Shakespeare
Shakespeare
Introduction
Shakespeare is a compulsory component of most A-Level English Literature specifications. His plays are studied not merely as literary texts but as works that have shaped the English language, theatrical tradition, and cultural imagination. At A-Level, you are expected to engage with Shakespeare’s language in detail, situate his plays within their historical and theatrical contexts, and explore a range of critical interpretations.
This section covers Shakespeare’s language, major themes, historical and theatrical context, and approaches to critical interpretation.
Key Concepts
Shakespeare’s Language
Shakespeare’s language is the primary object of analysis. Understanding how he uses words, imagery, rhythm, and rhetorical devices is essential to any A-Level response.
Iambic Pentameter
The dominant meter of Shakespeare’s plays. Each line has five iambs (unstressed-stressed pairs), creating a rhythm close to natural English speech:
“If mus-ic be the food of love, play on”
Deviations are analytically significant:
- Trochaic inversions (stressed-unstressed) at the start of a line draw attention: “Now is the win-ter of our dis-con-tent”
- Short lines (fewer than ten syllables) create pauses, emphasising a word or creating tension
- Shared lines (where one character’s speech completes another’s metre) show intimacy or conflict
- Prose passages (no meter) signal a shift in register — often used for comedy, madness, or lower-class characters
Imagery and Figurative Language
Shakespeare’s imagery operates through networks of related images (image clusters) that develop across entire plays:
| Play | Dominant Imagery | Thematic Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Macbeth | Blood, darkness, clothing, disease | Guilt, moral disorder, unsuitability for power |
| Othello | Animals, poison, sight and blindness | Racism, corruption, deception |
| Hamlet | Disease, corruption, acting, death | Moral decay, appearance vs reality, mortality |
| King Lear | Animals, nature, sight and blindness | Bestiality of humanity, natural order, understanding |
| The Tempest | Water, magic, clothing, sleep | Transformation, illusion, civilisation |
Rhetorical Devices
Shakespeare was trained in classical rhetoric. Key devices to recognise:
| Device | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Antithesis | Contrasting ideas in balanced phrases | ”To be or not to be” |
| Anaphora | Repetition of words at the start of clauses | ”Now is the winter of our discontent… Now are our brows bound…” |
| Chiasmus | Reversed structure in successive clauses | ”Fair is foul, and foul is fair” |
| Hyperbole | Deliberate exaggeration | ”I’ll love thee till the ocean is frozen” |
| Litotes | Understatement through negation | ”I am not bound to please thee with my answer” |
| Oxymoron | Combining contradictory terms | ”Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical” |
| Personification | Giving human qualities to non-human things | ”The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail” |
| Soliloquy | Speech alone on stage revealing inner thoughts | Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” |
| Tricolon | A group of three parallel phrases | ”Friends, Romans, countrymen” |
Major Themes Across Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays explore a set of interconnected themes that recur across comedies, tragedies, and histories.
Power and Authority
- The legitimacy of rulers and the consequences of usurpation (Macbeth, Richard II, King Lear)
- The tension between personal desire and political duty (Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V)
- The corruption that power breeds (Measure for Measure, Richard III)
Appearance vs Reality
- Disguise and deception (Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing)
- The gap between outward show and inner truth (Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth)
- Theatre itself as a metaphor for deception (“All the world’s a stage”)
Order and Chaos
- The natural order and its violation (Macbeth, King Lear)
- The Great Chain of Being: the hierarchical structure of the universe
- The restoration of order as the resolution of comedy and tragedy
Love and Desire
- Romantic love as transformative and destructive (Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra)
- Love complicated by class, family, and duty (The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night)
- The tension between idealised love and physical desire
Gender and Identity
- Women who disguise themselves as men (Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It)
- The constraints of gender roles in patriarchal society (The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing)
- Masculinity in crisis (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Hamlet)
Justice and Mercy
- The tension between revenge and forgiveness (The Tempest, Measure for Measure)
- The failure of legal systems (The Merchant of Venice, King Lear)
- Divine justice versus human justice
Historical Context
Elizabethan and Jacobean England
Shakespeare wrote during the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603-1625). Key contextual factors:
| Context | Relevance |
|---|---|
| The Divine Right of Kings | Kings were appointed by God; regicide was both a political and spiritual crime. Central to Macbeth and Richard II |
| The Great Chain of Being | A hierarchical view of the universe (God > angels > humans > animals > plants). Violating this order had cosmic consequences |
| The Protestant Reformation | The shift from Catholicism to Protestantism created religious anxiety. Ghosts, purgatory, and spiritual doubt feature prominently |
| The witchcraft persecutions | James I was obsessed with witchcraft. Macbeth’s witches reflect contemporary fear and fascination |
| The patriarchal household | Women were legally and socially subordinate. Shakespeare’s female characters must be understood within this framework |
| The Elizabethan world order | A belief in cosmic order: when the ruler is just, nature harmonises; when the ruler is corrupt, nature rebels |
| Tudor propaganda | The Tudor myth presented the Tudor dynasty as restoring order after the Wars of the Roses. The history plays reinforce this narrative |
The Elizabethan Theatre
| Feature | Significance |
|---|---|
| Open-air theatres (The Globe) | Natural lighting; performances in daylight; weather affected performance |
| Minimal set | Language and the audience’s imagination created the world of the play |
| Boy actors playing female roles | Adds layers of complexity to gender performance within the plays |
| Groundlings | Standing audience members in the yard; the plays had to engage all social classes |
| The trapdoor | Associated with hell and the supernatural |
| The gallery above the stage | Used for balcony scenes, upper-stage action, and divine perspectives |
Analytical Frameworks
Analysing a Shakespeare Speech
When faced with a soliloquy or key speech, work through these steps:
- Context — Where does this speech occur? What has just happened? What does the character want?
- Structure — How does the argument develop? Where does the speech turn?
- Meter — Is it regular iambic pentameter? Where does it deviate and why?
- Imagery — What images dominate? Do they connect to the play’s wider image clusters?
- Rhetoric — What persuasive devices does the character use? Are they convincing?
- Contradiction — Does the character contradict themselves? What does this reveal?
- Performance — How might an actor deliver this speech? What choices would they make?
Critical Interpretations
A-Level Shakespeare requires engagement with different critical readings. Major approaches include:
| Approach | Application | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Formalist | Close reading of language, imagery, and structure | Analysing the imagery patterns in Macbeth |
| Historical | The play in relation to its original context | Macbeth as a response to the Gunpowder Plot |
| Feminist | Gender roles, patriarchy, female agency | Desdemona’s voicelessness in Othello |
| Marxist | Class, power, social hierarchy | The gravedigger scene in Hamlet and class critique |
| Psychoanalytic | Unconscious desires, repression, trauma | Hamlet’s Oedipal complex |
| Postcolonial | Race, empire, the “Other” | Othello as a racialised outsider in Venetian society |
| Eco-critical | Nature, environment, the non-human world | The storm in King Lear and natural disorder |
| Performance criticism | How staging choices shape meaning | Different interpretations of Shylock across production history |
Key Terminology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Blank verse | Unrhymed iambic pentameter; the dominant verse form in Shakespeare |
| Comic relief | A humorous scene or speech that breaks the tension of a serious plot |
| Couplet | Two rhyming lines, often marking the end of a scene |
| Dramatic irony | When the audience knows more than the characters |
| Enjambment | A sentence that runs over from one line to the next without punctuation |
| Groundling | A member of the audience who stood in the yard of the Globe theatre |
| Hamartia | The tragic hero’s fatal flaw |
| Hubris | Excessive pride leading to downfall |
| Iambic pentameter | A line of five iambic feet, each foot an unstressed-stressed pair |
| Peripeteia | A reversal of fortune |
| Prose | Non-metrical language used for comic, lower-class, or intimate scenes |
| Protagonist | The central character of the play |
| Soliloquy | A speech delivered alone on stage, revealing a character’s inner thoughts |
| Sonnet | A 14-line poem in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme |
| Tragic hero | A protagonist of high status whose flaw causes their downfall |
| Tragicomedy | A play that blends tragic and comic elements |
| Volta | A turning point in a speech or argument |
Exam Technique
Approaching a Shakespeare Extract Question
- Read the extract twice — First for meaning, second for language and structure
- Locate it in the play — What has happened before? What follows? How does it fit the play’s arc?
- Identify 3-4 key moments — Select the most analytically rich lines for close reading
- Analyse the language — Focus on imagery, metaphor, and word choice
- Note the meter — Is it regular or deviant? What does the deviation suggest?
