informal, intimate, or familial. Crucially, it was also used by social superiors addressing inferiors. Addressing a social equal or superior as thou was a deliberate act of contempt, hostility, or disrespect.
• Ye / You / Your: Formal, polite, and deferential, used when addressing social superiors, professional equals, or groups.

When a character abruptly pivots from you to thou, Shakespeare is signaling an escalation in emotional intimacy or a calculated display of aggression and diminished respect.

Syntactic Inversion

To preserve iambic pentameter or throw semantic weight onto a specific idea, Shakespeare frequently inverted standard modern Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order into Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) or Verb-Subject-Object (VSO).

When deciphering dense lines:

1. Locate the primary conjugated verb.
2. Ask: Who or what is performing this action? (Identify the grammatical subject).
3. Identify the recipient of the action (the direct object) and untangle modifying prepositional clauses.

Example: "Him I forgive; but never shall my soul / Forget the treason."
Modern SVO order: "I forgive him; but my soul shall never forget the treason."
Rhetorical effect: Placing the object "Him" first establishes emphatic personal focus before asserting unyielding remembrance of the crime.

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Rhetorical Figures in Dramatic Verse

Shakespeare's drama is rich in classical rhetorical devices that sharpen theatrical tension:

• Apostrophe: A sudden emotional address to an absent person, deity, inanimate object, or abstract concept (e.g., Lady Macbeth invoking: "Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here").
• Antithesis and Chiasmus: The symmetrical juxtaposition of contrasting ideas or inverted word patterns to crystallize moral confusion (e.g., "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" or "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action").
• Shared and Split Verse Lines (Hemistichs): When two or more characters divide a single ten-syllable iambic pentameter line between them, the actors must deliver their phrases without pause. Shared lines often indicate heightened urgency, breathlessness, escalating confrontation, or intimate psychological synchronization (such as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's clipped exchanges following Duncan's murder).

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Comprehensive Archaic Vocabulary & Syntactic Reference