Shakespeare Memory Tricks | English & Lit

📝 Shakespeare — 9 Memory Tricks

Major Tragedies

HMORL (H=Hamlet, M=Macbeth, O=Othello, R=Romeo and Juliet, L=King Lear): the five major Shakespeare tragedies

Five essential Shakespeare tragedies and their central tragic flaws

Hamlet (1600-01): revenge, madness (real or feigned), inaction, mortality. Tragic flaw: excessive deliberation. Macbeth (1606): ambition, guilt, fate vs free will. Tragic flaw: vaulting ambition. Othello (1603): jealousy, racism, manipulation. Tragic flaw: credulity, pride. Romeo and Juliet (1594-96): young love vs family feud, fate. King Lear (1606): pride, filial ingratitude, madness, the nature of power.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Aristotelian tragedy

Greek model: a person of high status (hamartia) falls through a fatal flaw, producing catharsis (pity and fear) in the audience. Shakespeare adapts this: his heroes are complex, their flaws human, their falls often involve systemic corruption not just personal failure.

Hamlet's delay

Why does Hamlet not kill Claudius immediately? Various theories: Oedipal (Freud), philosophical (uncertainty about ghost), moral (cannot kill in cold blood), theatrical (delay is the plot). The question is the play.

Macbeth and ambition

Macbeth is the most compressed of the major tragedies. The witches equivocate. Lady Macbeth drives Macbeth at first, then collapses under guilt. Macbeth's arc: brave soldier to tyrant to cornered animal. We never fully lose sympathy.

Othello and racism

Othello is the only black protagonist in Shakespeare. Iago exploits the racism of Venetian society and Othello's own insecurity as an outsider. Race, gender, and power are inseparable in this play. Desdemona is the most fully innocent of Shakespeare's victims.

Major Comedies

Major comedies: Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night — and moret

Five essential Shakespeare comedies — all end in marriage, but explore much more

Shakespeare's comedies typically end in marriage and social reconciliation. Much Ado About Nothing: gender roles, wit, eavesdropping, slander. A Midsummer Night's Dream: love's irrationality, art and imagination, class. As You Like It: pastoral idealism vs reality, gender disguise. The Merchant of Venice: antisemitism, mercy, justice. Twelfth Night: mistaken identity, gender, desire, melancholy.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Comic structure

Comedies typically: begin with a problem or social disruption, move through complications (often in a green world/holiday space), resolve with marriage(s) and restoration of social order. The endings are often more ambiguous than they first appear.

Green world

Northrop Frye term: an alternative space (forest, island, holiday) where normal social rules are suspended and characters can experiment. Arden Forest (As You Like It), the enchanted wood (Midsummer). Characters return transformed.

Problem plays

Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida. Classified as comedies but resist easy resolution. Endings are forced or uncomfortable. Sometimes called dark comedies or tragicomedies.

Disguise and gender

Shakespeare's comedies frequently use female characters disguising as men (Viola, Rosalind, Portia). Explore gender performance and the instability of gender identity. All female roles were played by boy actors — adding layers of gender complexity.

History Plays

Richard II → Henry IV (1&2) → Henry V = the Henriad — the education of a king

Shakespeare's history plays explore kingship, power, rebellion, and national identity

The Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V): traces the fall of Richard II, rise of the Lancastrians, and Prince Hal's transformation from Falstaff's tavern companion to heroic king. The Henry VI trilogy and Richard III: Wars of the Roses, ending with Tudor triumph. History plays explore: the nature of legitimate authority, the relationship between personal virtue and political power, and the making of England.

Difficulty: Advanced

Falstaff

One of Shakespeare's greatest comic creations. Embodiment of carnival (Bakhtin): excess, disorder, wit, and humanity. Hal's rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV Part 2 is both politically necessary and humanly devastating.

Kingship

History plays examine what makes a good king. Richard II: poetic but politically inept. Henry IV: effective but usurper (guilty). Henry V: martial and charismatic but morally complex (orders killing of prisoners). No simple model.

Richard III

Shakespeare's greatest villain-hero: witty, self-aware, physically marked (hunchback), devilishly charming. Opens with famous soliloquy: Now is the winter of our discontent. Tudor propaganda (Richard was Henry VII's enemy) but dramatically brilliant.

Political body

In history plays, the king's body IS the nation. Disease in the body politic = disease in the state. The King's Two Bodies (Kantorowicz): natural body (mortal) and political body (eternal office). Richard II meditates on this distinction.

