# Shakespeare's Plays and Repetitiveness--Plus What's the Big Deal? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 31, 2020, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373 "2020-12-31T17:46:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2020, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/21 "2020-12-31T23:36:37Z")
Oh shiit, or rather Oh Shylock! ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2020, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/22 "2020-12-31T23:55:29Z")
Shakespeare wrote dialog, monologue and soliloquy in meter, allowing it to be delivered quickly (a typical Globe play ran for about 2 hours because of the pacing). The theater in the day was a raucous place, with the audience vocally responding to what they were watching, and probably talking among themselves much of the time. In such an environment, the playwright has to include a certain amount of redundancy so that the audience will catch what is going on, because the action and dialog happens so fast and not all of them are able to attend closely to something that only gets said once. ---
**Author:** ![Civil\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d78d45/32.png) [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/23 "2021-01-01T00:53:04Z")
Public service announcement, yes. I’ll shut up, now. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/24 "2021-01-01T02:35:38Z")
Verily, ‘tis all good. ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/25 "2021-01-01T03:14:28Z")
This is a bit longer, but worth reading in its entirety. From _Henry IV, Part I_, here is Lady Percy speaking to her husband, Henry “Hotspur” Percy, a veteran of many battles. > O, my good lord, why are you thus alone? > For what offence have I this fortnight been > A banish’d woman from my Harry’s bed? > Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee > Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep? > Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth, > And start so often when thou sit’st alone? > Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks; > And given my treasures and my rights of thee > To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy? > In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d, > And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars; > Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed; > Cry ‘Courage! to the field!’ And thou hast talk’d > Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents, > Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets, > Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, > Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain, > And all the currents of a heady fight. > Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war, > And thus hath so bestirr’d thee in thy sleep, > That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow > Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream; > And in thy face strange motions have appear’d, > Such as we see when men restrain their breath > On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these? > Some heavy business hath my lord in hand, > And I must know it, else he loves me not. This passage has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. It was probably written in 1597, more than 400 years ago, and yet it is a very accurate description of what we would now call PTSD. There are the disturbed sleep and nightmares of previous battles, his isolation and withdrawal from his wife (“A banish’d woman from my Harry’s bed”), his general depression (“What is’t that takes from thee Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep”), and his agitated mood (“And in thy face strange motions have appear’d, Such as we see when men restrain their breath”). Shakespeare was not a military man, so far as we know, and yet he had sufficient insight into the human experience to describe its effects on a soldier, centuries before the concept of PTSD had been formulated. Insights of this sort are one of the things that make him great. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/26 "2021-01-01T16:32:03Z")
This passage is one where we likely can say it was Shakespeare’s personal experience which animated him. His son Hamnet died at age 11. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/27 "2021-01-01T16:47:40Z")
Read some of his contemporaries. He’s entertaining in a way that, say, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd aren’t. He raised the bar for witty dialogue (though not so much for original plots). He’s kind of the dividing line between Middle English and Modern English, even if he didn’t seem like it at the time. Also, he and Richard Burbage invented the admissions gate, which did an awful lot to transform the theater. Before the Globe Theater, acting companies just sort of passed he hat around after a performance and asked people to put in what they thought the show was worth. I’m guessing most of the actors had to keep their day jobs. Shakespeare was instrumental in making the stage a viable livelihood. So even if you’re not impressed by his contributions to the language, you should appreciate what he did for theater. ---
