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Some Matters of Form in Critical
Papers
about Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
by Fran Teague, based on a handout from John Velz
This document should help students write essays about Shakespeare's
plays or other Renaissance drama. (If you want less specialized assistance,
try the writing
center resource page.) Some Matters of Form will explain Modes
of Exposition, Rhetorical Strategy,
Tense, Person and Tone,
Documentation, Quotations,
and Spelling and Italics. Whenever you want
to return to the Shakespeare homepage, look for this icon: .
When you want to return to this spot, look for this icon:
Modes of Exposition
The different modes are paraphrase (restatement of the original in
your own words), plot summary (statement of what happens in a story),
explication (explanation of meanings in a passage that are not obvious),
and analysis (statements about how the play makes its impact, how it fits
together, how it works). Prefer explication and analysis to paraphrase
and plot summary. As a rule, always explicate a crucial or extended quotation;
otherwise rely on analysis. Note that the first three kinds of exposition
answer the question "What?" while analysis, your primary concern
in an English course, answers the question "How?" Here is an
example based on "To be, or not to be--that is the question"
(Hamlet 3.1.56).(1)
Paraphrase: the issue is whether to live or die.
Plot Summary: Hamlet speculates about suicide, unaware that he is
being overheard by Polonius and Claudius, who plan to use Ophelia as a
means of drawing his secret from him.
Explication: Hamlet reveals his philosophical training at Wittenberg,
for "to be or not to be" is indeed the question in the metaphysical
science of ontology.
Analysis: the line is at the core of the play's meaning; Hamlet
now thinks that the great question is whether to live or die, but by Act
V he will have ripened in understanding to the point where he will care
more about the action he is to undertake than about whether he will die
as a result of it.
Rhetorical Strategy
Avoid beginning with broad claims or noble generalizations about "art,"
"drama," or "Shakespeare" if your subject is tightly
defined as an individual play or group of plays. You want to induce belief
in your critical position; use an inductive method in which conclusions
are made to proceed from carefully marshaled evidence. (You might think
of yourself as a lawyer presenting a case step-by-step to a jury.) When
you write well enough about the particular--the play and the bits of evidence
in it--a reader will draw the right general conclusions about the play,
and maybe even about "art," "drama," or "Shakespeare,"
even without your pointing them out.
Tense
Use historical present unless you specifically discuss the creative process
instead of the finished product. Criticism is usually concerned with the
artwork, not the creative process, and since the artwork has a continuing
validity (it is "for all time," not "of an age," as
Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare's canon),(2) speak
of it in the present tense: characters in plays do things. If you
want to distinguish between present and past action in a play, a perfect
form may help: "Portia, who has been in Venice and has participated
in the trial, nevertheless feigns ignorance of Antonio's fate
in the fifth act." You would say "Shakespeare puts bawdy
language in Lucio's mouth"; but when you talk about how Shakespeare
did things, past tense is appropriate: "Shakespeare did not find
the bawdy language that animates Lucio's speeches in his source
Promos and Cassandra." These are rules of thumb; judgment
will tell you how to decide between tenses in a given case.
Person and Tone
Third person is generally most effective. First person can sound self-conscious,
but if you decide it's appropriate in a particular case, use it without
apology. First person plural may seem like a shyster's attempt to suck
the reader into the vortex of your argument: "you and I, dear reader,
we agree, don't we?" Avoid cuteness of any kind. If you write well
enough about literature worth writing about, you'll hold your reader without
chicanery. So colloquialisms, facetiousness, clichés dignified with
quotation marks, clever euphemisms, rhetorical questions, puns: all these
mark a writer who is unsure that an idea can stand alone. If you fear sounding
stuffy, use occasional contractions, plenty of specific details, and short
sentences.
Documentation
Use a standard documentation style and use it consistently. English majors
should prefer MLA style. Use parenthetical references within your text,
reserve endnotes for commentary that does not fit in the body of the text,
and provide a list of works cited with full bibliographical information.
I've used a few endnotes in this handout to show you
what I mean. You may also need to document electronic documents: there's
a useful website
that tells you how to do so.
Listing the works you've consulted suggests that you've done your homework.
If you use one work heavily, say so in an endnote (as I have in my first
note to this handout). Under no circumstances would I consider Cliff's
Notes or other such works a work suitable for a college student
to consult. If you have many sources for a paragraph, you can conclude
it with an endnote like this: "The facts in this paragraph are taken
from the following works: . . . ." If you
use the actual phrases of a source, you must put them in quotation
marks, or you are plagiarizing--even
though you include the necessary parenthetical citation.
Quotations
The current convention is to cite act, scene, and line numbers in Arabic
numerals: "Portia shows in Act V that she has come to understand her
own words, 'The quality of mercy is not strained' (MV 4.1.182)."
Note that I have a quotation within a quotation, so I shift to single quotation
marks for the embedded quotation. Note also that normal punctuation is
omitted before the parenthetical reference; only ! or ? would be retained.
If a reader would have no trouble figuring out which play you're quoting,
you don't need to specify it. You can use abbreviations for play titles,
provided that you give the title in full, followed by its abbreviated form,
early in the essay.
Short quotations (fewer than three lines) can appear in your own paragraph
in quotation marks. You indicate the end of a line of verse by a
slash mark with a space on either side: "When to the sessions of sweet
silent thought / I summon up . . . " (Son 30.1-2).
Longer quotations are set off (and double spaced) from the body of your
paper without quotation marks. Quotations must appear exactly as they appear
in the original. If there is a good reason for tampering, you must indicate
that you have tampered. Deletion (ellipsis) is indicated by three spaced
dots: "He cannot live . . . and must not die / Till George be packed
with posthorse up to heaven" (R3 1.1.145-46). If
you omit a whole line or more of verse from a set-off quotation, use a
line of dots and use the parenthetical reference to indicate how many lines
you have omitted. To indicate substitution or addition, place your contribution
inside square brackets: "The spirit [of Julius Caesar] aunswered him,
I am thy evill spirit, Brutus: and thou shalt see me by the citie of Philippes"
(note the retained spelling and capitalization).(3)
Spelling List
Playwright, performance, interpretation, tragedy,
role: these are words often misspelled. Theater, judgment,
honor: these are standard spellings in American usage. (If you prefer
the British spellings, that's fine, but you should then use British spellings
consistently throughout: programme, centre, and so on.) Finally, if a work
takes longer than half an hour to experience, italicize or underline the
title; otherwise, put it in quotation marks. If you're using a word processing
system that supports a Times Roman typeface, then you should use italics;
with a Courier typeface, use underlining. Play titles are italicized.
End Notes
1. All citations are taken from the first Riverside
edition of Shakespeare's Works.
2. The Jonson reference is taken from his elegy on Shakespeare
in the 1623 Folio; a facsimile appears in the Riverside:
66.
3. This quotation is taken from Plutarch's Lives,
a source Shakespeare used to write Julius Caesar; Bullough
gives the relevant passage (Bullough 5: 116)
List of Works Cited
(Most word processing systems allow you to do a hanging indent; unfortunately
html files don't!)
Bullough, Geoffrey. "Sources for Julius Caesar."
In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare. N.Y.:
Columbia U P, 1964. 5: 3-211.
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 1st edn.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.