Sonnets

154 sonnets · 1-126 = Fair Youth · 127-154 = Dark Lady · Themes: time, beauty, love, art

Shakespeare's sonnet sequence explores time, mortality, beauty, and the power of art to preserve

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets were published in 1609. Sonnets 1-17: urge the Fair Youth to reproduce to defeat time. Sonnets 18-126: explore the poet's love, jealousy, and complex relationship with the Youth. Sonnets 127-154: the Dark Lady — sexually charged, disturbing, misogynistic. Famous sonnets: 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day), 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds), 130 (My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun).

Difficulty: Advanced

Sonnet 18 analysis

Opens with a simile then immediately rejects it: you are more lovely and more temperate. Summer is impermanent (Rough winds, the sun shines too hot or too dim). The twist: the poem itself will immortalize the beloved. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this.

Sonnet 130

My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun — deliberately violates Petrarchan conventions. Her eyes are dull, her breath reeks, her voice is harsh. The final couplet redeems her: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare. Anti-Petrarchan love poem.

Time and immortality

Recurring preoccupation: time is devouring. But the poem can defeat time. This is the poet's central boast: art outlasts beauty, life, and even love. The poem becomes a monument. Romantic egotism with genuine insight.

The Fair Youth problem

We do not know who the Fair Youth is (candidates: Henry Wriothesley, William Herbert). We do not know the nature of the relationship. The sonnets may be conventional exercises or genuine confession. The ambiguity is part of what makes them inexhaustible.

Language & Style

Iambic pentameter · Blank verse · Prose · Soliloquy · Aside

Shakespeare uses form strategically — verse vs prose, speech types all carry meaning

Shakespeare writes in verse (iambic pentameter) for noble characters and serious moments, and in prose for comic scenes, lower-class characters, and moments of psychological disturbance (Hamlet shifts to prose with Polonius). Soliloquy: character alone on stage, speaking thoughts aloud — gives audience direct access to consciousness. Aside: character speaks to audience while other characters cannot hear. Rhyming couplets: often signal end of a scene or a significant moment.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Prose vs verse

High status + serious = verse. Low status + comic = prose. But exceptions: Hamlet speaks prose with Polonius (suggesting feigned madness). Falstaff speaks prose (his world is comic, carnivalian). The shift between verse and prose is always meaningful.

Soliloquy

Shakespeare's most powerful dramatic device. Allows audience direct access to character's unmediated consciousness. To be or not to be: we hear Hamlet thinking, not performing. Compare soliloquies at different points to track character development.

Blank verse features

Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare varies it: feminine endings suggest hesitation or incompleteness. Short lines suggest pause, shock, or withheld speech. Prose intrusions mid-speech suggest breakdown. Regular verse suggests control.

Quibbles and wordplay

Shakespeare loves puns. Often combines two meanings simultaneously. Hamlet on Claudius: A little more than kin, and less than kind (kin = relative; kind = nature/species; he is family but not kind). Puns in Renaissance context were not low comedy but wit.

Themes Across the Canon

PGFMPD (P=Power, G=Gender, F=Fate, M=Madness, P=appearance vs reality (Pretense), D=Death): Power, Gender, Fate, Madness, Appearance vs Reality, Death

Six themes that run through Shakespeare's entire body of work

Power: who has it, who abuses it, how it is lost. Gender: the instability of gender roles (cross-dressing, women in male domains). Fate vs free will: the witches predict but do not compel Macbeth. Madness: real (Lear) vs feigned (Hamlet's antic disposition) vs grief-induced (Ophelia). Appearance vs Reality: Iago, Claudius, the witches all involve deception. Death: mortality as constant presence, from Hamlet's graveyard to Juliet's tomb.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Appearance vs reality

Pervasive theme: things are seldom what they seem. Iago wears a mask of honesty. Claudius looks like a king. The witches tell truths that mislead. Disguise in the comedies. The plays themselves are illusions presenting truths.

Power and legitimacy

What makes a ruler legitimate? Richard II is divinely appointed but politically incompetent. Henry V is heroic but his grandfather usurped the throne. Macbeth acquires power through murder and cannot hold it. Power always entails moral complexity.

Madness

Hamlet feigns madness (or does he?). Lear goes genuinely mad from grief and exposure. Ophelia breaks down from grief and powerlessness. Lady Macbeth develops real madness from guilt. Madness often reveals truth that sanity conceals (Lear on the heath sees clearly).

