SHAKESPEARE’S STYLE
Shakespeare is seen as the master of the blank verse. His rhetoric may be faulty and his logic passé but he still remains an impressionistic writer of human character and desires. He may not understand race and ethnicity the way we understand now, but he does carry the imprint of the Elizabethan society complete with its faults and prejudices. His is a world of linguistic freedom when language is fresh and alive with new possibilities. Though Shakespeare began with declamatory speeches he soon adapted the convention of his days to suit his own needs. Soon we get soliloquies, metaphorical poetry and blank verse. He could experiment with blank verse, free verse or poetry with dexterity that no one, except Chaucer had done before. His is a society of nobility, gentry, yeomanry and the poor. In Shakespeare the nobility spoke blank verse or unrhymed iambic pentameter which consists of 5 iambs per line where every second syllable is accented. We do not have to go to the court scene where Portia outwits everyone and gets Bassanio’s friend Antonio freed from the unkind grips of moneylender Shylock. Early in the play we get a glimpse of her sharp-wit and eloquence. In Act I Scene 2 Portia tells her waiting maid Nerissa, that she is “aweary of this great world.” Nerissa advises her to be happy with just enough and to follow this advice, to which Portia replies,
‘If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word 'choose!' I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one nor refuse none?’ (Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene 2)
Obviously Portia’s feminine and argumentative style suits her position as a rich, beautiful and intelligent speaker. She is going to masquerade as lawyer Balthazar and get Antonio free in a dramatic reinterpretation of the agreement. However here the sentence structure begins with a simple diction but becomes increasingly complex as she enters arguments. Right in the beginning she uses 2 verbs, repeats one and thereby shows action. Her prose is dynamic and based on western rational discourse. She begins with and ‘if’ clause which is closely subordinated to the subsequent main clause. Portia’s ability to subordinate clauses can be seen as an evidence of her sharp mind and rational temper. She uses powerful rhetorical devices such as a zeugma with double grammatical implication. The main clause of the first sentence is a condensed version of two clauses. It suppresses the verb “had been” but still keeps the balance –chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages [had been] princes palaces. She uses rhetoric to win over an argument by sheer eloquence. Though Portia is quick-witted, intelligent and beautiful, some scholars she her as cruelly-directed towards the moneylender Shylock. Wolf Mankowitz calls her a “cold, snobbish little bitch” while Harold Bloom sees her as anti-Semitic and philistine settling for the “glittering gold digger Bassanio” (Bloom 1986b). Bloom resents her for expressing the anti-Semitism of the Elizabethan society, something equivalent to being a “Nazi sympathizer” as if the Jews were “decedents of Satan, rather than of Abraham.” He blames Shakespeare for creating the image of Shylock who has done “great harm in the world (Bloom, 2008 xi). Whatever be the nature of reactive criticism, Shakespeare’s blank verse suits the temper and needs of his Christian heroine in the play. A few examples from continental and American literary texts would clear up the fog of literary abstraction that is often found in theorizing about literature.
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