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Copyright © Stuart Griffiths 2000.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright owner and the publisher.

The right of Stuart Griffiths to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2000. Pontcanna Press UK.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-9533476-0-5

www.pontcanna.com
www.pontcanna.co.uk

My intention is that anyone  who reads carefully through the book will be able to understand better the language of any Shakespeare play.     By Shakespeare's language I mean the way he framed and built his sentences. Individual words of any play will still need to be looked up in a glossary, the number depending on the reader.     Committing to memory one or two of the quotations in each section should also help to achieve the desired result.      I have concentrated on the main sentence forms which emerge again and again when we read or listen to a Shakespeare play.     There are of course other forms, lesser forms, and those frequent occasions when Shakespeare deliberately broke the rules for his own literary and dramatic purposes. These I have not dealt with.     A knowledge of the main lines, without the branch lines, should be sufficient. *   *   *     I begin with an account of the reasoning and the research behind the book.     There will be much talk of Grammar and Latin. These can present difficulties to the reader, but I have tried to minimise them.     There are only about half a dozen Latin words in the account; these have their English translations alongside.     The simplest way to think of Grammar is that it is the study of how a sentence is formed, the way it is put together, the way it is built.

How to use this book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

THE BACKGROUND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
An explanation of the thinking behind the book, the research
involved, and the book's purpose.

THE QUOTATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Representative quotations from Shakespeare, and his sources.
These are the  main sentence  forms which emerge  constantly
when we see or read one of his plays.

The Infinitive: TO
     a) The Infinitive of Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
     b) The Infinitive used as a Noun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
     c) The Infinitive: other forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44


The Conditional Sentence:
     IF with a Command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47

The Command form LET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

The Mood of Wishing:
     WOULD meaning WISH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

The Conditional Sentence:
     IF with WOULD or SHOULD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58

The Conditional Sentence:
     IF with COULD or MAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62

The Conditional Sentence:
     IF with WILL or SHALL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64

Sentences expressing a Result: SO . . . THAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67

Sentences expressing Purpose: THAT . . . MAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73

Sentences expressing Preference and Comparison: THAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79

The Present Participle: –ING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84
Also: the adjective form; the self-contained phrase;
the verbal noun.

The Past Participle: –D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97

The Impersonal Verb: IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Manner: AS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104

WHAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

THAT WHICH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110

THE ORDER OF WORDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113
Verb emphasis; noun emphasis; prepositions; adjectives;
balance, symmetry, antithesis; long sentences.

THE STORY CONTINUED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Representative quotations from other great writers:
Marlowe,  Ben Jonson,  Bacon,  Milton,  Bunyan, Dryden,
Pope, Swift, Dr Johnson, Gibbon, Macaulay, Wordsworth.
Also examples from great oratory.

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

      Children and adults often have difficulty in understanding Shakespeare's language. This is not primarily due to the intermittent archaic words, or to words which have changed their meaning. It is due mainly to Shakespeare's grammar.
      In fact, Shakespeare's grammar, viewed in its entirety, is wonderfully precise. It has however a strong Latin base, and  this can deter people.
      The sixteenth century Elizabethan Grammar School lived up to its name. It gave its pupils a rigorous training in Latin grammar. It consolidated this with a comprehensive study of Roman rhetoric, poetry, drama, moral philosophy, and history.
      The work was suitably intensive for a time when Latin was the second language of all educated people. From the age of six to fourteen, or older, pupils studied Latin for ten hours a day, six days a week, most weeks of the year.
      The most important book in this whole course of study was the Latin Grammar of Erasmus, Lily and Colet. It may not, like Ovid, have inspired Shakespeare's great poetry, or, like Cicero, his blazing rhetoric. It did provide the framework and the building bricks of his sentences. It is therefore a work of the highest significance.

The Latin Grammar of Erasmus, Lily and Colet
      In the early part of the sixteenth century in England, a widespread need existed for a co-ordinated and unified Latin Grammar for use in all schools. This need was answered by the great European humanist and scholar Erasmus, and two distinguished English schoolmasters, Lily and Colet. Their work was finally completed by 1540. Although it had no author on the title page, it came to be known as Lily's Latin Grammar.
      It lasted for three centuries, and it gave the elements of Latin Grammar to every English schoolboy from Shakespeare to Gladstone.
      It was exported overseas, to Europe and America. It very likely formed part of the school education of the American founding fathers.
      Lily's Latin Grammar did not change much during its 300 years of continuous use. The major change was that the second part, in which the instructions were in Latin, was translated into English in the eighteenth century. The first part was always in English.

