Paraphrasing Shakespeare

General directions

Paraphrase from Richard II

Paraphrase from 1 Henry IV

Writing your term paper

Topics for term paper

 

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GENERAL  DIRECTIONS  FOR  PARAPHRASING

Paraphrasing is a way to bring Shakespeare’s meaning into sharper focus. Think of paraphrasing as zooming in on a significant speech. The speech—or dialogue, if more than one speaker is involved—comes at an important moment in the drama. To get the speech in focus, you first need to explain its dramatic context, which is made up of two elements: the characters’ actions (the “plot”) and their thoughts and feelings (“sentiments”). Having provided a context for the speech, you need to analyze and gloss (give synonyms for) its significant words before you start paraphrasing it.

1. Quote the speech in its exact form as poetry or prose, using boldface or underlining to emphasize significant words and phrases. Significant words include figurative language (metaphors and personifications; see definitions below) as well as words that are unusual or whose meaning has changed. Even if a word is familiar, look up its etymology; Shakespeare expected his readers or auditors to be particularly attentive to the Latin roots of words.

2. In no more than 100 words, describe the dramatic context. Ask yourself how the scene forwards the action of the play; one way to do this is to imagine the play with the scene left out. Can you find dramatic irony in the speech? DRAMATIC IRONY may be defined as the situation brought about when a character’s perceptions or intentions are clearly at odds with what we know to be the real (or, as the drama unfolds, the eventual) state of affairs.

3. In no more than 200 words, state the speaker’s purpose in the speech, summarize its main argument, and characterize the speaker’s sentiments. What are the speaker or the speakers arguing—that is, what is s/he trying to get across in the speech, and to whom? Is the speaker trying to persuade another person to believe, do, or feel something? Is s/he being ironical or witty? (see NOTE ON STYLE below). If the speech is a soliloquy or an aside, what does the speaker tell us about her/his passions, sentiments, or purpose?

4. Paraphrase the speech by putting its Shakespearean meaning into modern English. Keep the first person (the “I”) of the speaker. Repeat nouns and other words whose meaning is plain, but don’t shirk difficult words whose Shakespearean meaning requires a modern gloss. If your gloss seems uncertain, you may strengthen it by adding a parenthesis. Try not to lose sight of the forest for the trees; a good paraphrase should capture the main import of a Shakespearean speech at the same time that it brings out the vehicle of each metaphor.
                Above all, don’t confuse paraphrasing with summarizing.  Summarizing or generalizing the meaning simply gets rid of a metaphor by suppressing its vehicle (see METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE).

METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE: A metaphor is a transfer (both words mean literally “carry across”): the name of a thing or an activity is carried across to another thing or action. In other words, a metaphor involves misnaming. The  deliberate misnaming gives us pleasure because it brings out identical or similar (hence the term simile) elements in two things or ideas not usually connected. In his sonnet 18 comparing his young friend to “a summer’s day,” Shakespeare writes, “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” Here the word eye is misapplied to the sun because the poet wants to convey the powerful effect of the young man’s glance. He uses the shining summer sun as his vehicle to bring out the similarity between his young friend and a summer day, noting at the same time a difference: the young friend is “more temperate” (the difference or misapplication becomes clear when you look more closely at the metaphor; in this case, we sense that an eye does not “shine” with heat as the sun does).
                When you analyze metaphorical language, always look for the actual vehicle used in the misnaming or “transfer.” Once you’ve identified the actual thing (e.g., a part of the body) or activity (e.g., a trade or skill) that serves as the vehicle, you’ll have no trouble spotting both the similarity and the difference.

