William Shakespeare's Style - Form

Form

In some of his early works, he added punctuation at the end of the lines to strengthen the rhythm wrote with his pen. He and other dramatists at the time used this form of blank verse for much of the dialogue between characters in order to elevate the poetry of drama. To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet, thus creating suspense. A typical example occurs in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,

His plays make effective use of the soliloquy, in which a character makes a solitary speech, giving the audience insight to the character's motivations and inner conflict. Among his most famous soliloquies are To be or not to be, All the world's a stage, and What a piece of work is a man . The character either speaks to the audience directly (in the case of choruses, or characters that become epilogues), or more commonly, speaks to himself or herself in the fictional realm. Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns." Indeed, in the nineteenth century, popular censored versions of the plays were produced as The Family Shakspeare by Henrietta Bowdler (writing anonymously) and later by her brother Thomas Bowdler. Comedy is not confined to Shakespeare's comedies, and is a core element of many of the tragedy and history plays. For example, comic scenes dominate over historical material in Henry IV, Part 1.