What was different about the syntax Shakespeare used in his plays?

Answer 1

Of course it is easy to spot that some characters speak more often in verse, and others more often in prose. Verse is more commonly associated with nobility of character and prose with ordinary and mundane characters. But this does not always hold.

More interesting is the way that Shakespeare tailors the way people speak to their character. Polonius in Hamlet is a windbag, and we see that in his tedious listing of "comical, tragical, historical, pastoral" and their various combinations, or when in instructing Reynaldo, he loses track of what he is saying "What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something! Where did I leave?"

Falstaff, possibly Shakespeare's greatest character, has a particularly rich manner of speaking, although it is larded with oaths. His associate, Mistress Quickly, is likewise a mistress of malapropisms, which help show her as a somewhat fuzzy-minded individual.

Shakespeare also makes use of accents, as with Princess Katharine in Henry V or the Welsh pedant Sir Hugh Evans in Merry Wives.

Another good example is the contrast between the garrulous Shallow, who cannot stop talking, and his friend Silence, who reponds in terse sentences of half-a-dozen words, in Part II of Henry IV.

From all of this you can conclude rightly that Shakespeare uses language to create interesting characters more in the four plays Henry IV Parts One and Two, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V than in any others which he wrote.

Answer 2

Nothing. It is not dissimilar from what a whole bunch of other playwrights were doing at the same time. What Shakespeare was doing was not unusual except that he was much better than anyone else at doing it.

Answer 3

In order to get his lines into the iambic pentameter pattern, or to facilitate a rhyme, Shakespeare would sometimes reverse the order of words, placing the verb at the end of the sentence. This is a common enough device in poetry (even in greeting card poetry), but it means that the reader or listener must be alert to catch the meaning. A few examples:

"What light from yonder window breaks?" (Romeo and Juliet) means "What light breaks from yonder window?"

"Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments" (Sonnet 116) means "Let us not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds"

"And all the clouds that lower'd upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." (Richard III) means "and all the clouds that lowered upon our house buried in the deep bosom of the ocean."

This abnormal syntax was abnormal for Shakespeare also: he never uses it in prose and only occasionally in verse.

Answer 4

Shakespeare used iambic pentameter to give his plays a rhythm. He also invented or borrowed words from other languages. Words borrowed from another language are called loanwords.