标签:
杂谈 |
分类: 电影艺术 |
If William Shakespeare wrote in broken English
grammar, why is he so famous for his literary works?
I'm not sure what you mean. Most of Shakespeare's sentences are
grammatical. Since he was chiefly a playwright, he occasional wrote
sentence fragments, because that's how people often talk, and he
was trying to mimic human speech. If anything, his writing was
unrealistic in that his characters were
much more often grammatical than
people are when they're speaking in real
life.
Here's a typical speech:
O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I
see!
-- Ophelia from "Hamlet."
Let's examine it from with our focus on
grammar.
1. "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" is a
perfectly grammatical sentence, with a subject ("mind") and a
predicate ("is here o'erthrown").
2. The next sentence is more complex, but it's equally
grammatical:
SUBJECT:
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all
observers,
PREDICATE:
quite, quite down!
Well, I suppose you can quibble that it should be
...
"is quite, quite down!"
... but that would ruin the poetic meter, and it's
unnecessary for comprehension, especially when spoken by an actor.
It's hearing someone sigh and say, "My life ... totally ruined by
drugs and alcohol!" There's no need for an "is."
3. And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;[and]
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with
ecstasy.
The above is perfectly grammatical, though complex. I
have bolded the main structural elements of the sentence, which you
could shorten to "And I now see that reason and that form and
feature blasted," which, while confusing out of context, is
grammatically the same as "And I now see that sofa and that table
and chair burning."
The non-bolded words are
gloss—modifying phrases. You could put them all
in parentheses if you wanted.
My addition of "[and]" isn't a cheat. I just did it to
clarify. The semicolon after "harsh" serves the same purpose.
Compare "I like cats and I like dogs" with "I like cats; I like
dogs."
My high school English teacher would have complained
about starting a sentence with "And," but that's a silly and
arbitrary rule which writers have ignored for centuries. Even God
(or at least the minions of King James I) ignored it:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.
And the earth was without form, and
void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and
there was light.
-- "The King James Bible," "Genesis"
Here, F. Scott Fitzgerald shockingly starts one
sentence with an "And" and another with a "But."
I think he was afraid they would dart down a side
street and out of his life forever.But they
didn't. And we all took the less
explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza
Hotel.
-- "The Great Gatsby."
Here's Jane Austen flagrantly ignoring the
rule:
The happiness anticipated by Catherine and Lydia
depended less on any single event, or any particular person, for
though they each, like Elizabeth, meant to dance half the evening
with Mr. Wickham, he was by no means the only partner who could
satisfy them, and a ball was, at any rate, a
ball. And even Mary could assure
her family that she had no disinclination for it.
-- "Pride and Prejudice."
And Charles Dickens wouldn't give a sixpence for my
English teacher's silly strictures:
So Mr. Kenge gave me his arm and we went round the
corner, under a colonnade, and in at a side
door. And so we came, along a
passage, into a comfortable sort of room where a young lady and a
young gentleman were standing near a great, loud-roaring
fire.
-- "Bleak House."
4. "O, woe is me, to have seen what I have seen, see
what I see" is a fairly simple, grammatical sentence, though to
please your English teacher, you might want to change the comma
between "seen" and "see" to a semicolon.
As to why Shakespeare is so famous, I doubt it has
much to do with whether or not he's perfectly grammatical. As Elvis
said, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog!" By which I assume he
meant bad grammar ain't gonna keep you off the
charts.
Shakespeare is famous at least partly because he used
language better than almost anyone else. And I'm not talking about
grammar. I'm talking about imagery, musicality, metaphor, meter,
and surprise. He painted with words. He made words
sing.
He also did this over 400 years ago, so his English
was a bit different from contemporary English. It takes some
training for a newbie to get into it. Here are some posts that
might help:
Marcus Geduld's answer to What is so great about
Shakespeare?
Marcus Geduld's answer to Is Seinfeld at the level of Shakespeare in terms of comedy?