PERSONIFICATION AND METONYMY:  Metonymy (literally, “by-name”) is metaphor based on association—not on similarity. Because the “transfer” does not carry across some natural resemblance but merely links up some customary association, you have to seek the meaning of metonymy in literary and symbolic tradition (all symbols are metonymy, including even so-called pictographs that are supposed to resemble the things they name; a reader ignorant of its traditional meaning would never be able to guess what the written sign or pictograph refers to). Sometimes the metonymy seems natural or intuitive: a snake, for example, is a natural symbol for evil. But the link does not involve actual resemblance; rather, it involves a natural association of the snake with our fears (as atavistic tree-dwellers?).
                Note also that the other part of this metonymic “transfer,” evil, is an abstraction rather than an actual, perceptible thing. The same kind of metonymy occurs in personfication. A personfication is metonymy involving some abstraction: its vehicle “transfers” concrete, physical attributes to the abstraction which is often capitalized (for example, Jealousy is personified as a yellow-faced woman tormented by snakes; Hope is a woman dressed in blue; Sorrow is dressed in black; Victory is imagined having wings; Lust—for reasons buried in folkloric tradition—is personified by a goat). Personification humanizes an abstraction, or else it relates an inanimate thing to us by endowing it with a purpose (e.g. the “biting wind”).  Most personifications can be talked to like a human being or an animal and even addressed familiarly as “thou.”  Note that the abstraction need not be something imaginary or unreal; Time and Death, often personified, are undeniable realities—and so is Evil.

NOTE ON STYLE: You’ll find it easier to paraphrase a speech if you observe its style or manner of address. Most speeches can be assigned to one of three styles: the high style appropriate to the court, to serious thoughts, and to historic deeds; the plain style suited to the country, used by uneducated persons to express commonplace sentiments such as proverbs; and the mean (i.e. middle) style associated with the city and with clever conversation. Each style has its special purpose. The high style aims to move you to action or feeling. The mean style seeks to entertain by wit. The end of the plain style is to inform or instruct; most courses in freshman composition work on developing a plain style.
                A passionate utterance in any of the styles is apt to rely on metaphors, whereas a thoughtful address is more likely to depend on wit. One sign of intellectual effort is personification, which is a conventional kind of metaphor (metonymy; see above) rather than an original simile. Other signs of wit are irony (saying one thing while meaning another) and antithesis (patterned speech: e.g., words and phrases balanced against one another. They may be formed into a chiasmus, or grouped by alliteration, by rhyme, etc.). In contrast to poetry, which heightens the style by metaphors, the highly patterned prose in a comedy like Much Ado subordinates the metaphors to the speakers’  wit. Shakespeare’s comedies generally use a mean style that can either sink to a plain style (compare Dogberry) or rise to a high style (compare the passages of poetry).

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PARAPHRASE OF Richard II 3.2.160–77 (word count: 650)

1) Quotation

                                For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and—farewell, king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends.  Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

2) Context

King Richard arrives from campaigning in Ireland to defend his kingdom against Bolingbroke, who has returned from exile abroad to claim his father’s inheritance that Richard seized upon Gaunt’s death. We have just seen Bolingbroke and his Percy henchmen defy Richard’s deputy York and do justice upon Richard’s favorites, Bushy and Green. When Richard first hears, from Salisbury, of Bolingbroke’s menacing approach and then, from Scroop, learns that his favorites have been executed, he collapses in despair, despite the best efforts of Carlisle and Aumerle to encourage him.

3) Sentiments and argument

In this speech, Richard gives vent to self-pity, a passion brought on by his suddenly realizing that he is just as vulnerable as his favorites whom Bolingbroke has beheaded. Richard seems bent on dramatizing his grief, and he even chides his followers for trying to “lead me forth / From that sweet way I was in to despair” (204–5). His main argument is that a king imagines he is invulnerable because he sees others tremble in his royal presence but doesn’t realize Death is waiting for the moment to finish him off. Richard cleverly develops the personification by making Death the real king who manipulates Richard like a puppet or play-king. This thought leads Richard to reject all ceremony as a kind of mockery and to claim—not very convincingly—that he finds no essential difference between himself and his dutiful followers, who listen in dismay to their king’s self-abasement. This speech should be compared with Richard’s soliloquy in prison near the end of the play.

4) Paraphrase

Death keeps his court within the empty crown that encircles a king’s vulnerable/venerable head (“mortal” means dying; “temple” puns on the fact that a king is like a sacred building). There Death sits enthroned like a grotesque jester, scoffing at the king’s show of magnificence and grinning at his regal ceremony. (Like a puppet-master,) Death grants the king a momentary breathing space to play the monarch and condemn others to die by his mere glance. Death infuses in the king a vain conceit of his power, making him think his mortal flesh is an impregnable wall of brass protecting the life within it. When Death has thus amused himself (or when Death has thus indulged the king; or while the king is in this smug mood), he besieges the castle and bores through its wall (the king’s flesh) with a little pin (some disease? or some trivial but unperceived cause of death?)—and that’s the end of the king!
                Put your hats back on in my presence; don’t mock my (mortal) flesh and blood by signifying your profound regard for me (as if I were immortal and not like you). Forget about distinctions of rank, civil customs, proper behavior, shows of duty to your superior; for you have all this while taken me for someone I am not. No more than you can I live without food. I too (like you) am sensible of what I sorely lack, I suffer grief and I need friends (to share my sorrows?). Seeing me thus reduced to a mere subject like yourselves (note pun on “subjected,” i.e. made dependent or subordinate), how can you tell me I am a king?