**Author:** ![gdave](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gdave/32/3683_2.png) [@gdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gdave)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/28 "2021-01-01T16:59:26Z")
> [@MrAtoz](#): > > Shakespeare was not a military man, so far as we know, and yet he had sufficient insight into the human experience to describe its effects on a soldier, centuries before the concept of PTSD had been formulated. Insights of this sort are one of the things that make him great. Shakespeare was never a soldier, but there must have been quite a few of them in London in his time (England was directly involved in _8_ wars and significant armed conflicts in his lifetime). It’s clear that he talked to a _lot_ of people, in a lot of different walks of life, and _listened_ to them. The characters in his plays aren’t fictional personalities he just invented from whole cloth. They’re real people that he knew, or at least facets of them. That’s not to say that he wasn’t a genius. Talking and listening to vastly different people, getting inside their heads, and then transmitting that understanding to others, especially in a formalized and stylized format like an Elizabethan play, is _hard_. And Shakespeare not only did it, he did it so well that his characters still sound like real, living, breathing people to us, 400 years later. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/29 "2021-01-01T17:46:38Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > I know I read some place that people would **hock** their goods between the play and the audience. Did you perhaps mean **hawk** their goods? Is a question about a writer’s misuse of language containing a misuse itself an example of Gaudere’s Law or a corollary to it? ---
**Author:** ![gdave](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gdave/32/3683_2.png) [@gdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gdave)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/30 "2021-01-01T17:57:18Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Did you perhaps mean **hawk** their goods? No, no, the audience pits in a theater were a well known market for pawn brokers of the era. That’s where Shakespeare met the real world inspirations for Shylock. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/31 "2021-01-01T18:16:13Z")
I hadn’t realized until just now that “hock” meant specifically to pawn goods, and was different from the homophone “hawk,” which is selling goods in general. This is a stupid distinction, and I encourage everyone to use “hock” to mean “selling in general” until it disappears. ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/32 "2021-01-01T18:23:07Z")
It’s not a stupid distinction. If you hock something at a pawn shop, and come back within the set time with the money, you get it back; you’ve not sold it, unless you let the time period run out without reclaiming. When you hawk something, you’ve sold it. It’s not your property anymore. Two different things, two different words. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/33 "2021-01-01T18:24:38Z")
You’re wrong. It’s dumb, and I will brook no disagreement. I HAVE SPOKEN! ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/34 "2021-01-01T18:42:22Z")
> [@Horatio\_Hellpop](#): > > Also, he and Richard Burbage invented the admissions gate, which did an awful lot to transform the theater. Before the Globe Theater, acting companies just sort of passed he hat around after a performance and asked people to put in what they thought the show was worth. Shakespeare was an innovator, but not that much of an innovator. The first purpose-built theater in England was the Red Lion, built in 1567 when Shakespeare was three years old and Richard Burbage was a baby. As far as we know, it worked the same way as later theaters – you had to pay to get inside before you could see a play – and The Theatre, built in 1576 by Richard Burbage’s father James, _definitely_ worked that way. To the extent that anybody in the Burbage family invented the stage as a commercial enterprise, it was James; by the time Shakespeare and the younger generation of Burbages came along, there were multiple companies of professional actors in London, all performing at theaters that charged admission (but not at the Globe yet – it wasn’t built until 1599, roughly midway through Shakespeare’s career). ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/35 "2021-01-01T18:44:53Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > I hadn’t realized until just now that “hock” meant specifically to pawn goods, and was different from the homophone “hawk,” which is selling goods in general. Homophone? Only if you’re speaking American! 😀 ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/36 "2021-01-01T18:53:36Z")
I speak American, like Shakespeare and Jesus! ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/37 "2021-01-01T19:53:38Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > Homophone? Only if you’re speaking American! What is this America you speak of? In my country hock and hawk are no more similar than stock and stalk, wok and walk, or tock and talk. And don’t give me Shakespeare! You ever see what words he thought rhymed? “If this be error and upon me proved/ I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/38 "2021-01-01T20:33:44Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > What is this America you speak of? In my country hock and hawk are no more similar than stock and stalk, wok and walk, or tock and talk. In my part of the US, those pairs are absolutely indistinguishable. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/39 "2021-01-01T20:51:59Z")
Tell me what part that is. So I can avoid it. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2021, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373/40 "2021-01-01T20:52:41Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > In my part of the US, those pairs are absolutely indistinguishable. I live in Canada and yeah, to me all those pairs are homonymous. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shakespeares-plays-and-repetitiveness-plus-whats-the-big-deal/929373.md?page=3)