Section Four: Possible Student Projects

Ask students to assemble a chrestomathy. First you'll have to explain that the term is Greek for "useful learning"; it's an ANTHOLOGY of passages on a particular subject that seems central to the assigned plays. They might look for

A particular verbal image pattern that occurs in several plays: celestial bodies, light and dark, plants, animals, disease.
Presentational imagery, i.e., staged images like the use of properties like letters, swords, or rings, etc.
Classical allusions in several plays.
Personification (e.g., of Death as bridegroom in ROM).
Key terms: Friendship in TGV, Honor in the Henry plays, Love in TGV and TN, the Sea in TN and HAM.
Key events: betrothal, death, or battles.

I told students the following: When you have finished your compilation, you are to write a preface to your anthology (5-8 pp.) explaining what you found: is the treatment of the topic uniform throughout the plays you studied? Does one play have a markedly different treatment? Can you trace any development of an idea? A variety of treatments is possible; your job is NOT to discuss the topic according to any preconceptions, but rather to locate information and then use it to reach conclusions.

Here are some other topics that fit well into a more traditional essay rather than a chrestomathy:

Parallel imagery in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (several critics discuss parallel imagery in these plays; can a detailed analysis suggest which play was written first?)
The concept of honor in the Henriad (when is the word "honor" used in 1H4 and H5, how do those meanings vary, when is it not used).
The nature of the family in Hamlet (survey kinship terms in context and analyze what they suggest)
How letters are used in TGV (Jonathan Goldberg's Voice Terminal Echo has an interesting chapter on the love letters and the letter "I" and the lovers' eyes in this play).
The association between love and the sea in TN.
Kinship terms in context
Classical allusions (look up the Classical name and its variants; e.g. Hero and Leander--or Limander in MND).
Character movement: search for "exit" or "exeunt"
Pronouns: thou/thee and you often mark character relationships
Puns: e.g., in TGV, on/one, lubber/lover; in 1H4, raisin/reason; in Ado, nothing/noting
Similes: search for "like" and "as"
Some punctuation marks, like the question mark. (N.B., these must always be checked against early texts to guard against editorial taste.)
Dialectal variants (ich, oon)
Contractions
Use of negations (Shakespeare's highly characteristic use of "un" as a prefix, for instance.)
Phrases ("true love," for example)

(It can also be useful to seek absence; if some element isn't present when you think it should be, try to figure out why it's not there. )

If students would like more information on Shakespeare's use of language, the general introduction to the Riverside edition, pp. 8-14, offers a good discussion of Shakespeare's language use. More specialized studies include the following:

Blake, N.F. Sh's Language: An Introduction (1983).
Brook, G.L. The Language of Sh (1976).
Clemen, W.H. The Development of Sh's Imagery (1951).
Doran, M. Sh's Dramatic Language (1976).
Elam, K. Sh's Universe of Discourse: Language Games in the Comedies. 1984.
Hawkes, T. Sh's Talking Animals (1973).
Joseph, Sister Miriam Sh's Use of the Arts of Language (1947).
Mahood, M.M. Sh's Wordplay (1957).
Sonnino, L.A. A Handbook to 16th-Century Rhetoric (1968).
Spurgeon, C. Sh's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935).
Vickers, B. The Artistry of Sh's Prose (1968); Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1970).

ADVANCED TOPICS

1. What's in a name? What parallels are there between Romeo (Rom) and Julia (TGV) tearing up writing to get rid of a name? What other characters use a similar image? What of Iago's insistence that a good name is more valuable than gold? Search terms like nam*, letter*.

2. To what extent are Dogberry and Falstaff alike in what they say of "pitch"? Does any one else discuss pitch? Note what Iago says of Desdemona (3.1.356) The image of a beautiful exterior marred by pitch, mud, etc., that cannot be cleaned away without injuring the beautiful surface might be explored by checking terms like pitch, dirt, mud; a useful place to search could be the sonnets.

3. Check for words beginning in C to check if Sh uses a particularly large number (especially in history plays) as key terms. Some examples of such loaded terms: in Jn, "commodity" and in H5 consideration (vide Arden intro) or Ceremony (ceremony also impt. in Mac); other possible terms: chance 2H4; care R2. Is the "C" beginning just coincidence?

4. The variants circl*, circuit, ring*, whir*, round* combined with glor*--all refs. to crown. Is there a common idea behind this association? Why the attribute of "glory"?

5. Hal's change in character is compared to strawberry beneath the nettle (H5 1.1.60 ff.). Explore the connections among this figure, the serpent & strawberry emblem (in R3, Oth), and the rose and thorn figure. Possible that rose/canker figure fits in as well? And what of War of Roses?

6. Explore "element" and plays on it in TN; instances of 4 elements in canon: variants on earth, air, wind, fire.

7. In H5, the Frenchmen speak English and Frenchwomen speak French. Why this differentiation? What of refs. to gender in these plays? Lang. use in other plays where men and women struggle with foreign langs.? (Langs. in Wiv, for instance.)

8. Age of Sh's characters: are the twins in Err 23 yrs old (1.1.125-139)? 25 (5.1.321)? 33 (5.1.401)? Why the muddle? What other plays give the age of characters and why? When is age given and what function does age have?

9. Using Leinwand's PMLA article, look at the various constables (and officers). Note the Elbow in Ado uses varlet (s) inconsistently; once he knows what it means, once he doesn't. Any other inconsistent language use? What of other jobs, e.g., nurses, teachers, preachers, doctors, etc.

10. Bawdy language: check out words like prick that are often used punningly. Perhaps also check words like lap, placket for women, codpiece for men, and also words like geld, splay, eunuch. Cross check these in Onions and Partridge.

HOME