By the way... Shakespeare wasn't a genius
Shakespeare was no genius. I rather like writing that. I imagine an angry reader reddening to scarlet, and steam escaping from their ears. But it’s true. He wasn’t. Greatest writer who ever lived, of course. But no genius.
If you want to know how much of a natural/inspired-by-God/born-with-this-great-talent writer Shakespeare was, you should sit down and read one of the early plays: Henry VI Part 1, maybe. Try and make it to the end of Act I, and then, if you still believe that Shakespeare was born with ability, you may write me a stiff letter. Do you remember the famous line from Henry VI Part 1? No? That’s because there isn’t one.
It’s rather hard to date the early plays, but there are certainly no famous lines in Titus Andronicus or Love’s Labours Lost or Comedy Of Errors. The first line Shakespeare wrote that anybody normally remembers was in Henry VI Part 2: ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ And there is a good reason that is famous. If it had been ‘First, let’s kill all the lawyers’ it wouldn’t have been half as memorable. Or ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers first.’ It would be as bad as taking the great line ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ and changing it to ‘The days of wine and roses are not long.’ You lose something. You lose a figure of rhetoric, called prolepsis.
The figures of rhetoric are the funny ways of arranging a sentence that make it beautiful, memorable, quotable after four centuries. They are simple formulas. Prolepsis is when you have a mysterious pronoun loitering at the beginning of the sentence – thing, they, him – and explain it later.
It’s a beautiful thing, prolepsis. ‘About suff ering they were never wrong,’ wrote Auden, before adding ‘the old masters’. ‘Nobody heard him’, wrote Stevie Smith, ‘the dead man’. And Philip Larkin used prolepsis to describe your mum and dad in a way quite unfit for the pages of The Lady.
He wasn’t a genius, Shakespeare. He was a man who learned a technique, picked up a trick, and used it again and again and again. ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ he wrote. People remembered that line. It might even have got a round of applause. History does not relate or record. But Shakespeare knew he was on to something. So a year or so later he wrote ‘Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ Then he had Hamlet say ‘Villain! Villain! Smiling, damned villain!’
And then everybody else copied him: from Tennyson with ‘Dead, dead, long dead’ to Flanders and Swann with ‘Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!’ Sometimes a formula just works. There’s something so satisfying about This! This! That, This! And it couldn’t work any other way. Try singing ‘Mud! Glorious mud! Mud!’ Some formulas work, and Shakespeare knew that. He had, after all, learnt them all at school.
Elizabethan education was a strange thing. Many of the subjects we learn now just didn’t exist. There were no essays on the causes of the French Revolution. No chemistry classrooms with the periodic table on the wall. Really, there was just a lot of Latin. A bit of Greek here and there, but mainly Latin, Latin, and yet more Latin. You did history, but it was Livy. You did a bit of maths, but it was from Euclid (usually in Latin). But the bulk of Elizabethan education was about how to write well (in Latin), and to do that you had to learn rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the whole art of persuasion. All of it. Every technique you can use to make somebody agree with you, right up to the great argumentum ad baculum or argument by the club, which means hitting somebody with a big stick until they agree. But a vital part of rhetoric, and the most popular part in Elizabethan times, were the fi gures, or flowers, of rhetoric.
The little changes in word order and what have you that make a sentence trip off the tongue, or make you stop and think. These don’t alter the sense at all, they’re just about beautiful wording. Erasmus wrote a textbook in which he listed 150 ways to say ‘Thanks for your letter’; and, silly as that sounds, it works. There’s a reason that Elizabethan London produced so many great poets. They had all learnt to phrase everything beautifully. Not only had they had it whipped into them at school, rhetorical instruction manuals were to them what cookbooks are to us.
Shakespeare knew his horses and Romeos were diacope. Shakespeare knew that ending each sentence with the same word was epistrophe. Shakespeare knew that starting each sentence with the same words was anaphora. He delighted in even the most obscure little rearrangement. There’s a very odd little figure called hendiadys, where you take an adjective noun and change it to noun noun. So ‘I walked through the rainy morning’ becomes ‘I walked through the rain and the morning.’ Do you see? Have you ever wondered why it’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? It’s because the arrows were slung. That’s hendiadys, and that’s why a tale full of furious sound becomes full of sound and fury. It signifies nothing; but it reads so much better.
And then, slowly, very slowly, people stopped learning about the flowers of rhetoric. The Puritans didn’t like them, because the Puritans distrusted anything beautiful. Then the Romantics took against them because the Romantics distrusted anything artificial. And now, now we live in an age when the flowers of rhetoric, Shakespeare’s garden, are gone and forgotten.
They still grow wild. Listen to Yesterday by The Beatles and you’ll hear that each verse begins and ends with the same word. That’s epanalepsis. And in Here, There And Everywhere, the last word of each sentence is repeated as the fi rst word of the next. That’s anadiplosis. JFK spoke in chiasmus, and Casablanca is overgrown with tricolons. But it is time that we knew what we were doing again. We must replant our garden.
