Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well. (Page 11)
Note: Memorable line
Nobody is quite sure which is Shakespeare’s first play, but the contenders are Love s Labours Lost, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI Part 1. Do not, dear reader, worry if you have not read those plays. Almost nobody has, because, to be utterly frank, they’re not very good. To be precise about it, there isn’t a single memorable line in any of them (Page 11)
Shakespeare got better because he learnt. Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more. (Page 11)
So Shakespeare learnt and learnt and got better and better, and his lines became more and more striking and more and more memorable. But most of his great and famous lines are simply examples of the ancient formulas. “I can smile, and murder while I smile” was not handed to Shakespeare by God. It’s just an example of diacope. (Page 12)
All that the Greeks were doing was noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard, and working out what the structures were, in much the same way that when you or I eat a particularly delicious meal, we might ask for the recipe. (Page 12)
The figures are alive and thriving. The one line from that song or film that you remember and don’t know why you remember is almost certainly down to one of the figures, one of the flowers of rhetoric growing wild. They account for the songs you sing and the poems you love, although that is hidden from you at school. (Page 13)
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else. (Page 13)
There is no possible way that Shakespeare didn’t have North open on his desk when he was writing. But also, Shakespeare made little changes. That means that we can actually watch Shakespeare working. We can peep back 400 years and see the greatest genius who ever lived scribbling away. We can see how he did it, and it’s really pretty bloody simple. All he did was add some alliteration. (Page 15)
Any phrase, so long as it alliterates, is memorable and will be believed even if it’s a bunch of nonsense. (Page 16)
It’s still polyptoton if the words have a close etymological connection, or are just different parts of the same verb, (Page 18)
Polyptoton, even though nobody has ever heard of it, succeeds, and nothing succeeds like success. Polyptoton is the sort of rhetorical trope you use when you’re the first man on the moon, unless cruelly messed up by the radio transmission. (Page 20)
Polyptoton was complex. Antithesis is simple. Indeed, the only tricky thing about antithesis is how to punctuate it. Some insist that you should use a colon: others complain that you should use a full stop. But in essence antitheses are simple: first you mention one thing: then you mention another. (Page 21)
But these are all just plays on the basic formula of antithesis: X is Y, and not X is not Y. Wilde did a few of these: “Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.” This is the soul of antithesis, and this is what makes it so simple. (Page 21)
Merism is when you don’t say what you’re talking about, and instead name all of its parts. (Page 23)
Synaesthesia is either a mental condition whereby colours are perceived as smells, smells as sounds, sounds as tastes, etc., or it is a rhetorical device whereby one sense is described in terms of another. (Page 29)
Synaesthesias of smell are jarring and effective, and are probably an easy shortcut to a memorable line. (Page 29)
Aposiopesis is Greek for becoming silent and it’s the reason that we do not live in Paradise. (Page 31)
This is, of course, an easy and effective thing to fake. If you’re too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you’re not saying, you must. . . I’m sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying. (Page 32)
Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, (Page 34)
Yoda-is known for wrong his word order getting, but his most quoted line, from Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace , uses a different figure entirely. Yoda announces that fear leads to anger. He then takes the last word of that sentence and repeats it as the first word of the next: anger leads to hatred. He then takes the last word of that sentence and repeats it as the first word of the next: hatred leads to suffering. This is a case of anadiplosis. It links him directly to a previous spiritual teacher: St. Paul. (Page 37)
Like a conquering general it arrives at a word, plants a flag there, and then moves on. By doubling down it makes everything seem strong, structured and certain. (Page 38)
