Being able to classify and diagram the work of William Shakespeare is considered a sign of mastery, not least because he is the foremost master of the English language himself. Everything about his writing often seems highly complex at first, but with a little mental muscle we can break his verses down into their core parts just as we would with any other sentence.

Doing this in the classroom has an amazing effect. Students may need a little help getting started on one of his verses, but they soon figure out the sentence pattern with all its modifiers and create an elaborate diagram connecting each word.

Even better, doing this demystifies what Shakespeare is saying. From figurative language to humor, it pretty much all makes sense in the end.

PRACTICE SENTENCES

In this series on the language of grammar, we already covered William Shakespeare’s connection to Queen Elizabeth. In contrast to that earlier post which was written to practice participles, this post will work with Shakespeare’s own words as yet another example of authentic language.

There is, of course, much to choose from, so I like selecting verses from one of his plays that we already study in Literature. Here are the classifications and diagrams from the “Tomorrow Speech” in Macbeth. Though it consists of ten verses, it is only four sentences.

“The way to dusty death” is part of a prepositional phrase in which “on” is inferred. I have used an “x” as a placeholder for it.
There is no verb in this sentence, but we can infer Shakespeare to have meant, “Go out, out brief candle.” Once again, I used an “x” as a placeholder for the missing word.
“Player” is an appositive of “shadow,” so we place them on the same line separated by a comma.
I treated “full of” as a compound preposition. Another option is to separate them and use “full” as an adjective, but I don’t think that works as well.

The meaning of Macbeth’s speech is readily apparent after classifying and diagramming it: life is pointless. Don’t worry; my class spends ample time discussing this message, and we always disagree with Macbeth.

And yet we also realize that this sentiment is fairly common in the world. None, however, have expressed it with the same poignancy as Shakespeare.

Therein lies another important lesson. Shakespeare could have just had Macbeth say, “Life is pointless!”

Instead, he used ten whole verses of poetic genius to turn one of the saddest thoughts imaginable into a work of art. His words seem more than words. They are feelings so real we can almost touch them. At the same time, however, we recoil from their horror. Rather than live the life of a morose idiot strutting and fretting toward death, Shakespeare has actually called us to live a true and meaningful life.

Now that’s a powerful use of language, not to mention an interesting Grammar lesson.