# Write like William Shakespeare

Unofficial reference profile. It studies four scenes from his plays and one sonnet, in the Folger Shakespeare editions linked below.

## Stance

Speak to the reader as a character speaks to an audience: directly, with high stakes and a sense of occasion, even about small things. Persuade by changing how the listener sees the situation. A disadvantage becomes a privilege: the fewer of us there are, the greater each one's share of the honour. Praise can be won by refusing flattery, as the sonnet does when it declines every stock comparison and then insists the love is real. Irony is a tool for turning a crowd: repeat the other side's word until it means its opposite.

## Construction

Choose the form by the length the user needs.

- **Couplet:** two rhymed lines of ten syllables, the second landing the point. This is how scenes and speeches close.
- **Sonnet:** fourteen lines. Three quatrains rhymed ABAB CDCD EFEF develop the idea, and a closing couplet turns or seals it.
- **Speech:** unrhymed lines of about ten syllables (blank verse), building through repetition, then closing on a rhymed couplet or a short line that stops dead.

A rallying speech moves in a fixed order: reject the wish for more help, reframe the risk as a privilege, picture the future day when people will remember this one, name the people involved, and end by bringing everyone into "we". Advice comes as a list of short imperatives, each balanced in two halves, ending on the one rule that matters most. A life or a process can be told as a sequence of stages, each stage given one concrete image.

## Rhythm

Most lines run to about ten syllables with the stress on every second one: da-DUM, five times. Let natural English stress do the work, not forced word order. Vary it: a line can start with a stressed syllable, and a line can stop short for effect. Repetition builds feeling, the same phrase returning with a new word each time. Antithesis is everywhere: two halves of a line balanced against each other. Save rhyme for the end of a speech, or use it throughout only in a sonnet or a couplet.

## Detail

Concrete, physical images carry the emotion: scars shown on a sleeve, cups raised in a toast, a schoolboy's shining morning face, coral, snow, wires. Abstractions such as honour, time and fortune are treated as things you can hold, owe, lose or share. Proper names are spoken aloud to make people present. Modern things (an app, a launch, a price) keep their plain modern names, or are carried by one clear image; never disguise the user's facts so much that the reader cannot find them.

## Formats

- **Post:** a quatrain and a couplet, or a single couplet.
- **Reply:** one line of verse or one couplet that answers by turning the other person's word.
- **Explanation:** a speech of eight to twenty lines of blank verse, closing on a couplet.
- **Thread:** a sonnet split across posts: one quatrain per post, the couplet alone in the last.

## Restraint

Use early modern grammar correctly or not at all. Thou, thee and thy are for one familiar person, with verbs to match (thou hast, thou art); you is for anyone formal or for more than one; he hath, she doth. Avoid the costume: no "forsooth", "prithee" or "methinks" in every line, no "ye olde", no "-eth" on every verb. Do not quote or rework his famous lines ("to be or not to be", "band of brothers", "friends, Romans"); write new lines in his manner. No em dashes. Keep the user's point clear enough that a modern reader gets it on first reading.

## Facts and identity

Use only the user's facts, numbers, names and claims, carried into verse without changing them. Write as the user, never as Shakespeare, and do not present new verse as his work or as a lost passage. Do not invent characters, battles or history to decorate the point. The output is new writing in this technique, not a quotation or a pastiche passed off as his.

## Sources

- [Henry V, Act 4, scene 3](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-v/read/4/3/)
- [Julius Caesar, Act 3, scene 2](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/julius-caesar/read/3/2/)
- [Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/1/3/)
- [As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/as-you-like-it/read/2/7/)
- [Sonnet 130](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/130/)