Yoda could have said that fear leads to running away, and running away leads to safety. If the line had simply been “Fear leads to anger, which leads to hate, which leads to suffering” it wouldn’t have sounded half as good, or half as convincing. But with the doubling of anadiplosis, it feels like an inevitable progress. (Page 38)
There’s simply a satisfaction, half logical and half beautiful, in seeing the same word ending one phrase and coming back to life at the start of the next. It is progression. Progression is a story. A story leads to a climax, just as here leads there and there leads everywhere. (Page 39)
He knew the reader can’t stop until they get to that main verb. (Page 40)
Shakespeare knew that content was not nearly as important as form. If you want to know what actually happened to Richard II, read a history book. Shakespeare is in it for the periods. (Page 41)
However, you don’t need to keep using exactly the same structures to stop the sentence finishing. Kipling had his conditional clauses, Shakespeare and Sting their nouns, but Milton managed to hold off the first verb of Paradise Lost by digging a huge grammatical hole and setting up camp in it. (Page 42)
Using lots of conjunctions is called polysyndeton. No conjunctions is called asyndeton. (Page 43)
Absolutely anything sounds civilised and well-thought-out, provided that it’s expressed in the most syntactically complicated, hyper-hypotactic manner. (Page 45)
Diacope (pronounced die-ACK-oh-pee) is a verbal sandwich: a word or phrase is repeated after a brief interruption. You take two Bonds and stuff James in the middle. Bingo. You have a great line. (Page 47)
The most famous line in English literature is famous not for the content, but for the wording. To be or not to be. (Page 49)
This is the purest form of the rhetorical question, where a couple of words have been switched around and a question mark slapped on the end. (Page 51)
The thing about anacoenosis is that it makes us realise how much we have in common. (Page 51)
Hypophora is a rhetorical question that is immediately answered aloud, usually by the person who asked. (Page 51)
By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That’s also why they’re traffic policemen. That’s also why such a series of questions is called subjectio. (Page 52)
So when Saint Paul told the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” it’s probably a hendiadys for fearful trembling, but it might be a hendiadys for trembling fear. And there’s at least the possibility that he really did mean both with fear and with trembling, and wasn’t using hendiadys at all. (Page 55)
The point and beauty of hendiadys is that it sets the words next to each other, that it removes the grammar and relation, that it doubles the words out to give breadth and beauty. (Page 56)
Mind you, for my money, the greatest use of hendiadys isn’t by Shakespeare, but by Leonard Cohen in his song “Hallelujah”: You saw her bathing on the roof. Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you. The “and” where we might expect “in” makes the hendiadys. And that whole song is, like so many songs, an extended example of epistrophe. (Page 56)
When you end each sentence with the same word, that’s epistrophe. When each clause has the same words at the end, that’s epistrophe. When you finish each paragraph with the same word, that’s epistrophe. Even when it’s a whole phrase or a whole sentence that you repeat, it’s still, providing the repetition comes at the end, epistrophe. (Page 58)
In music epistrophe is so common that we barely notice it or think about it. We’re all so familiar with the way songs work that we don’t see that they work in a particular way. Because epistrophe brings with it some quite definite feelings. Wherever you start you always come back to the same thing. Wherever Bob Dylan starts off, he always ends up out there on Highway 61. Whatever is said in the verse, you can be sure that come the chorus everybody in the whole cell block will continue to dance to the jailhouse rock. Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It’s the trope of emphasising one point again and again. And it’s the trope of not being able to escape that one conclusion, which is one of the reasons that songs are so suited to the idea of obsessive love, political certainty and other such unhealthy ideas. You can’t reason in an epistrophic pop song. You can’t seriously consider the alternatives, because the structure dictates that you’ll always end up at the same point, thinking about the same girl and giving peace a chance. Wherever you are in the world and whatever question Bob asks, you already know that you’ll be dancing in the street while the answer blows in the wind. It’s built into the structure. It’s epistrophe. (Page 58)