Gender and power

Shakespeare's women are often more clear-sighted than the men around them (Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice). But they operate within severe patriarchal constraints. Volumnia controls Coriolanus. Lady Macbeth pushes Macbeth — then collapses. Gender is always a political question.

Hamlet Deep Dive

To be or not to be = question of action vs inaction · Revenge tragedy conventions and subversions

Hamlet is the most analyzed play in the English language — know the key debates

Hamlet (c. 1601) is a revenge tragedy that constantly questions the genre's conventions. Revenge tragedy: hero is called to avenge a murder, delays, becomes corrupted by the pursuit of revenge, and dies in the final bloodbath. Hamlet subverts this: the delay is psychologized, the hero reflects obsessively on the morality of revenge and the nature of action and death. The play is about thinking itself.

Difficulty: Advanced

To be or not to be

The most famous soliloquy. Not simply about suicide: the question is whether it is nobler to endure suffering passively or to take action against it. The undiscovered country (death) prevents action. A meditation on the relationship between thought and action.

The mousetrap

Hamlet stages a play within a play (The Mousetrap) to verify Claudius's guilt. Plays are a way to catch the conscience of the king. Metatheatrical: the play about a play points to theatre's power to reveal truth.

Ophelia

Often reduced to a victim. But Ophelia is trapped by patriarchal structures: she obeys her father, is used as a spy, is rejected by Hamlet, loses her mind when structures collapse. Her mad songs reveal what politeness concealed.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Old friends now instruments of the king. Hamlet dispatches them to their deaths. Are they innocent victims or culpable? Tom Stoppard rewrites the play from their perspective in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, exploring contingency and meaninglessness.

Historical Context

Elizabethan world picture · Globe Theatre · Acting companies · Patronage

Understanding Shakespeare's world unlocks meaning in the plays

Shakespeare lived 1564-1616. Elizabethan world picture: great chain of being (God → angels → humans → animals → plants → minerals) — disorder in the state = disorder in nature. Theatre: public (Globe, open air, 3,000 spectators, standing groundlings), private (Blackfriars, indoor, wealthier audience). Acting companies: Lord Chamberlain's Men (Shakespeare's company, later King's Men after James I's patronage). No women on stage.

Difficulty: Intermediate

Great chain of being

Hierarchical ordering of all existence. Disruption at one level = disruption at all levels. Macbeth kills the king = horses eat each other. Lear divides his kingdom = storm on the heath. The supernatural reflects the political and moral.

The Globe Theatre

Open-air amphitheatre. Daylight performances (no artificial lighting). Minimal set (words create the world). No fourth wall convention. Groundlings (standing, 1 penny) on three sides. Wealthy audience in galleries. Boy actors played women. No actresses until 1660.

Patronage system

Writers depended on aristocratic patrons for support. Shakespeare's company had noble and royal protection. Plays performed at court for royal entertainment. This political context shapes the history plays especially.

Sources

Shakespeare rarely invented plots: adapted North's Plutarch (Roman plays), Holinshed's Chronicles (histories), Italian novellas (comedies), earlier English plays. His genius was in character, language, and thematic depth, not in plot invention.

Quotations to Know

To be or not to be · All that glitters · What's in a name · All the world's a stage · Et tu Brute

Ten essential Shakespeare quotations — context is as important as the words

To be or not to be, that is the question (Hamlet). All that glitters is not gold (Merchant of Venice). What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (Romeo and Juliet). All the world's a stage (As You Like It). Et tu, Brute? (Julius Caesar). Now is the winter of our discontent (Richard III). Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Hamlet — spoken by Marcellus, not Hamlet). The lady doth protest too much, methinks (Hamlet — means assert strongly, not complain). The quality of mercy is not strained (Merchant of Venice). Brevity is the soul of wit (Hamlet).

Difficulty: Intermediate

Misquotations

Money is the root of all evil (Bible, not Shakespeare). Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well (actually: I knew him, Horatio). The lady doth protest too much now means complain but in Shakespeare means vow emphatically. Et tu, Brute? is from Julius Caesar, not from history.

Context matters

O brave new world, that has such people in it (The Tempest — Miranda has never left the island, so this is ironic, not celebratory). Brave new world is naive wonder, not optimism. Huxley uses this irony for his dystopian novel title.