PARAPHRASE OF Falstaff’s soliloquy from 1 Henry IV, 5.4.110–22 (word count: 645)

1) Quotation

Embowelled? If thou embowel me today, I’ll give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow.
‘Sblood, ‘twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me, scot and lot too. Counterfeit?
I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not
the life of a man. But to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true
and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved
my life. Zounds, I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead. How if he should counterfeit too
and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit.

2) Summary of Circumstances, Argument, and Sentiments

Hal has just killed Hotspur and taken his leave of Falstaff, whom he sees lying dead nearby (“Could not all this flesh / Keep in a little life?”). Saying he’ll have Falstaff’s corpse disemboweled for embalming, Hal leaves the stage. After a pause so that we (the audience) may take in this scene of the cowardly knight lying next to the heroic Percy, Falstaff startles us as he leaps up and shows that “all this flesh” is perfectly intact. Although addressed to us, his ensuing soliloquy repeats his argument from the tavern scene (2.4) where Falstaff tried to persuade his companions that he had not run away out of cowardice but from a noble instinct.
                The gist of his argument is a paradox: a man is never more alive or has his wits more about him than when he’s trying to escape being killed. As for the sentiments revealed here, Falstaff sounds quite satisfied with his argument at first; but then his instinct of self-preservation reminds him that Percy, too, may be feigning death and might be really dangerous. The chief metaphors come from hunting and preparing a deer, and from acting or “counterfeiting.” The important nouns, valor and discretion, are abstract qualities or virtues but they do not really become agents, as they might have done if Falstaff had said ‘Valor and Discretion have saved my life.’ Note that these active personifications,  besides being animate, also have a willful purpose (saving his life).

3) Paraphrase

You think you’re going to have me emboweled? If you can manage the job of eviscerating me (taking out all my guts) in one day, you’re welcome to pickle my flesh for tomorrow’s meal. By Christ’s blood, it was time to play dead, or that furious devil, Douglas, would have paid me in full (Falstaff puns on paid meaning “punished” and “paid off the debt that I owe to God,” 5.1.126). Counterfeit? That’s not true, I am not just an actor playing a role. To die is to become a (waxen) image of a man, a mere corpse without life. But to keep myself alive by posing as a dead man—that’s not to counterfeit (fake it), that’s to portray life in its most vital form. (COMMENT: When you’re in danger of death, you’re most alive. Who is more alive: someone enjoying a beer in front of his TV, or someone walking a tightrope over the abyss?) Intelligent caution is a truer form of courage (than mere foolhardiness; NOTE that “better part” does not mean larger part), by which courage I’ve saved my life. By God’s wounds, I’m afraid this Percy could still blow me up, dead as he seems. What if he should be playing dead and were to rise up, too? No doubt he’d prove the more vital of the pair. (If he rose from death to kill Sir John, Hotspur would prove himself even more fully alive—in terms of Falstaff’s paradoxical definition, he’d be a “better counterfeit” than Falstaff.)

WRITING YOUR TERM PAPER

By the last week of classes, you should have written a preliminary draft of your term paper that includes a title and a coherent introduction of one or two paragraphs with a thesis statement. You may be asked to read in class an abstract of your paper, including its title and thesis statement, together with an outline of your argument, which must be based on quotations from the plays.

The final paper must quote and paraphrase a speech (or separate speeches) totaling 10–15 lines. If your topic is a comparison/contrast, you may compare an action, a character, or a theme from one the plays we read with another Shakespeare play.  Whatever its topic, your paper should focus on a particular scene or scenes.  Instead of doing a formal paraphrase summarizing the circumstances and arguments (see above, GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR PARAPHRASING), you may find it easier to paraphrase a speaker’s arguments and sentiments only when you have occasion to quote them.  Just as in writing out a formal paraphrase, however, you should pay attention to metaphors, personifications, irony, antithesis, and other marks of style. (See METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE and the NOTE ON STYLE, above.)

