Enjambment

I was surprised when looking into the history of enjambment to discover that its use went back much further than I had expected. I was getting prepared for a bit of a rant about contemporary poets cutting lines and rolling them over to the start of the next line for no apparent reason. However it seems, for instance, that Homer used the technique and it is used in the 32nd Psalm of the Hebrew Bible.

I’d better explain what the technique is before going any further:

‘Enjambment is when a sentence or phrase spans over more than one line of poetry. Because of this, a thought or idea carries on from one line to the next without a pause or punctuation mark at the end of the line’.

And thanks to Kassiani Nikolopoulou at QuillBot for that simple but clear definition. So many of the other definitions I looked at included words like syntax or couplets which can mean that someone then has to go and look up their meanings.

After finding that definition I was going to go on to my original idea but got stopped in my tracks by references to scholars such as Goswin König and A. C. Bradley who have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment. How on earth does that work?

An example quoted is this from Romeo and Juliet from around 1595:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punishèd.

Each line is complete in itself and the argument goes that this is an example of his early works.

Then there are these lines from The Winter's Tale, from about 1611, which use enjambment comprehensively:

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew
Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodged here which burns
Worse than tears drown.

The point is that the reader's eye is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like ‘flow-of-thought’ with a sensation of urgency or disorder. It is said that this is a measure of Shakespeare’s development as a writer.

I should mention that the use of computer technology has confirmed this analysis. And how does that work? I got this from the AI overview to the question ‘How Computer-Aided Analysis Works’.

Stylometry & Machine Learning: Scholars use machine-learning algorithms to "train" a computer on a known, chronologically arranged corpus of Shakespeare's work (e.g., training on Coriolanus and The Tempest to analyse Henry VIII).

Quantifying Enjambment: Computers allow for rapid, precise counting of enjambed lines, pause patterns, and "weak" endings (endings that cannot pause) across thousands of lines, which would be labour-intensive to do manually.

Pause Patterns: Analysis shows that the distribution of pauses within iambic pentameter lines serves as a reliable chronological marker, allowing computers to place plays in a chronological sequence that largely matches the established scholarly consensus.

I found confirmation of the points in articles such as in MIT Technology Review.

But instead of a play let’s choose a sonnet.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

                                                      William Shakespeare

                         

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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Reputation

I’m not really qualified to comment on the Taylor Swift album ‘reputation’ which is the main result of searching google for the subject. I’m not qualified to comment on the reputation of Shakespeare either but found myself being curious as to whether he was as famous back in his day as he was just a few years after his death.

bust of William Shakespeare

Apparently it is difficult to assess Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime in England so the facts about his reputation can only be judged from his name being mentioned in documents such as a list of contemporary lists of leading poets. Shakespeare's poems were reprinted far more frequently than his plays; but Shakespeare's plays were written for performance by his own company, and because no law prevented rival companies from using the plays. His company tried to prevent his plays from being printed.

I came across the story of the publisher Thomas Pavier whose bookstall was near the Royal Exchange in London. In 1608 he was selling ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ a play about real life murders. And the name of the author splashed across the front page was ‘W. Shak(e)speare’.

the fake play

It was, of course, a fake but the point is that WS had by then developed, quite literally, a name.

So, if he was established by then as a playwright let’s go back a bit and we find that when he first came to the notice of readers he was far better known as a poet whose most important works were 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'Venus and Adonis', and the 'Sonnets'.

For the purposes of this article I had a go at reading some of 'Venus and Adonis'. If I could have understood the (very) long poem properly I have a feeling it was rather in the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ territory.

Anyway by 1592 he was sufficiently well known to be subject to the famous attack on him by Robert Greene i.e. an vp=start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. And even though the attack seems a bit daft now Greene and his group were not stupid people. They were England’s first professional writers but I don’t know enough about them to further this argument.

The Poems of William Shakespeare

We can tell what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought about his plays by looking at their manuscripts. (Well, I can’t but those who know can). These were handwritten documents where they would jot down notes, accounts, poems, and snippets from plays. According to the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, early readers didn't prefer Shakespeare over other popular writers of the time, such as Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson.

