Paraphrasing
Formatting your term paper
General directions for paraphrasing
Metaphorical language
Note on style
Paraphrases from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet
FORMATTING YOUR TERM PAPER
Format and quotations
All papers should be double-spaced except for the quotations, which should be single-spaced and indented. (Don’t be misled by the format of the
Shakespeare paraphrases elsewhere in this link. There, each quotation as well as the entire paraphrase has been single-spaced to keep the text
together for different browsers.)
If you are quoting four lines of poetry or fewer, run them into your text: “Aye, there’s the rub. / For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause. There’s the respect . . . ” (Ham. 3.1.66–69). Note the spaced slash marks
separating the lines and the three spaced periods to indicate something has been omitted. The same rules apply to any prose quotations that take
up more than four lines of the paper you are writing:
The knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to
be discerned, that [Psyche’s] confused seeds . . . were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the
knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam
fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. (Areopagitica 939)
Notice that you don’t put quotation marks around indented quotations, and that any omission—of a word, of a phrase, of one or more sentences—
gets marked either by the same three spaced dots (periods) or else by inserted words in brackets. Note too that the parenthetical reference comes
between the quotation marks and the period in the text, but after the period in the indentation.
For the kind of paper required in this course, parenthetical references to one or more of the author’s works are more practical than footnotes
mentioning your secondary sources (those can be added in a bibliography and you can cite them, too, in a parenthesis giving the critic’s or the
editor’s name with the page number of their book: (Kerrigan 939). Quotations from a long poem should be identified by the poem’s title (italicized
and abbreviated) followed by the section or book with line numbers: “Greedily she engorged without restraint, / And knew not eating death” (PL
9.791–92).
Parenthetical citations of dramatic speeches use the same format. Your first reference should identify the play, act, scene, and line(s) quoted: Shrew
3.1.16–18 (note abbreviated, italicized title; no commas; two digits for line numbers from 10 to 99 and for the ending line above 100: e.g., 3.2.138–
42). Once it is clear what scene you are referring to, you only need to give the lines in a parenthesis: “I trust you not” (42–43). Again, note that the
parenthesis goes outside the quotation, with period after parenthesis. If you want to summarize and partly quote a speech in your argument, you
don’t need a parenthesis to identify the quotation. Just identify the lines: “Bianca lets her disguised tutor know in lines 41–44 that she’s willing to
go along with his ruse, but she also says, ‘I trust you not,’ and she tells him he should neither presume nor despair.” Note that all commas and
periods go inside any adjacent quotation marks. (Question marks and exclamation points that you’ve added to the quoted text go outside the
quotation marks “like this”! Do you hear the irony when Eve says at line 811, “I perhaps am secret”?)
Title
Your title should do more than announce your subject. In a short paper like this, the title has to define your subject by limiting it. A title such as
“Beatrice: A Witty Heroine” doesn’t tell your reader what is individual about your approach. “Beatrice: A Witty Shrew” is much more distinctive
because it suggests an interesting argument.
You might try using a device favored by Shakespeare scholars and adapt a quotation to your title: “Beatrice as ‘Lady Disdain.’” Notice how by
quoting a phrase from the play or the poem, you can borrow an “argument” or implied thesis, either from one of the characters (see Ado 1.1.108) or
from the author: “Revolt and Disobedience” (see PL 9.7–8).
Thesis statement
A thesis statement may seem artificial or mechanical, but it is indispensable for a brief essay—even if it’s the last thing you actually write. Some
writers begin with a thesis; others like to state it at the end of the first paragraph or at the start of the second. Depending on how the opening
paragraph is written, its argument (thesis) may either be announced at the beginning or summarized at its end. Here’s a thesis that could serve in
either position: “Beatrice is an independent woman who claims for herself the same libertine freedom that men like Benedick enjoy.” A paragraph
introducing this thesis might explain that both lovers cling to an ideal of libertine (sexual) freedom, and the paper might go on to argue that they
fear they will compromise their freedom by committing themselves to love—to say nothing of marriage.
Argument and evidence
When you frame critical arguments about literature, the evidence or proof of what you say is the pertinent examples you cite.
Each assertion you make about part of a play or a poem should come with a “for instance.” A distinguished paper will select examples from the
author’s text that are thematically interesting as well as pertinent. Quote related words and phrases from elsewhere in the scene or the play (or in
the poem) that bear out your interpretation of the chosen passage or scene. Glossing or briefly paraphrasing the quoted passage is the readiest way
to show how it pertains to your argument. (For clarity, you should paraphrase in idiomatic, American English any language containing unusual
words or striking metaphors.)
Comparison and contrast
Every comparison implies a contrast. The more alike two things are, the more necessary it is to differentiate them (it’s harder to distinguish
between two identical wax apples than between a real apple and its waxen imitation). Comparing characters from different plays is persuasive only
to the extent that you can show their situations are similar. By the same token, to compare Milton’s great poems from the Restoration with his
earlier works, you’ll need to identify his characteristic ideas and themes.
You’ll have a chance to revise your first draft, and in fact the best papers are produced by trial and error. In any case, try to help your reader by
using your title to identify clearly the kind of theme—or, if you are comparing plays, the type of character—on which you mean to ground your
arguments.
GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR PARAPHRASING
Paraphrasing is a way to bring a speaker’s meaning into sharper focus. The speech—or dialogue, if more than one character is involved—comes
at a particular moment in the play and it serves to advance the drama. (To understand its importance, try imagining the play with the speech and the
scene left out.) Before you try to paraphrase a speech, take care to examine and describe its peculiar dramatic context. That has two elements (1)
the plot, which includes the characters’ immediate circumstances as well as their actions, and (2) their sentiments (thoughts and feelings). To
understand and paraphrase a speech, you need to examine both elements.
Begin by reproducing the text. Quote the speech in its exact form (i.e., as poetry or as prose), using boldface or italics for words and phrases
whose significance you want to emphasize. These should include figurative language (metaphors and personifications; see definitions below) as
well as words that you find unusual or whose meanings have changed. If a word seems strange, look up its etymology; Shakespeare and his
audience or readers were particularly attentive to the Latin roots of words. (NOTE: Your university may provide online access to the OED, an
invaluable tool for paraphrasing.)
Next, briefly describe both elements of the dramatic context. (1) Plot. Assume your readers know the plot and only need to be reminded how the
scene serves to further the play’s action. What scene precedes and what follows? Does the playwright exploit dramatic irony in the situation (see
definition below)? (2) Sentiments. Specify precisely the chief thoughts and feelings that you’re paraphrasing. Try to bring out the purpose of the
speech—keeping in mind that the speaker may have one purpose and the author another. Whom is the speaker trying to persuade to do, feel, or
believe something? What response does the author expect from the audience? Is the speaker expressing an emotion? Making an argument? Being
ironical or witty (see “Note on Style,” below)? If the speech is a soliloquy or an aside, what is it meant to reveal about the speaker’s motives or
sentiments?
Finally, paraphrase the speech by putting its Shakespearean meaning into modern English. Keep the first person (the “I”) of the speaker. Repeat
nouns and verbs whose sense is plain (unambiguous; not involving wordplay or metaphor), but don’t shirk difficult words whose Shakespearean
meaning requires a modern gloss. Where you’re unsure how to gloss a particular word or phrase, use a parenthesis to suggest an alternative
meaning or to identify the metaphorical vehicle or any personification (see below).
Try not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. A successful paraphrase, even if you strip away the parenthetical explanations, should always
preserve the main import of a speech. Test the integrity of your paraphrase by reading it aloud alongside the Shakespearean original. Make sure that
anything you’ve added is enclosed in parentheses and that the paraphrase without its parentheses preserves Shakespeare’s uncluttered meaning.
METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE: A metaphor is a “transfer” (both words mean literally “carry across”): the name of a thing or an activity is
carried across to another thing or action. In other words, a metaphor involves misnaming. This deliberate misnaming gives us pleasure because it
brings out some identity (or similarity—whence simile) between two things or between different ideas not usually connected. In his sonnet 18
comparing his young friend to “a summer’s day,” Shakespeare writes, “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” Here the word eye is
misapplied to the sun, and the transfer allows the poet to convey the powerful effect of the young man’s glance. He uses the shining summer sun as
his vehicle to bring out the similarity between his young friend and a summer day, noting at the same time a difference: the young friend is “more
temperate.” No figurative resemblance will be perfectly exact; the metaphor will reflect the difference as well as the identity (in this case, we sense
that an eye does not “shine” with heat as the sun does).
When you analyze figurative language, always look for the actual vehicle used in the misnaming or transfer. Once you’ve identified the actual
thing (e.g., a part of the body) or activity (e.g., a trade or skill) or natural phenomenon (e.g., a fair day in May, sunshine, rough winds) that serves
as the vehicle, you’ll be able to recognize both similarity and difference in the metaphor.
PERSONIFICATION AND METONYMY: Metonymy (literally, “by-name”) is metaphor based on association instead of similarity. Because
the “transfer” does not carry across any natural resemblance but merely links up some customary association, you have to seek the meaning of
metonymy in literary and symbolic tradition. (All symbols are metonymy, including even so-called pictographs that are supposed to resemble the
things they name; a reader ignorant of its traditional meaning would never be able to guess what the written sign or pictograph refers to.)
Sometimes the metonymy seems natural or intuitive: a snake, for example, is a natural symbol for evil in most cultures. But the link (snake = evil)
does not rest on actual resemblance; rather, it arises from our cultural association of the snake with our fears—a defensive habit we perhaps
learned as atavistic tree-dwellers.
Note that what the snake stands for in this metonymic transfer, evil, is an abstraction rather than an actual, perceptible thing. This special kind of
metaphorical transfer is called personfication. A personfication is metonymy applied to some abstraction: its vehicle transfers concrete, physical
attributes to the abstraction, which may also be given a proper (capitalized) name. For example, Jealousy is personified as a yellow-faced woman
tormented by snakes; Hope is an extroverted woman dressed in blue; Sorrow is more introverted and dressed in black; Victory is imagined having
wings; Lust—for reasons buried in folkloric tradition—is personified by a goat.
Personification humanizes an abstraction by giving it purpose or pathos. A generalized, abstract noun (e.g., “the winter wind,” “my own fears,”
“unrestrained mirth”) does not become personification until it’s assigned an animate purpose or a passion (in AYL 2.1, the winter wind bites with
its “icy fang”; in sonnet 107, the soul of the world foretells events to come as “the prophetic soul / Of the wide world”; in 1H4 1.2, idleness is
released from its yoke to wander like stray oxen by Hal’s phrase, “unyoked idleness”). Shakespeare uses personification to show wit or at least to
indicate heightened mental activity and to call attention to abstractions (or “universals”) that really do affect our lives. When we think of Time and
Death as our enemies, we are personifying them. Shakespeare’s audience found it easier than we do to visualize these “abstractions”
concretely. For example, they pictured Love (note the capitalized name) as blindfolded Cupid. Often Shakespearean personifications are related to
one another like persons in a metaphorical society, and they become clearer once you’ve grouped them in an imagined scene or pageant.
DRAMATIC IRONY may be defined as the situation brought about when a character’s perceptions or purpose are clearly at odds with what we
know to be the real—or, as the drama unfolds, the eventual—state of affairs.
NOTE ON STYLE: You’ll find it easier to paraphrase a speech if you observe its style or manner of address. Most speeches can be assigned to
one of three styles: the high style appropriate to the court, to serious thoughts, and to historic deeds; the plain style suited to the country, used by
uneducated persons to express commonplace sentiments such as proverbs; and the mean (i.e. middle) style associated with the city and with clever
conversation. Each style has its special purpose. The high style aims to move high-minded persons to action or feeling. The mean style seeks to
entertain by wit. The end of the plain style is to inform or edify. (Most courses in freshman composition aim at developing a plain style that you
can use in writing papers—or in paraphrases.)
In contrast to poetry, which heightens the style by metaphors, the highly patterned prose in a comedy like Much Ado subordinates the metaphors to
the speakers’ wit. Shakespeare’s comedies generally use a mean style that can either sink to a plain style (compare Dogberry and his watchmen)
or rise to a high style (compare the other characters’ occasional use of poetry).
