Why did shakespeare use lists in his plays?

Answer 1

I assume you do not mean the word "list" as used in Hamlet when the Ghost says to Hamlet "List, list, oh list." Here it is a shorter form of "listen"

Perhaps you mean those passages where Shakespeare has his characters make a long list of something. For example, in Macbeth, Macbeth says to the murderers, "Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men, as" and here he lists seven breeds of dog " are clept all by the name of dogs". Or again in Macbeth, Malcolm says that he has no kingly virtues and then proceeds to list twelve of them which he claims not to have. Mercutio in his Queen Mab speech lists seven body parts of particular people which causes them to have particular dreams.

In part, this is only natural. If you are describing something or someone, you list its or his or her characteristics. This is usually what Shakespeare is doing. In Act 4 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream Theseus describes his hounds by listing their characteristics.

Shakespeare had to do this frequently because he could not show things to his audience, but could only describe them in words.

However, in some cases these lists tell us something about the character saying them. This listing can in fact be tedious, especially when the number of things enumberated gets up to or over seven. Shakespeare does this to tell us that the character is in fact a tedious person. For example, Polonius in Hamlet (described by Hamlet as a "tedious old fool") has come to tell Hamlet that there are players arrived and talks about the kinds of play they can perform. He lists eight such varieties. Polonius is constantly being shown to be a boring windbag. Malcolm's list of kingly virtues is painful to listen to, but Malcolm is not a character for whom we are supposed to feel much sympathy. We suspect that he is virtuous not so much because of having any virtues but rather because he is too tedious to have any interesting vices.