elong to other authors. [6] characteristic trait of Shakespeare s language are numerous compounds that he so readily used in his plays. They conform to poetic usage of the time and indicate specifically Shakespearian kind of English at the same time. The most commonly used types of compounds are:
) Noun + Present Participle + Noun kissing hill, swelling flower, cleaving thunderbolts, aspiring thoughts, haunting martlet, waning widow, tripping fairy,
) Noun/Adj. + Present Participle + Noun seeming substance, seeming lust,
3) Adv./Adj. + Present Participle + Noun
highest-peering hill, pacing clouds, hanging rock,
) Noun + Past Participle + Noun capped towers, sucked fogs, crossed lovers, tossed body,
) Adv./Adj. + Past Participle + Nounswoln face, grown field, fallen birthdom, would be interesting to analyze Shakespeare s works of different genres looking for the elements that influences further development of the English language. Let s start with the blank verse as an important example of his influence. He experimented with the blank verse, trying to perfect it. Its rhythm gave Shakespeare enough freedom for experimentation. An outstanding feature of Shakespeare's poetry is the adaptation of speech rhythm to the blank-verse framework. He expressed emotions in the form of a verse, making a phrase flexible and spontaneous.blank verse rhythm is conversational, but in everyday conversations people tend to break the rhythmic pattern and make certain words more prominent, bring them into focus. Shakespeare too deviates from the perfect blank-verse line. In his plays such deviation means a change in the feelings or thoughts of the character or in a situation. With the change of the rhythm, the energy of the language changes too. For example, feel the abrupt, ragged the rhythm of the lines of Macbeth:
In poetry Shakespeare introduced two main factors: verbal immediacy and stress of living emotion. [1] His words reflect passage of time, they give us an idea of ??the time frame. His capacity to convey emotions with simple words was remarkable:
When my love swears that she is made of truth, do believe her, though I know she lies-
(Sonnet CXXXVIII)
he expresses complex and contradictory feeling in simple short words. sonnets as a literary form are limited structurally. Strict rules of the sonnets together with the vividness of the language make Shakespeare s writing style so intense. Complex human emotions were expressed by simple means of Shakespeare's language. His most memorable lines were written in iambic pentameter. rhythm patterns and rhymes are used by Shakespeare to distinguish characters, for example the witches in Macbeth:
, double, toil and trouble burn and cauldron bubble,
rhythm is not the only way of distinction here. You see that this is not an iambic line. For the witches Shakespeare has created another musical rhythm, four feet long and with the stresses reversed from the iambic. is also used for songs and epilogues, that are rather separate elements of the plays. So, Prospero (The Tempest) says farewell to the audience in rhyme.source for the sound of Shakespeare s speech, apart from rhymes, is the use of British dialects. lived at the time of the transition from the Middle English to the Modern English. Linguists call this period the Great Vowel Shift. The length of the vowels was different from the one we are used to. The English of that time is also supposed to be rhotic. It means that the sound r was more prominent in phrases. These and some other features are obvious in Shakespeare s plays. For example:
)/r/pronounced post-vocalically
) /?/Was not lowered
) wh was pronounced [? ]
) mid-vowels were not diphthongised
)/a/after/w/was not retracted
)/a/before/f, s,?/Was short
) /? :, E:/was not raised to/i:/
) diphthongs/ai, au/were centralized
) short/u:/was not very commonsimple rhymes and wordplay Shakespeare uses various rhetorical devices. Some of them are rather common (metaphor, simile), others are exotic (polysyndeton). Below we make a list of rhetorical devices in Shakespeare s texts. They are:
1) alliteration
.... sessions of sweet silent thought .... (Sonnet XXX)
) anadiplosis
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, every tongue brings in a several tale, every tale condemns me for a villain. ...