Epistrophe gets bigger and stronger the longer you delay it. (Page 59)
In fact, epistrophe is particularly suited for death; I suppose because death is the huge human epistrophe, and all biographies end the same way. (Page 59)
Faith, hope and love is a good example of a tricolon. (Page 60)
Three is the magic number of literary composition, but to explain why that is you have to look at the much more boring number two. (Page 61)
With a tricolon you can set up a pattern and then break it. (Page 61)
Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer. (Page 61)
When you finish a tricolon, you finish because there is nothing more to say. (Page 62)
Epizeuxis (pronounced ep-ee-ZOOX-is) is repeating a word immediately in exactly the same sense. Simple. Simple. Simple. However, epizeuxis is not the easiest way to get into the dictionary of quotations. It’s like a nuclear bomb: immensely effective, but a bit weird if you use it every five minutes. (Page 63)
Other forms of epizeuxis are less powerful. Without the rule of three, epizeuxis loses its punch. (Page 64)
But the advantages of syllepsis are also its failings. Syllepsis makes the reader astonished and go back to check what the word was and how it’s working now. (Page 67)
Roses are red. Violets are blue. That, at its simplest, is isocolon. Two clauses that are grammatically parallel, two sentences that are structurally the same. The Ancient Greeks were rather obsessed with isocolon, the modern world has rather forgotten it. The Greeks loved the sense of balance that it gave to writing, which reflected the sense of balance that they admired in thought. (Page 69)
Modern isocolons tend to work as a kind of spot-the-difference game. (Page 69)
Melodies tend to repeat themselves, and so the words that are sung over them repeat themselves too. Sometimes these lines even conform to the ultra-strict definition of isocolon in the Rhetorica ad Herennium:—that the two clauses have exactly the same number of syllables. (Page 70)
In verse a te-TUM is called an iamb, and five in a row is called a pentameter (that’s the same pent as pentagon). So five te-TUMs are called an iambic pentameter. (Page 74)
The Renaissance poet Ben Jonson said that when he wanted to write poetry, he just wrote prose and then mucked around with the word order and banged it with a verbal hammer until it fit nicely into a verse form. (Page 79)
The iambic pentameter is the Rolls-Royce of verse forms. The others are mere unicycles, tractors, quad-bikes and rickshaws. They’re fine for some particular purpose, but the iambic pentameter can do everything. (Page 79)
Shakespeare almost never used another verse form. He didn’t need to. It was the iambic pentameter or it was plain prose. Because the pentameter has an odd number of feet, it doesn’t need to rhyme. (Page 79)
Usually, zeugma has the verb actually printed in the first clause and then understood in the second (prozeugma). But you can do it the other way around and have the verb in the last clause (hypozeugma). (Page 82)
The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. (Page 85)
My fingers need only tap the keyboard for every cop to be a criminal and all the sinners saints. But the reader can meditate on the words forever. (Page 85)
A well executed paradox stirs the soul and mixes language and philosophy in a way that no other figure does. (Page 85)
Nature is not symmetrical and symmetry is not natural. (Page 87)
a good chiasmus needs to be thought out. Chiasmus is clever, but not natural. (Page 89)
Assonance is repeating a vowel sound: dee p heat or blue moon. It is, I’m afraid, the thin and flimsy cousin of alliteration. (Page 91)
Catachresis is rather difficult to define, but it’s essentially when a sentence is so startlingly wrong that it’s right. (Page 95)
A catachresis is any sentence that makes you stop, scratch your head and say “that’s wrong,” before you suddenly realise that it’s right. (Page 96)
Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite. (Page 97)
Understatement is a tricky business, because it works only if you know the truth. (Page 97)
Irony is an odd fish because, contrary to popular belief, irony draws people together. Irony is an untruth that both parties know is untrue, that both parties agree is untrue.-When two strangers meet in the pouring rain and one says to the other, “Lovely weather we’re having,” he’s appealing to the one thing that he knows they both have in common and the one truth they both recognise. (Page 98)
Litotes isn’t the best figure to use when you’re trying to be grand. Litotes does not stir the soul, it’s more suited to stirring tea. (Page 98)
