Shakespeare’s Mature
Style: Language as Drama
© 2005
Is
Shakespeare’s dramatic language shutting down or revving up in his later
plays? The answer might seem to depend
only on vague general impressions, and to vary according to which critic’s
impressions one encounters. In The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays,
Ifor Evans writes of the late romances that “the language has on the whole a
quietness, a thinness, an absence of overtones or subtle associations”
(201). In contrast, Vivian Salmon
extols the “dramatic energy and economy of expression which characterize
Shakespeare’s mature style” (204). Has
Shakespeare’s language become colourless and flaccid or vivid and
“dramatic”? Sometimes one finds, paradoxically,
both views expressed by the same scholar.
Winifred Nowottny deplores “the absence from Lear of . . . poetry that survives quotation out of context” and
asserts that the play’s “originality is not discernible from its vocabulary”
(49), yet she finds it “deeply concerned with the inadequacy of language to do
justice to feeling” (52). Is
Shakespeare’s language here unruffled
and conventional or involved and questioning?
A detailed focus on Shakespeare’s mature syntax and grammar in light of
his customary linguistic habits and those of his age yields a more objective
and less contradictory picture. This
article will first situate Shakespeare’s use of language in relation to the
options available to English writers during his lifetime, highlighting some
notable syntactical and grammatical features of his mature style. Following this broader discussion, the
article will centre on one linguistic aspect of Antony and Cleopatra, the conversion of nouns into verbs, as
representative of Shakespeare’s practice in his later plays. It will become evident that he derives
considerable expressive energy from grammatical innovation, and that in these
plays the field of language has itself become a stage for some of his most
dynamic dramatic effects. Such effects
are not isolated verbal fireworks, the “bold personification” associated with
“tumults and high passions” for which Evans looks nostalgically back to the
earlier plays (201). Rather, they
represent a dynamism both “more closely integrated into the fabric of the text”
(Wales 182) and more deeply rooted in Shakespeare’s unique realization of the creative potential of his
language. Shakespeare’s linguistic
power does not wane in the later plays.
It goes underground, working itself through the structure of the
language to energize the creative capacity of that structure as never before.
Elizabethan English
and Shakespeare’s Options
During
Shakespeare’s lifetime, the English language experiences a significant growth
spurt in both the number of words and the variety of syntactical structures in
which words can be employed. While
writers are bringing numerous words from Latin into English, they are also
experimenting with syntax to achieve the accuracy and the expressive range of
lost inflections. This freedom of experimentation is unhampered by established
systems of rules and usage that might confine the range of meaning of
individual words or that might restrict the ways in which words are combined
and ordered.
Shakespeare
thus writes not only in a linguistically rich field, but also in an age where
there is little grammatical strictness.
Like dictionaries, grammar books were written for (and associated with)
foreign languages rather than English (de Grazia 51). The lack of standardization in English contributes both to the
lexical enrichment of Shakespeare’s language and to his flexibility with syntax
and grammar. Not only does Shakespeare
employ a working
vocabulary of some 25,000 words – far more than
any other writer of English, and amply justifying Nevalainen’s characterization
of him as “an unusually prolific inventor of new words” (“New Words” 237). He also takes full advantage of the absence
of rules governing the placement and function of those words, using this
syntactical and grammatical freedom to dramatic advantage.
As
in an inflected language such as Latin or Greek, words of different grammatical
function need not always be arranged in a prescribed sequence of
subject-verb-object. Instead, the
writer can order them so as to give primacy of place and therefore stronger
emphasis to certain words. Writers can
also orchestrate their readers’ progress through each sentence more
dramatically, saving particularly dynamic effects for a sentence’s climax. De Grazia cites several potent examples of
such creative arrangement from Shakespeare’s mature tragedies (57). With King
Lear, Shakespeare places the verb before the subject in Edgar’s “Met I my
father” (5.3.188) and the object before the verb in Gloucester’s earlier “I
such a fellow saw” (4.1.33). Both kinds
of inversion come together in de Grazia’s example from Othello, in the hero’s passionate recollection: “That handkerchief
/ Did an Egyptian to my mother give” (3.4.53-4). This kind of non-standard placing can be used quite effectively
to accentuate certain parts of the statements: in the first example, met is given emphasis through its
initial placement; in the second example the power of the verb is again
heightened, this time by its climactic position at the end of the blank verse
line. The example brilliantly shows how
grammar can underline thematic significance, as it allows Shakespeare to put
both the handkerchief and its matrilineal origins into prominance. One might also cite Shakespeare’s use of
grammatical placement in conjunction with alliteration to convey the
spluttering outrage of Leontes’ grievance about his imagined cuckoldry, “Physic
for’t there’s none” (The Winter’s Tale
1.2.200), or the inversion that rings down an imperative curtain on that hero’s disastrous series of
false inferences: “Be it concluded” (1.2.203).
This
creative restructuring was not simply a characteristic of the age which
Shakespeare picked up along with everyone else: he worked unusually hard at it,
earning Jonathan Hope’s description of him as a “deriver” rather than a
“coiner” of words (“Natiue English” 250).
And as J. H. P. Pafford observes, the language of the later plays
becomes even more “dramatic” because
Shakespeare’s experiments give his language an unusual “abundance and rapidity”
(lxxxv). Part of this effect stems from
syntactical innovations whereby subject-object-verb inversions and asyndeton
both increase progressively throughout these plays; as John Porter Houston sums
up, “His syntactical imagination pushed further toward the limits of English
idioms” (213; also 198, 210-11). Yet,
Shakespeare’s experimentation involves his changing not just the position but
also the function of parts of speech. Marvin
Spevack elucidates the primary grammatical means by which he achieved the
latter effect, concluding after thirty years of exhaustive study that
Shakespeare “favored the most productive forms [of grammatical conversion] in
English – that is, verb-to-noun and noun-to-verb conversion – and . . . most
preferred noun-to-verb conversions” (358).
