STYLE OF WRITING

My first writings were in the conventional style of the day. I wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally fromthe needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborated metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical-written for actors to declaim rather than speak. However, later on, I began to adapt the traditional styles for my own purposes. The opening soliloquy, which is a scene when the character is talking to himself, has its roots in the slef-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of the play. No single play marks a change from the traditional style to the freer style. I combined the traditional style and the freer style and one of the best examples of this mix is Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy about two lovers who were forced to keep their love affair a secret because Romeo's family, who was the Montegues, was opposed to Juliet's family, who were the Capulets. In the end however, they both die because of their love for each other. After their deaths, the Montegues and the Capulets are able to live with each other in peace. This is one of many tragedies that I have written. My standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. Thsi means that my verses were usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of my earlier pla ys is quite different from that of my later plays. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of the lines, with the risk of monotony. Once I was able to master the traditional blank verse, I began to interrupt and vary the flow of it. This technique relases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays like  Julius Caesar  and Hamlet . For example, I used this technique to convey the turmoil that went around in Hamlet's mind.

"Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay

Worse than that of mutines in the bilboes. I lay

And prais'd be rashness for it-let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well..." Hamlet Act 5, Scene 2, Lines 4-8



Petrarch

After Hamlet, I varied my poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. Much later throughout my life, I adopted many techniques to achieve run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. Like all other playwrights of the time, my dramatised stories came from sources such as Petrarch and Holinshed. I reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest because different people had different tastes, and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. As I got better at writing these plays, the characters of my plays had a clearer and more varied motivation and distinctive pattern of speech. I preserved aspects of my earlier style in my later plays, so that in my later romances, I deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.