Five-Minute English Lesson: How to Understand Shakespeare

Courtesy of geograph.org.uk.

Literary critics and layman alternatives such as SparkNotes and CliffsNotes will—with varying degrees of accuracy and depth—summarize and analyze scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. Even when these sources get it completely right—and they don’t always—they don’t necessarily leave you with permanent skills so that you can decipher Shakespeare’s language on your own. Accounting for inversion (words and phrases in places you don’t expect them) is one of several strategies that can help you understand what the great Bard intends to convey.

In Macbeth, when King Duncan sees one of his wounded soldiers, he declares:

                                    He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state.

With phrases moved into positions we’re more accustomed to, the passage might read like this:

                        As seemeth by his plight,
He can report the newest state of the
Revolt. 

Or:

                                    He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, the newest state
Of the revolt. 

So why does Shakespeare place phrases in such odd positions? Partly for emphasis. Partly to maintain each line’s iambic-pentameter structure. If these lines were from one of his sonnets or from a rhymed section of Macbeth for that matter, rhyme (i.e., getting words into rhyming position at the ends of lines) would likely have been an additional factor.

Let’s examine a longer passage from the same play:

Brave Macbeth,—well he deserves that name,--
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave.

Moving phrases around in line four helps clarify matters:

Brave Macbeth,—well he deserves that name,--
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Carved out his passage like valour’s minion
Till he faced the slave.           

Even with the change in line four, this sentence remains complex given that the subject, Macbeth, is still separated from its verb, carved, by two and a half lines, a reality that certainly challenges comprehension. Be that as it may, the change in line four has at least peeled away one layer of reading-comprehension challenge.

Anticipating Shakespeare’s profuse use of figurative language and translating such passages into something more prosaic can also aid understanding, but that is a subject for the next blog post.

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