So, for instance, Shakespeare gains graphic immediacy by turning “lip”
into a verb at 4.1.71 of Othello and
“virgin” at 5.3.48 of Coriolanus,
“sty” into a verb at 1.2.345 of The
Tempest and “fang” at 4.3.23 of Timon.
Although
no statistical evidence seems available, Salmon (205), Wales (182) and Quirk
(79) affirm the accepted view that noun-to-verb conversions increase and become
more thematically potent in Shakespeare’s later plays. This increasingly dynamic approach to
grammar corresponds significantly with (and becomes more persuasive in light
of) the evolution of his use of Ovid.
Adamson identifies that Latin writer’s counterpointing of physical and
linguistic transformations as largely responsible for his unrivalled popularity
among Renaissance writers on language and rhetoric (550); and Shakespeare’s
employment of Ovidian references and motifs entails an increasingly vital
incorporation of such transformation.
As Bate puts it, “a prominently flaunted mode of composition” in early
works “became a more inwoven practice in the later ones” (173). Like Shakespeare’s language, his Ovidian
transformations move from the early plays’ set pieces, to means of expressing
“internal metamorphoses” in the mature tragedies (Bate 181), to miraculous
transfigurations of the entire field of action in the late romances. The “shifting world” (Bate 246) of a play
like The Tempest finds appropriate
expression in a grammar that turns erstwhile solid nouns into the quicksilver
of verbs. Thus, the dramatic effects of
verb-formation, which Nevalainen finds the most common kind of conversion in
Early Modern English (“Lexis” 355), but which Quirk also finds particularly
characteristic of Shakespeare’s usage (79), make Antony and Cleopatra a paradigm of his mature practice.
Antony and Cleopatra: Grammar into Dramatic Energy
Kathleen Wales remarks that in Shakespeare’s
noun-to-verb conversions “what are thought of as stable objects . . . are
wrenched from their passivity to acquire new vigour as actions,” observing
further that “metaphor harmonizes well with the flexibility of conversion”
(181-2). This union of metaphor and
grammatical conversion is evident throughout Antony and Cleopatra, where shifts from noun to verb simultaneously
affirm the fertility of metaphor and displace action from the material to the
more fluid metaphorical realm. Whether
the characters be Roman or Egyptian, their language persistently coins new
words by incubating the solidity of nouns and adjectives into the dynamic
liquidity of verbs. Thus, “joint”
becomes a verb at 1.2.91, “safe” at 1.3.55, “dumb” at 1.5.50, “spaniel” at 4.7.21, and “boy” at 5.2.220,
while “candy” melts itself into “discandy” at 3.13.166 and 4.12.22. These conversions garner tremendous dramatic
advantages. For instance, Terttu
Nevalainen notes (“New Words” 242) that by turning dumb from an adjective into a verb, instead of using the
already-available verb “silence,” Shakespeare gains both the solidity of an
Anglo-Saxon root word (instead of the more abstract, Latinate “silence”) and an
association with the inarticulacy of beasts – beasts were and are commonly
described as “dumb” rather than “mute.”
Such advantages supplement what is always present in Shakespeare’s functional
conversion of nouns and adjectives into verbs, the “dramatic energy and economy
of expression” that Vivian Salmon praises (204).
Enobarbus’
famous description of Cleopatra’s barge (2.2) is a remarkable place to observe
the combined powers of metaphor and conversion. Throughout his speech, Enobarbus sets up the metaphorical as the
real and establishes its priority over the literal. When Enobarbus tells Agrippa and Maecenas how “the barge she sat
in . . . burned on the water” (198-9), the active verb “burned” allows the
metaphorical description to become extraordinarily vibrant, leaping outside of
the limiting simile that makes the barge simply “like a burnished throne”
(198). This metaphorical reality
continues to dominate: the sails move beyond possessing the power of matter, as
they are “so perfumed that / The winds were lovesick with them” (200-1); the
oars animate the metaphorical quality of the water, so that it “follow[s]
faster . . . amorous of their strokes” (203-4). Even the wind in the “divers-coloured fans” seemed “to glow the
delicate checks which they did cool, / And what they undid did” (210-212). This final metaphorical flourish is central
to the experience of Antony and Cleopatra. The immediate function of the fans is to
cool, and yet the metaphorical power of Cleopatra’s transformative love has
overridden that function and the fans inflame their carriers with passion. So, in the same passage, Shakespeare’s
grammatical art transforms Cleopatra into one who “beggar’d” (191) all description,a
noun-to-verb conversion which O.E.D.
cites Shakespeare as the first writer to use metaphorically. Cleopatra’s person then leaps into the
present by participially “o’erpicturing” Venus (193). Nevalainen suggests that the latter verb “may be taken to mean
either ‘surpassing the picture of Venus’ or ‘representing the picture of Venus
in excess of reality’” (“New Words” 245), but the conversion unfolds at least
one further interpretation: ‘painting over the picture of Venus.’ Thus, metaphor and grammar unite in Antony and Cleopatra to convey a power
that transcends both the literal and the artistic bounds of a fixed reality.
Conclusion
Language,
often in Shakespeare the recourse of women while action is the province of men
(Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew provide examples), becomes a source of
action in his mature plays as it generates verbs and verb forms. This is an economical drama, less flashy but
more potent than the decorative set pieces of the early Shakespeare, and its
usage coincides with and reinforces an approach to language arts which “relies
less on extended patterns of formal rhetoric and more on figures which condense
experience” (Ewbank 60). Thus, in these
plays, Shakespeare puts his linguistic capacities most efficiently and
energetically in the service of his mature dramatic genius.
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