Shakespearean Conventions

What they are and how they are usedAdapted from :

Charney, Maurice. How to Read Shakespeare. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Why they were needed

• Outdoors• Limited set• Audience meandering/attention span• Time limit (daylight due to no electricity)• Limitations in casting (all men)

Verbal setting and time

• To suggest night, torches or candles were brought on stage and an actor would say, “Now it is night” or something similar…

• For example, in Romeo and Juliet we find, “O blessed, blessed night! I am afearedBeing in night, all this is but a dream.”• With rapid scene changes…an actor would

state, “Now we’re in the forest” and the audience would know

Gender descriptions instead of Actions

• No women limited casting• Thus, descriptions of feminine charms allowed

an audience to accept that someone was a woman…also could allow for comedic effect

• Shakespeare often uses difference in size and height for comedic effect…a 6 foot tall Helena coupled with a 4’9” Hermia…and Helena calls Hermia a puppet …it is funny

Impenetrability of Disguise• Think…Harry Potter and the Invisibility Cloak• On the Elizabethan stage the acceptance of

disguise frees the playwright from having to make the disguise convincing….Because of the insistence on “the natural order” of the Great Chain of Being, seeing a “woman” pretending to be a man was funny and didn’t have to be accurate (since all “women” were really men anyway on the stage)

• A cloak, cape, or moustache or beard identified disguise and/or invisibility for the audience

Clothing as Social Position/Rank

• More layers, more jewelry, more color = wealth and nobility

• Neutral colors, single layers, browns = poor• Black clothing = evil• White/blue = virginal

Imagery• Mention of disease suggests evil, ugliness, and

discord• Animal imagery is used to great effect.

Elizabethans lived closely with nature and easily understood animal characteristics. Man was supposed to be godlike; any reference to a man as a pig, then, immediately identified that person as gross, smelly, nasty, ill-tempered and unclean

• Food also affected character: some foods engender choler (ill temper)

• Light and dark….obvious

Language Styles

• Use of poetry indicates good breeding; rough speech means low status…for this reason, the actors in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” are referred to as “rude mechanicals” and speak unmetered, unrhymed lines….lovers speak in iambic pentameter

Soliloquy and Aside

• An aside is usually a character connecting with audience…audience knows something others on stage don’t

• Soliloquy often depicts the actor alone on stage and can reveal the thoughts through spoken word…however, sometimes it links to action just prior or just after….for instance, in “To be or not to be” scholars debate whether Ophelia hears Hamlet before they speak…