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The Differences & Similarities Between Hamlet & as You like It

Essay by   •  January 9, 2012  •  Essay  •  394 Words (2 Pages)  •  4,207 Views

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William Shakespeare style of writing is shown in most of his works. Ultimately, it's specifically used in two of his famous plays, Hamlet, and As You Like It. These two plays were written in a sort of style that no other writer could achieve like William Shakespeare did. William Shakespeare didn't use language that most of us now can understand, but the way he wrote it and the way he expressed his words into such rich vocabulary is what cajoled us to read his works.

In the play Hamlet, this is one of the plays where like in Shakespeare's other plays, this one is written in a combination of verse, poetry, and prose. As I was reading Hamlet I often felt like reading a lengthy poem and that's because Shakespeare's characters often speak in verse. The nobles typically spoke in unrhymed iambic pentameter. An "iamb" is an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. "Penta" means "five," and "meter" means to a regular rhythmic pattern. So "iambic pentameter" is a kind of rhythmic pattern that consist of five iambs per line. It's the most common rhythm in English poetry and sounds like five heartbeats. That is one of the writing styles that William Shakespeare implements in his plays. For example, Claudius's opening speech in Act I, scene ii, he addresses the court. Hamlet's soliloquies are usually in verse as well but he also speaks a lot of prose. Characters lower on the social scale, like the gravediggers don't talk in a special poetic rhythm; they just talk. In Hamlet, It had tragedy, love, and revenge in the play. Hamlet however, sometimes speaks in prose, and even some of his most poetic or most important lines don't fall into that iambic pentameter beat.

In As You Like It, William Shakespeare used the same style of writing as in Hamlet, but once difference that this play had was it was a comedy. The themes of the play were love, injustice, and forgiveness. The only difference between both plays is the different styles that each play was written upon. One was a complete tragedy where everyone ends up dying, and the other was a comedy where everyone does not die, and everyone lives happy. Both plays, play a different role, but both plays attribute the same style of writing such as iambic pentameter, free verse, and prose.

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