One of the earliest commentaries we have on Shakespeare comes from Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and writer, who noted in the margins of one of his books that 'the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort'.

However, it was his history plays that seemed to make the breakthrough, to really seal his reputation. According to the Database of Early English Playbooks, the two most published plays (and likely the most popular) from the 1590s to the 1630s were 'Henry IV Part I'  – published eleven times – and 'Richard III', which was published ten times.

Henry IV part i

Although we can only guess at why early audiences were so drawn to the histories, it could be that the histories held an importance that is hard to imagine today. In a country where power was centred on the throne, the issues of sovereignty and power, dramatised in Shakespeare's history plays, would have been at the centre of society, affecting everyone within it.

I should add that the various We’s and I’s above are drawn from loads of sources on the web and are not me.

From: As You Like It

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.
And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Thanks for reading. Comments/feedback welcomed.

Terry Q.

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History

Part two of this Shakespeare mini-series devotes itself to history. Here's a brief history of the man himself, still something of an enigma 400 years later.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is generally acknowledged to be the finest playwright of them all, certainly as far as the English language is concerned. He was in the right place at the right time - the quarter of a century from 1589 to 1614 - when the European renaissance really took hold in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England.

Although he was grammar school educated in  his home town of Stratford-on-Avon, and evidently capable of going to university if he wished, William was not attracted by academia. Instead he was married at 18 to Anne Hathaway, a woman seven years his senior, and was a father soon afterwards, providing for his young family by working as a lawyers' clerk.

He had always been attracted to the theatre, which in early Elizabethan England existed mainly as acting companies at the courts of the Queen and her nobles. These companies toured the provinces when not performing for their patrons and Stratford (being close to both Kenilworth Castle and Oxford) played host to such touring companies. Thus it was that in 1587, Shakespeare at age 23 set out to make his way in London in the emerging theatrical world. He was intent on making a living and a name for himself  in the capital, spent much of the next thirty years there, visiting his wife and family in Stratford as the occasion offered (once or twice a year).

Initially he served as an actor for the Lord Chamberlain's men but before long, as well as acting, he was busy editing other people's plays to make them more stageworthy. It was then only a matter of time before he was producing original work for his company to perform. They soon recognised where his true worth lay and his reputation as a dramatist and a poet grew quickly. He went on to write 39 plays (academics still argue over a further 4) plus 4 long poems and 148 sonnets. He became a shareholder in the theatre company, a mainstay of the Globe when it opened and he continued to act minor roles in the string of major plays that he wrote either side of the change of century. Dividing his time between London and Stratford, he became a man of considerable means by the time of his death, aged exactly 52 to the day.

It is claimed that Shakespeare "created" over 1,700 new words among his prolific output, something of an exaggeration as this count also includes pre-existing words that were given a new twist (i.e. an adjective derived from a noun, a noun transformed into a verb etc) and words for which no earlier written example has been found. Regardless of count, the achievement is impressive, as is the list of hundreds of well-known phrases in common usage today that have their origin in the works of William Shakespeare.

The illustration (above) is claimed by historian Mark Griffiths, in a treatise worthy of Dan Brown, to be the earliest - and hitherto unknown - depiction of Shakespeare and the only extant likeness that was fashioned during his lifetime. It is taken from the title-page of 'The Herball or Generall Histoire of Plantes' published in 1598 by the horticulturalist John Gerard. The engraving showed four figures and Griffiths had to make sense of an elaborate Tudor code of rebuses, ciphers, heraldic devices and symbolic flowers to determine the men's identities. One turned out, not surprisingly, to be the author John Gerard himself; another was famed Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens; the third was Gerard's patron Lord Burghley (also Queen Elizabeth's chief minister). All the clues about the fourth individual, Griffiths contends, point to him being our man Shakespeare. The further conjecture is that Burghley supported the careers of both the horticulturist and the playwright and that Shakespeare earned his place in the book alongside the author, the author's inspiration and the author's patron as the author's literary advisor, possibly helping him with the Latin and Greek translations in the text. Griffiths enlisted no lesser authority than Edmund Wilson, emeritus fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, to disprove his analysis. Wilson admits to having failed in that mission. "This is the most important contribution to be made to our knowledge of Shakespeare in generations."

Finally, to today's poem, just completed in time for the blog. It is an attempt to address a near-contemporary historical issue (the Tottenham Riots of a few years ago) within the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet (three quatrains and a rhyming couplet all in iambic pentameter). See what you think...

Tottenham Riot Sonnet
I saw insanity the other night
writ cross the faces of a seething mob.
Untrammeled by concerns of wrong or right
they surged with fixed intent to loot and rob.
Hot air swirled thick with smoke, with sirens' wail,
anger unmasked laid waste to city streets.
Attempts to stem the tide looked doomed to fail,
the force of law uncertain in retreat.
We watched these scenes unfold on tv screens
in sunset bars beside a tranquil bay,
safe haven this, for those who have the means,
north London's meltdown half a world away.
  I let my mind untravel to revise
  that day we chose another path more wise.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week, S ;-)

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A Sonnet for England

This week on the Dead Good Blog we've been looking at the theme of Shakespeare- the man that coined a thousand phrases and has been hated by struggling schoolchildren countrywide ever since. It has been no coincidence- having been his official birthday last Monday and we've had a host of different angles on his legacy all week. 
Today, I want you to cast your mind back to the start of the week. It was a Monday, you probably went to work. Did you notice anything different? Any mention of it being Shakepeare's birthday? Any mention of St George's day? No, I didn't either. 

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Modern Language

Couple of weeks back at the last BDGPS meeting at the Cafe 5, I delivered a mini lecture about how to Shakespeare more interesting to the youth of today. I concluded the Iambic Pentameter was partially to blame. It makes the dialogue hard to master and turns the kids off, which is such a shame when the words themselves have so much meaning.

I also claimed that William was a 'punk', that he often did his own thing, wrote his own rules and famously, invented his own words. This last statement I used as evidence that it is academics who claim to be bastions of the English language that are stopping people from being interested in Shakespeare and that modern 'counter culture' which many refer to as 'chavs', 'goths' or 'emos' have more in common with the Bard than any of these professor types do.

The youth, with their slang terms and inarticulate grunts of communication are the ones tacking the language forward. By telling these social groups that they do not 'speak proper' Telling them to read Shakespeare so they can understand the English language is like telling them to stop listening to hip-hop and listen to Elvis Presley. Whatever your musical tastes, Elvis was at the start of the new movement that allowed Hip-Hip to be created, not a real reason for street beats not to exist.

William Shakespeare invented over 1700 new words in the English language. Some by changing the use from nouns into verbs and verb into adjectives. He put words together connecting them in ways never seen before. He added prefixes and suffixes, removed letters created completely new original words. And all because he wanted to make them fit, because he wanted to finish his work, because he, well, just wanted to.

So, our Will was a bit of rebel who just made things up to suit him and his art. Sounds like he should be a hero of the young and not as the graffiti once said about him, as a man who “wrote plays that were very boring”

Here are just a few of his creations:

academe, accused, addiction, advertising, amazement, arouse, assassination, backing, bandit, bedroom, beached, besmirch, birthplace, blanket, bloodstained, barefaced, blushing, bet, bump, buzzer, caked, cater, champion, circumstantial, cold, blooded, compromise, courtship, countless, critic, dauntless, dawn, deafening, discontent, dishearten, drugged, dwindle, epileptic, equivocal, elbow, excitement, exposure, eyeball, fashionable, fixture, flawed, frugal, generous, gloomy, gossip, green, eyed, gust, hint, hobnob, hurried, impede, impartial, invulnerable, jaded, label, lackluster, laughable, lonely, lower, luggage, lustrous, madcap, majestic, marketable, metamorphize, mimic, monumental, moonbeam, mountaineer, negotiate, noiseless, obscene, obsequiously, ode, olympian, outbreak, panders, pedant, premeditated, puking, radiance, rant, remorseless, savagery, scuffle, secure, skim milk, submerge, summit, swagger, torture, tranquil, undress, unreal, varied, vaulting, worthless, zany, gnarled, grovel

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