shakespeareinyourface.blogspot.com: Zach on MND intro

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Zach on MND intro

Intro to A Midsummer Night's Dream (Zach Kieser)

The intro to A Midsummer Night’s Dream mentioned how many advanced rhetorical and literature techniques are used in the play. I wanted to define the ones that the intro mentions which are anaphora, anadiplosis, isocolon, and stichomythia. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. Shakespeare pokes fun at how badly people use this technique in Bottom’s unintentionally comedic speech in Act 5, Scene 1 where he says, “O night with hue so black \ O night, which ever art when day is not....” This speech also contains an example of the second technique, anadiplosis, which is the repetition of a word at the end of one clause and at the beginning of another. Shakespeare’s comedic example of this is when Bottom says, “O grim-looked night, O night with hue so black.” The anadiplosis is with the word “night” just as the anaphora was with the word “night”. Shakespeare does not always just mock literature techniques, though. He does seriously use isocolon, which is a figure of speech in which the sentence has two parts with equivalent structure, length, and rhythm. An example of this is in Act 1, Scene 1, when Hermia, declaring that she would rather be a virgin forever than marry Demetrius, says, “So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord.” “So live, so die” is isocolon since both phrases are exactly the same except for one word. Finally, an example of stichomythia, which is where two characters trade lines back and forth and thus create poetry together, occurs between Lysander and Hermia. As they are bemoaning the many obstacles to true lovers getting married, Shakespeare has them take turns saying lines of poetry. Overall, all these techniques reveal how Shakespeare was a master of literary techniques and when he chose to, could use a ton of them in a single play, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet.