Sonnets and Shakespearean Drama: Hamlet & Romeo and Juliet

The Sonnet

Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet: In the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet the number of lines is fourteen, the layout is two quatrains and two tercets. The rhyme scheme is ABBA ABBA, CDE CDE or CDC CDC. The turning point is at the end of the eighth line. The traditional theme is love and desire for a lady who cannot return the poet’s love; the lady is the embodiment of both physical and moral perfection.

Shakespearean (English) sonnet: In the Shakespearean or English sonnet the layout is three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Shakespeare introduces themes like beauty, decay and art.

The Development of Drama (pp. 100-101)

Before the building of the first permanent theaters, the performances took place in the nave of churches at first, but soon they moved outside.

Permanent theaters were circular or octagonal. Within the outer walls there were three tiers of roofed galleries looking down on the stage and the yard, or "pit", where the poorer spectators, or "groundlings", stood. The stage, or apron stage, was projected into the yard, so that when the theater was full, the players were surrounded on three sides.

The plays took place in daylight, usually starting at 2 p.m.

Boys acted female roles because women did not act in Shakespearean times.

The audience knew the place and the time in the play because they were usually mentioned in the dialogue.

Romeo and Juliet (R&J)

In this play, Romeo uses the image of light associated with love: he compares her to the brilliant light of the torches that illuminate the Capulet's great hall; this means that she frees him from his dark melancholy. The main themes are the power of love, passion and violence, individual against society, and the power of fate. The most important stylistic features are regular rhythms, common rhymes and sometimes the sonnet. Imagery is all about oxymora.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy because it begins with their happiness for being in love and it ends with their death.

Hamlet

Shakespeare chooses Denmark as a setting because the nation was Protestant like England, and also because it had common aspects with the plot, for example the possible war with Norway. The most important characteristic of Hamlet’s language is his ambiguity: he always expresses himself through rhetorical figures. He constantly complains about the fact that he has to play roles he does not believe in. The shock that he receives from his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage are the main causes of his melancholy.

The major question in the play is the relation between reality and appearance.

In the third act there is the play within the play, which is the only true thing in the play, since it is staged by Hamlet to expose his father’s murder. In the Elizabethan age tragedies of revenge were banned because they involved violence. However, Shakespeare decided to simulate the grand themes of the classical tragedies in order to shake the established certainties.