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Chapter 5 - Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Emma Smith
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Finding the heart of the play

Try a trick. Gather together the pages of the text of your chosen play – not including any introduction or prefatory material – and try, as accurately as you can, to open the play in the middle. Look at where you are. Who is on stage? What is going on? What is the effect of the scene to the development of the plot? It doesn't always work, but often the chronological mid-point in a play gives us something central: an event, a tableau, an encounter, which we might construct as in some way pivotal.

Here are some examples. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the centre-point of the play is the death of Mercutio, brawling with Tybalt. We might see this first death in the tragedy as a signal that things cannot now go well; the death of this jesting character who dies on a joke – ‘ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man’ (3.1.89–90) – marks the end of the lightness with which the Montague/Capulet feud has been temporarily leavened. Chapter 6 considers Shakespeare's use of his sources in more detail, but it is interesting to note here that Mercutio is one of Shakespeare's most substantial additions to his sources: what would the play be like without him, and why, having invented him, does Shakespeare have to kill him off at this point?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Structure
  • Emma Smith, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816970.006
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  • Structure
  • Emma Smith, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816970.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Structure
  • Emma Smith, University of Oxford
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816970.006
Available formats
×