Basic pointers to follow in writing your term paper

Format and quotations

All papers should be double-spaced except for the quotations, which should be single-spaced and indented. (Don’t be misled by the format of the online paraphrases, above.  There, the quotation as well as the entire paraphrase has been single-spaced to keep the text together for different browsers.  In your paper, indent and single-space quotations only.)

Your first reference should identify the play(s), act, scene, and line(s): Shrew 3.1.16–18 (note abbreviated title; no commas; two digits for both lines). Once it is clear what scene you are referring to, you only need to give the lines in a parenthesis: “I trust you not” (42–43). Note that the parenthesis goes outside the quotation, with period after parenthesis. If you make a reference in your argument, you don’t need a parenthesis to identify the quotation. Just refer to the lines: “Bianca lets her disguised tutor know in lines 41–44 that she’s willing to go along with his ruse, but she also says, ‘I trust you not,’ and she tells him he should neither presume nor despair.”  Note that commas and periods always go inside adjacent quotation marks.

Title

Your title should do more than announce your subject. In a short paper like this, the title has to define your subject by limiting it. A title such as “Beatrice: A Witty Heroine” doesn’t tell your reader what is individual about your approach. “Beatrice: A Witty Shrew” is much more distinctive because it suggests an interesting argument.

You might try using a device favored by Shakespeare scholars and adapt a quotation to your title: “Beatrice as ‘Lady Disdain.’” Notice how by quoting a phrase from the play, you can borrow an “argument” or implied thesis from one of the characters (see 1.1.108). And you’ll pique your reader’s interest by featuring Benedick’s preciosity—here, his witty trick of addressing Beatrice by personifying one of her discreditable traits (his thesis or implied assertion is that she epitomizes scorn and contempt). Some more examples of quotation-derived titles:

“‘Honor at the stake’: The Heroine’s Reputation Compromised” (could be used for TN, Wives, Ado, AWW)
“‘Some soul of goodness in things evil’: Providence in Henry V”
“‘Prophetic Souls’: Hamlet’s and Brutus’s Ghosts”
“‘It is the cause’: Desdemona’s Murder”
“‘O brave new world!’ Costume in The Tempest”

Thesis statement

A thesis statement may seem artificial or mechanical, but it is indispensable for a brief essay—even if it’s the last thing you actually write. Some writers begin with a thesis; others like to state it at the end of the first paragraph or at the start of the second. Depending on how the opening paragraph is written, its argument (thesis) may either be announced at the beginning or summarized at its end. Here’s a thesis that could serve in either position: “Beatrice claims for herself the same libertine freedom that a man like Benedick enjoys.” A paragraph introducing this thesis might explain that both lovers cling to an ideal of “libertine freedom,” and the paper might go on to argue that they fear their ideal will be compromised by any commitment to love and marriage.

Argument and evidence

When you frame critical arguments about literature, the evidence or proof of what you say is the PERTINENT EXAMPLES you cite.

Each assertion you make about part of Shakespeare’s play should come with a “for instance.” A distinguished paper will select examples that are interesting as well as pertinent. Quote related words and phrases from elsewhere in the scene or the play that support your reading of the chosen scene. For clarity, you should paraphrase any language you cite that contains unusual words or metaphors.  Glossing or briefly paraphrasing the quotation is the readiest way to show how it pertains to your argument.

Comparison and contrast

Every comparison implies a contrast. The more alike two things are, the more necessary it is to differentiate them.  While comparing different characters and situations can be a difficult undertaking, choosing an ambitious topic is not as important as demonstrating your grasp of the dramatic context.  Even so, you’re encouraged to tackle a difficult comparison in order to better understand both of its elements; you’ll have a chance to revise your efforts, and in fact the very best papers are produced by trial and error.  Note that if you do compare two characters, you should compare them with respect to some role or theme that you clearly identify in your title. You can also compare and contrast characters and actions within the same play (or within related plays like the Henriad or the Roman plays), especially when one of the roles mimics another at a different level: e.g., Polonius as a senile Hamlet; Dogberry as a frustrated wit; Pistol as a caricature of Hotspur.

SUGGESTED TOPICS FOR TERM PAPER

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