Metaphor is when two things are connected because they are similar, metonymy is when two things are connected because they are really physically connected. (Page 100)
The extreme form of metonymy is synecdoche, where you become one of your body parts. You are your feet, your lips or your liver. (Page 101)
The Boston Tea Party, the storming of the Bastille, and the fall of the Berlin Wall are all synecdoches. They are fragments that narrate a whole story. (Page 102)
A transferred epithet is when an adjective is applied to the wrong noun. So instead of writing “The nervous man smoked a cigarette” you write “The man smoked a nervous cigarette.” (Page 103)
Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it’s almost always a one-way street. The emotions leak out from us. (Page 104)
The transferred epithet makes the world come alive. (Page 104)
Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn’t require them. (Page 105)
And finally, there is the third and best kind of pleonasm: the lovely pleonasm of emphasis. A free gift may be put down to thoughtlessness, but “free, gratis and for nothing” is quite deliberate. It is certainly pleonasm, but it is also effective. It is the pneumatic drill of repetition that gives emphasis and insistence to the notion that you don’t have to pay a penny. (Page 106)
We are all casual creatures and we say things that we don’t really mean; so, when we really mean a thing, we say it twice. Or three times. (Page 106)
Ending where you began has two effects that are, at first sight, contradictory. It gives the impression of going nowhere, and it gives the impression of moving inevitably on. (Page 108)
Now, there’s nothing wrong with allegory of this kind, but it has no place in this book. Here we are dealing only with the effects that can be achieved in a single sentence, or at most a paragraph. Allegory is for finer minds than mine, and deeper souls. Also, it tends to religion. Not just because the best examples are religious, but because personification is very close to deification. (Page 110)
What this tells us about Shakespeare’s psyche, I don’t know and don’t want to know. The important thing is that you only get this complete picture of hungry, randy, ragged death if you read the whole of Shakespeare’s works and put it together. Because Shakespeare does it all in glimpses. One detail and then Death is hidden away again. It’s beautiful and it’s remarkably effective. This isn’t the half-personification of “duty calls,” but it’s not the full-blown allegory either. It’s one detail and no more. (Page 112)
If you really want to make a hyperbole work, you must make sure that it is beyond anything that is even vaguely possible. (Page 114)
About pronouns they were sometimes wrong, the old masters; because you can use a pronoun before saying what it refers to. It’s an odd little technique, and it’s called prolepsis. (Page 119)
Prolepsis has two great advantages. First, it has mystery, but not too much. When a poem opens with a pronoun, a little bit of your mind thinks to itself: “What? What the hell’s going on? Who? Who are they?” For a moment it weeps and wonders, but only for a moment, because a few words later, before the full stop is even upon us, you find out that they are the old masters, or your mum and dad, or the days of wine and roses. The mystery is opened, your attention is grabbed, and then the mystery is solved. (Page 120)
The second reason that prolepsis is so effective is that it is thoughtful and natural. (Page 120)
Congeries is Latin for a heap, and in rhetoric it applies to any piling up of adjectives or nouns in a list. (Page 122)
humans don’t naturally make lists. Or, to be more precise, we don’t talk in lists. (Page 122)
You cannot help but see the Christmas tree in all its detailed glory. It is a heap of pretty images. And that’s how Dickens wanted to get his image across. The reader is simply bludgeoned into submission. (Page 123)
Congeries work precisely because readers and listeners aren’t used to them (Page 123)
The scene is set perfectly, because that’s what scesis onomaton (SKEE-sis o-NO-mat-on) does best. Setting scenes. The simple noun that tells you all you need to know. (Page 125)
Scesis onomaton can therefore set an eternal scene, but it can also state an eternal principle, one that’s not pinned down within History’s muddy field. (Page 126)
With anaphora people always remember the opening words, but they usually forget the rest. (Page 129)
They hear, and because they’ve heard it several times, they believe. Churchill needed to get across two messages: we shall fight, and we shall probably lose. The anaphora allowed him to push one, while slipping the other in unnoticed. (Page 130)
