Shakespeare and Me - Important Decisions
Now I and many others can vouch for this. Learning Shakespeare quotes is the hardest thing in the world when you’re not sure which quotes you actually want to use. As fabulous as it is to know whole soliloquy’s and conversations but really they’re only good as party tricks amongst scholars. I know I’ve never made a friend over my knowledge of the beginning of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”. So what are the most important things to think about when shakespeare revision time comes around.
- Theme
It’s important to know what quotes are linked to which theme, or themes. This way if you get a question such as religion, conflict, hypocrisy etc. you’ll have a whole list of quotations you can rifle through to really bulk out your essay.
- Length
Keep your quotes short. There is nothing worse than trying to remember long quotations. For example if we relate back to the last Shakespeare and Me, where I wrote about some of my favourite quotes, rather than writing out “forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum”, you could simply say that Hamlet uses the hyperbole of “forty thousand brothers” to show how much more he loved Ophelia than her brother. Keeping quotes short is vital to markers as well as they don’t want to see how well you can remember quotes, although it feels like it. They want to see that you can use these quotes and show a real depth of understanding about how they relate to a theme or concept.
- Context
Know your quotes in context. There’s no good using a fabulous quote if you don’t know where about in the play it comes from. This is because perhaps quotes may have a different meaning depending on how a character is feeling in a particular moment. Additionally this can often link to the theme as in one scene a quote may link to one theme whereas it could easily mean something else in another scene. This sounds far more complicated than it really should be. Essentially the key is to know where about in the play the quote is said and...
- Who said it?
If you’re about to say that so and so said such a line when actually it was said by another can really lose you marks in a paper. It’s really important when looking a themes like conflict as it shows your knowledge of who is in a more powerful position. Additionally getting a quote wrong can put you in bad stead for the rest of the paper as you can continuously think that that character is in fact saying those lines when it is another character entirely. This is something that happens mostly with minor characters who don’t have large roles in multiple scenes, yet mostly they have a lot of important things to say and therefore should not be disregarded and their names should be learnt.
So there are a few tips on how to choose your quotations. Now how do you go about learning them? This was something I struggled with when I was in sixth form as I had to memorise two plays worth of quotes and poetry as well! And then my teacher told me that Hamlet was the longest of Shakespeare’s plays and I almost had a breakdown. But here are a few of my top tips.
- Flash cards are your friends
Indeed they are! Flash cards made my life so much easier when I was learning quotes. On one side I had my quotes, on the other side their meanings, split off into act and scene. Every day I would take a stack of these to school with me and flick through them when I had a spare few moments.
- Repetition
Repeating your quotes may get boring, but it’s worth it. Even if you do it with friends, where one of you starts off a quote and the rest of you finish it. It can be made into a game but at the same time you are learning quotes. Maybe even if one of you said a quote and the other said where it was from and who said it. It’s all about repeating key quotations to get them stuck in your brain.
- Practise
When I say practise I mean practise writing essays. Every exam board has a load of past papers with questions for you to practise with. Some even have a corresponding mark scheme so you can have a look at how you did. What this does is give you the opportunity of practising how to use your quotations in context with the linguistic analysis and historical context.
These are my tips for picking and learning quotes for Shakespeare essays. I’m hoping to do a whole post soon about the historical context for Shakespeare and some more about the period in which he was writing. Maybe also when I get home to all my notes I can have a dig out of all of my old work and show you how I structured and wrote my old essays. If you have anything else you’d like to see in this series do let me know!
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