All the world's a stage

From As You Like It, spoken by the melancholic Jaques. Lists seven ages of man from infant to second childhood (sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything). Jaques is a satirist — the speech is neither celebratory nor simply mournful but mordant.

Something is rotten

Not spoken by Hamlet but by Marcellus — the soldier, not the prince. Context: after the ghost appears. The line describes political corruption in Denmark. Often misattributed to Hamlet himself, which changes its register.

🎓 Common Exam Questions

Q: What are Shakespeare's major tragedies (HMORL) and what is each about thematically?

A: HMORL: Hamlet — revenge, indecision, corruption of the state. Hamlet's inability to act is the central problem: is delay wisdom or cowardice? Explores appearance vs reality, mortality (To be or not to be). Macbeth — ambition and its consequences. The play asks whether Macbeth is inherently evil or corrupted by circumstance and suggestion. Lady Macbeth is arguably the driving force. Othello — jealousy and manipulation. Iago is one of literature's greatest villains. Race and otherness are central to Othello's vulnerability. Romeo and Juliet — love, fate, and feud. The lovers are passive instruments of fate as much as agents of their own destruction. King Lear — power, loyalty, aging, and the ingratitude of children. The storm scene is Shakespeare's most powerful portrayal of psychological disintegration.

Q: Explain the PGFMPD themes — give one example from Shakespeare for each.

A: PGFMPD: Power — who has it, how it corrupts, how it is legitimized. Richard II asks what makes a king. Macbeth shows power destroying the one who seizes it. Gender — rigid Elizabethan roles challenged. Viola (Twelfth Night), Portia (Merchant of Venice), and Rosalind (As You Like It) all use cross-dressing to gain agency. Lady Macbeth inverts expected gender roles. Fate vs free will — Romeo and Juliet are called 'star-crossed lovers' — yet their choices also drive the tragedy. Madness — real (Ophelia's madness is genuine) vs feigned (Hamlet's 'antic disposition'). Lear's madness is both. Appearance vs Reality — Iago projects honesty while plotting murder. Merchant of Venice: the caskets test who judges by appearance. Death — the Hamlet gravedigger scene, Macbeth's 'Tomorrow and tomorrow' speech — mortality is everywhere.

Q: Analyze Hamlet's To be or not to be soliloquy — what is it really about?

A: The soliloquy is not simply about whether to commit suicide — it is about the existential question of whether to endure suffering or act against it. To be: continue living and enduring. Not to be: cease to exist. The central question: 'Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.' What stops Hamlet? 'The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns' — fear of what comes after death. The soliloquy reveals Hamlet's fundamental problem: he thinks too much. It exemplifies the play's central tension between thought and action, and explains why he cannot simply carry out the revenge the ghost demands. The language shifts from Latin-derived words (nobler, conscience) to Anglo-Saxon (die, sleep) — mirroring the tension between philosophy and raw experience.

Q: What is Shakespeare's sonnet sequence and what are the major themes?

A: Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published 1609. Sonnets 1-126: addressed to the Fair Youth (a beautiful young man) — themes: urging the youth to have children (procreation sonnets 1-17), the poet's love and admiration, the power of poetry to immortalize ('Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'), time and mortality, rivalry with other poets. Sonnets 127-154: addressed to the Dark Lady — themes: desire, lust, obsession, self-reproach, betrayal. The Dark Lady is described as unconventional beauty, in contrast to Petrarchan idealized blondness. Sonnet 18: famous for 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' — argues that poetry outlasts physical beauty. Sonnet 73: 'That time of year thou mayst in me behold' — meditation on aging and mortality. Sonnet 130: parody of Petrarchan conventions — 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.'

Q: How do you read and interpret a Shakespeare play for a literature exam?

A: Key strategies: Language and imagery — Shakespeare's metaphors are not decorative, they reveal character and theme. Track recurring image patterns (light/dark in Romeo and Juliet, disease in Hamlet, equivocation in Macbeth). Verse vs prose — note when and why characters switch (see above). Soliloquy and aside — these give privileged access to characters' true thoughts. Dramatic irony — the audience often knows things characters do not (we know Juliet is asleep not dead). Tragic flaw (hamartia) — identify the protagonist's central weakness: Hamlet's indecision, Macbeth's ambition, Othello's jealousy, Lear's vanity. Historical context — the Elizabethan world picture (Chain of Being), divine right of kings, gender roles, plague and death, religious upheaval all inform the plays. Close read key passages — a 10-line close reading can anchor a whole essay.

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