The Elements Of Eloquence: How To Turn The Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth, is published by Icon Books, priced £12.99.
If you want to know how much of a natural/inspired-by-God/born-with-this-great-talent writer Shakespeare was, you should sit down and read one of the early plays: Henry VI Part 1, maybe. Try and make it to the end of Act I, and then, if you still believe that Shakespeare was born with ability, you may write me a stiff letter. Do you remember the famous line from Henry VI Part 1? No? That’s because there isn’t one.
It’s rather hard to date the early plays, but there are certainly no famous lines in Titus Andronicus or Love’s Labours Lost or Comedy Of Errors. The first line Shakespeare wrote that anybody normally remembers was in Henry VI Part 2: ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ And there is a good reason that is famous. If it had been ‘First, let’s kill all the lawyers’ it wouldn’t have been half as memorable. Or ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers first.’ It would be as bad as taking the great line ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’ and changing it to ‘The days of wine and roses are not long.’ You lose something. You lose a figure of rhetoric, called prolepsis.
The figures of rhetoric are the funny ways of arranging a sentence that make it beautiful, memorable, quotable after four centuries. They are simple formulas. Prolepsis is when you have a mysterious pronoun loitering at the beginning of the sentence – thing, they, him – and explain it later.
It’s a beautiful thing, prolepsis. ‘About suff ering they were never wrong,’ wrote Auden, before adding ‘the old masters’. ‘Nobody heard him’, wrote Stevie Smith, ‘the dead man’. And Philip Larkin used prolepsis to describe your mum and dad in a way quite unfit for the pages of The Lady.
He wasn’t a genius, Shakespeare. He was a man who learned a technique, picked up a trick, and used it again and again and again. ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ he wrote. People remembered that line. It might even have got a round of applause. History does not relate or record. But Shakespeare knew he was on to something. So a year or so later he wrote ‘Romeo! Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ Then he had Hamlet say ‘Villain! Villain! Smiling, damned villain!’
And then everybody else copied him: from Tennyson with ‘Dead, dead, long dead’ to Flanders and Swann with ‘Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!’ Sometimes a formula just works. There’s something so satisfying about This! This! That, This! And it couldn’t work any other way. Try singing ‘Mud! Glorious mud! Mud!’ Some formulas work, and Shakespeare knew that. He had, after all, learnt them all at school.
Elizabethan education was a strange thing. Many of the subjects we learn now just didn’t exist. There were no essays on the causes of the French Revolution. No chemistry classrooms with the periodic table on the wall. Really, there was just a lot of Latin. A bit of Greek here and there, but mainly Latin, Latin, and yet more Latin. You did history, but it was Livy. You did a bit of maths, but it was from Euclid (usually in Latin). But the bulk of Elizabethan education was about how to write well (in Latin), and to do that you had to learn rhetoric.
Rhetoric is the whole art of persuasion. All of it. Every technique you can use to make somebody agree with you, right up to the great argumentum ad baculum or argument by the club, which means hitting somebody with a big stick until they agree. But a vital part of rhetoric, and the most popular part in Elizabethan times, were the fi gures, or flowers, of rhetoric.
The little changes in word order and what have you that make a sentence trip off the tongue, or make you stop and think. These don’t alter the sense at all, they’re just about beautiful wording. Erasmus wrote a textbook in which he listed 150 ways to say ‘Thanks for your letter’; and, silly as that sounds, it works. There’s a reason that Elizabethan London produced so many great poets. They had all learnt to phrase everything beautifully. Not only had they had it whipped into them at school, rhetorical instruction manuals were to them what cookbooks are to us.
Shakespeare knew his horses and Romeos were diacope. Shakespeare knew that ending each sentence with the same word was epistrophe. Shakespeare knew that starting each sentence with the same words was anaphora. He delighted in even the most obscure little rearrangement. There’s a very odd little figure called hendiadys, where you take an adjective noun and change it to noun noun. So ‘I walked through the rainy morning’ becomes ‘I walked through the rain and the morning.’ Do you see? Have you ever wondered why it’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? It’s because the arrows were slung. That’s hendiadys, and that’s why a tale full of furious sound becomes full of sound and fury. It signifies nothing; but it reads so much better.
And then, slowly, very slowly, people stopped learning about the flowers of rhetoric. The Puritans didn’t like them, because the Puritans distrusted anything beautiful. Then the Romantics took against them because the Romantics distrusted anything artificial. And now, now we live in an age when the flowers of rhetoric, Shakespeare’s garden, are gone and forgotten.
They still grow wild. Listen to Yesterday by The Beatles and you’ll hear that each verse begins and ends with the same word. That’s epanalepsis. And in Here, There And Everywhere, the last word of each sentence is repeated as the fi rst word of the next. That’s anadiplosis. JFK spoke in chiasmus, and Casablanca is overgrown with tricolons. But it is time that we knew what we were doing again. We must replant our garden.
The Elements Of Eloquence: How To Turn The Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth, is published by Icon Books, priced £12.99.