English 101: Suggestions for Second Paper
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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1. Focus on analyzing the details in the chosen speech and poem, rather than summarizing the text’s plot or paraphrasing the passage (or “translating” the early modern English into your own words).
2. Don’t just observe, “A simile can be found in line 3”; explain what is being compared to what and the significance of the terms of comparison.
3. Consider how the details in the passage relate to the themes, images, and action of the rest of the play or poem (for example, central and/or recurring images of “celestial bodies”—stars, lovers, and star-crossed lovers—in Romeo and Juliet and in Astrophil and Stella).
4. Be thorough—examine each line word by word. Comment on a range of literary devices (consulting a glossary of literary terms will help you here).
5. Quote and interpret specific words and phrases from the passage(s) to illustrate your points.
6. Consider how the passage may signal its socio-historical context or refer to early modern theatrical/poetic practices.
7. Avoid circular, imprecise statements (i.e., “Shakespeare uses blank verse to make the language sound more poetic and flow more smoothly” or “The beginning is important because it gives a foreshadowing and sets the reader up for what is to come.” ) Recall, for instance, that Shakespeare uses blank verse to describe death as well as love. Explain instead how the form reinforces the passage’s content.
Here is a sample close reading of a speech from Hamlet:
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. S’blood, do you think I am easier to be played than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
Hamlet speaks to Rosencrantz and Guidenstern after the play within a play in Act 3 and before the closet scene. Shakespeare uses prose rather than orderly blank verse to indicate Hamlet’s emotional intensity and distracted state. The passage reiterates one of the play’s thematic concerns, namely the degradation of potentially noble humanity (“how unworthy a thing you make of me); we can compare the passage to an earlier scene in which Hamlet, also in the presence of R and G ponders, “What a piece of work is a man.” Hamlet’s metaphor, comparing himself to a recorder or pipe, may refer to the music that was performed after Elizabethan performances. R and G are trying to “sound” Hamlet out for Claudius; although Hamlet’s claim that there is “excellent voice, in this little organ” is true (he talks constantly throughout the play and often loudly), he resents his former friends’ attempts to “play” upon him and puns on “fret”—they annoy him but can only figure the instrument, not make it perform. There may also be an implicit pun on “instrument””—R and G are spying instruments of the king. The emphasis on the lack of harmony between friends and in the state, despite the musical metaphor