- Connect to the whole play — Link the extract to wider themes, character development, and context
Writing About Shakespeare
- Quote precisely — Short, embedded quotations are more effective than long extracts
- Name the device, then analyse the effect — “The metaphor of X suggests…”
- Discuss performance possibilities — “In performance, an actor might deliver this line as…”
- Engage with interpretations — “A feminist reading might argue that…” or “Critics have disagreed about whether…”
- Weave in context — Connect the text to its historical moment without reducing the play to mere propaganda
Common Pitfalls
Pitfall 1: Translating Shakespeare into Modern English
Problem: Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s language instead of analysing it.
Fix: Never “translate” a quotation. Instead, analyse the specific words Shakespeare chose and their connotations. The question is not “What does this mean?” but “Why did Shakespeare choose these words and what effect do they create?”
Pitfall 2: Character Psychology Without Textual Evidence
Problem: Speculating about characters’ thoughts and feelings without grounding analysis in the text.
Fix: Every claim about a character must be supported by textual evidence. Instead of “Hamlet is depressed,” write “Hamlet’s first soliloquy establishes his despair through the image of an ‘unweeded garden,’ suggesting moral and emotional decay.”
Pitfall 3: Treating Context as Separate from Analysis
Problem: Writing a paragraph of historical facts at the end of the essay without connecting them to the play.
Fix: Integrate context into each analytical paragraph. When discussing Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, immediately connect it to the Divine Right of Kings. When discussing Othello’s race, connect it to Jacobean attitudes to Moors and foreigners. Context should illuminate the text, not replace analysis of it.
Worked Examples
Example 1: Macbeth’s Soliloquy “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5)
Analysis:
This soliloquy, delivered after Lady Macbeth’s death, is one of the most famous passages in Shakespeare. It marks Macbeth’s complete descent into nihilism. The repetition of “tomorrow” at the opening creates a mechanical, numbing rhythm — three identical beats that suggest the endless, meaningless repetition of time. The iambic pentameter is regular and unrelenting, mirroring the inevitability of passing time that Macbeth describes.
The metaphor of life as a “walking shadow” reduces human existence to a theatrical illusion — a “poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” This is deeply ironic given Macbeth’s own performance of power throughout the play. The imagery of the candle (“Out, out, brief candle”) suggests both fragility and the possibility of deliberate extinguishment. Macbeth’s earlier invocation of darkness (“Stars, hide your fires”) is answered here by the recognition that the light of life is brief and readily snuffed out.
The final image — “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” — collapses the play’s own language into meaninglessness. Macbeth, who has been manipulated by the witches’ equivocation and his own rhetorical self-deception, arrives at the conclusion that language itself is empty. This is a moment of both recognition and despair: he sees the truth of his situation but has no capacity to change it.
Example 2: Othello’s Final Speech (Othello, Act 5 Scene 2)
Analysis:
Othello’s final speech is an exercise in self-dramatisation and narrative control. Even as he faces the consequences of murdering Desdemona, Othello constructs a version of events that preserves his dignity. He asks the assembled characters to “speak of me as I am” — yet what follows is a carefully crafted performance rather than a confession.
The speech contains an extended narrative about a time “in Aleppo once” where Othello “smote” a “turban’d Turk” who “beat a Venetian and traduced the state.” By casting himself as both the avenger and the punished “Turk,” Othello splits his identity in two: the noble servant of Venice and the “malignant and a turban’d Turk” who must be destroyed. The irony is that this story — which may be fabricated — allows Othello to kill himself as both executioner and victim, preserving the role of the tragic hero he has always performed.
A postcolonial reading might note that Othello’s final act of self-destruction is framed through an Orientalist narrative: he must kill the “Turk” within himself, the racialised Other that Venice has always feared. Even in death, Othello serves the state that ultimately destroyed him. The speech’s concluding couplet — where Lodovico orders Othello’s story to be told — raises the question of who controls narrative and whose version of events survives.
Summary
- Shakespeare’s language — meter, imagery, rhetoric — is the primary focus of A-Level analysis
- Iambic pentameter is the dominant rhythm; deviations are always analytically significant
- Track image clusters (blood in Macbeth, animals in Othello, disease in Hamlet) across entire plays
- Contextual knowledge (Divine Right of Kings, the Great Chain of Being, Elizabethan theatre) must be integrated into analysis
- Engage with multiple critical interpretations: feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, performance-based
- Never translate Shakespeare into modern English; analyse his specific word choices
- Practise close reading of key speeches, attending to meter, imagery, rhetoric, and performance potential