Cicero: "The orator will say something, but desire to have      it understood in the opposite sense." Antony: "For Brutus is an honourable man;      So are they all, all honourable men . . ."

Sentences beginning with IF
      The pages of Cicero's rhetorical manuals are peppered with Conditional sentences. The IF sentence was an essential technique in the armoury of Roman advocates and politicians.
      Much of the Conditional sentence technique discussed by Cicero was in fact used by the Greeks before him, and he states this. Nonetheless it was Cicero's account and interpretation of the older technique that was studied in Latin in Elizabethan grammar schools.
      The technique has continued down to modern times. One of the most effective uses of it occurred during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the great Labour orator Aneurin Bevan addressed a mass rally in Trafalgar Square. He attacked the Prime Minister, Eden, for his specious justification for the Anglo-French invasion of Suez:

      From Socrates to Cicero, from Shakespeare to Kipling, from Pitt to Gladstone to Bevan . . .
      As Touchstone says in his satire on the technique in As You Like It: "Much virtue in IF".

Ovid's Metamorphoses and Golding's translation

The importance of Grammar
      Until recent times, the importance of Grammar was not in question. For many centuries before Lily's Latin Grammar was compiled, and long afterwards, Grammar was regarded as the foundation of knowledge. Without it, nothing else was possible.

      It goes on to stress the importance of learning Latin Grammar at an early age. This certainly meant before the age of ten. Latin Grammar was drilled into Elizabethan schoolboys like the multiplication tables of later centuries. It was not forgotten. It was etched indelibly on the mind.
      It thus provided the framework and the building bricks of Shakespeare's sentences. Poetic and dramatic genius supplied the rest, but his precise grammar is always visible and audible. For him, as with other great English writers to follow, Lily's Latin Grammar furnished the germ of a great eloquence.

A relevant tradition

      We are talking here about how he built his sentences; and there is no doubt that his thought, feeling and poetry blend easily with his grammar in a happy, unjarring fluency and harmony.
      Many of his finest lines are, in fact, the direct result of his grammatical precision. Examples can be seen in the Shakespeare quotations of this book or on any page of his work, but here is another:

"She should have died hereafter.  There would have been a time for such a word."

Macbeth.

      The accuracy of the tenses and the use of the word "hereafter" come straight from the Short Introduction (Part I of Lily's Latin Grammar). Yet these are resonant, compelling lines, which lead into one of Shakespeare's greatest speeches: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow."
      It may also be worth noting, in view of the way the speech continues, that the phrase "the last syllable" appears early in the Short Introduction, and is also prominent in the section on Prosody.
      The greater the play, in fact, the more impressive its grammar. The grammar of King Lear is like the play itself – ironclad. It evokes indestructible images: gnarled oak, rock, bronze.
      None of this can be described as a man showing off his grammatical expertise. It is more that of a man who has grammatical accuracy ingrained in his thinking, and permanently at his finger-tips. Shakespeare's grammar can be likened to a superbly tooled piece of precision engineering.

The Infinitive expressing Purpose
    i.e. an aim, intention or objective.

The Infinitive expressing Purpose
Shakespeare's sources: examples

Note: Lily's Latin Grammar was the standard textbook of Latin Grammar used in English schools for three hundred years: 1550 to 1850. There are many references, direct and indirect, to Lily's Latin Grammar in Shakespeare's plays. (Some information in The Background will be repeated in this section.)

The Infinitive used as a Noun
    It is often the subject of IS. It often includes other words.

The Infinitive used as a Noun
Shakespeare's sources: examples

Note: Virgil, Rome's greatest poet, was studied in Elizabethan grammar schools.

IF with a Command
Shakespeare's sources: examples

The sentence expresses a Result or Consequence.

Note also the use of SUCH:

SO . . . THAT: Sentences expressing a RESULT
Shakespeare's sources: examples

Preference and Comparison: THAN
Shakespeare's sources: examples

The expected order of words in a sentence is often rearranged by Shakespeare.


Verb emphasis

Verbs are often placed for emphasis at the beginning or end of the sentence or phrase.

Balance and Symmetry

    Balance and symmetry are  important. The first half of a Shakespeare
sentence  is  often  nicely  balanced  by  the  second  half  (see  previous
quotations). The method can include parallel patterns of words, contrast,
antithesis.

Note how the words in one line are paralleled exactly by those in the line below it.

Long Sentences

A) Where the main statement is held back until the end.

Long Sentences

B) Where the main statement comes at the beginning.

    'Macbeth does murder sleep' is the main statement. The rest of the sentence flows from it.