WIT, ANTITHESIS, WORDPLAY. A passionate utterance in any of the styles is apt to rely on metaphors, whereas an artful address is more
likely to depend on wit. In comedy, wit can be used to show off a speaker’s cleverness in detecting similarities (similes). In tragedy, a sign of
elevated sentiments or heightened intellectual effort is personification (explained above as a special kind of metaphor—metonymy—that depends
on conventional association, such as cause and effect, rather than on similarity). Other signs of wit are irony (saying one thing while meaning
another) and antithesis (patterned speech: e.g., words and phrases balanced against one another with the parallel members sometimes containing
the same number of syllables). The pattern may be a scheme of words such as chiasmus (words or phrases placed in the sequence a-b:b-a, or
alliteration (words starting with the same letter), or rhyme (lines ending with the same sound), or anaphora (lines or clauses beginning with the
same word or phrase) or antistrophe (ending lines or clauses with the same word or phrase—the reverse of anaphora). Wordplay consists in
repeating a word in a different form or in a scheme to indicate that its meaning has changed. (A striking example is Othello’s wordplay as he puts
out the torch and goes to kill the sleeping Desdemona: “Put out the light, and then put out the light.” In this tragic scene, the hero uses wit to
intensify rather than to mock his dire purpose.)
PARAPHRASE OF Romeo and Juliet 3.2.76–85
Dove-feathered raven! Wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despisèd substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damnèd saint, an honorable villain!
O Nature, what hadst thou to do in hell
When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? Oh, that Deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!
Dramatic context
Juliet was anticipating her wedding night with Romeo when the Nurse brought news that Tybalt has been slain by her husband. Because Juliet does
not yet know what really happened, her passionate outburst is framed by dramatic irony. That device allows us (the audience) to appreciate her
witty exclamations without lessening our sympathy with her sentiments. She has discovered—falsely, as we know—that her husband is a monster,
and that the “fair . . . cave” (his body full of treasure) instead houses a “dragon” (line 74). Her series of antitheses all express Juliet’s dismay at this
unlooked-for discrepancy between Romeo’s desirable outside and his inward repulsiveness.
Paraphrase
Raven with a dove’s white feathers! Lamb with a wolf’s appetite! (Each of these figures is an oxymoron, preparing for Juliet’s more extended
paradoxes that follow.) Most worthless substance underlying the most heavenly form! Precisely the opposite of what you deliberately (i.e.
hypocritically) appear—a saint in heaven who is in fact damned, a man of honor who is actually a villain (extending the oxymoron in line 75,
“fiend angelical”)
.
O Nature (personified here as Romeo’s creator), what made you go down to hell and, choosing thence a fiendish spirit, lodge it in so desirable an
earthly body (like the Garden of Eden, Romeo’s “sweet flesh” is beautiful but perishable or “mortal”)? Who has ever taken so much care to fill a
book with such rot and then bind it in a handsome cover? Oh, that Deceit should be provided with such a splendid palace to live in! (It’s important
to bring out Juliet’s accusatory note at this point in the dramatic irony. She wants to blame Romeo for deceiving her, but rather than call him a
hypocritical villain she personifies Nature and Deceit, denouncing them for perverting beautiful things including the image of Romeo. In this way
she objectifies or externalizes her despair without being aware of the wit, which is of course really the author's.)
PARAPHRASE OF Hamlet 3.4.77–89
What devil was’t
That thus hath cozen’d you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope. O Shame, where is thy blush?
Rebellious Hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To flaming youth let Virtue be as wax,
And melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardor gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn,
And Reason panders Will.
Dramatic context
After exposing King Claudius’s guilt by The Mousetrap, Hamlet once again hesitated to take his revenge on the King and instead has obeyed
Queen Gertrude’s summons to her bedroom. When she tries to scold him, he explodes, denouncing her so violently that the concealed Polonius
cries for help and is stabbed through the curtain by Hamlet. Seeing that his victim wasn’t the King, Hamlet treats his own rash act as an annoying
distraction and returns to denouncing instead his mother’s act (which he seems to think was less impulsive than his) of marrying her second
husband.
Thrusting before her eyes the pictures of his father and Claudius, Hamlet asks how she could be so blind to the difference between these royal
brothers whom she married in succession. “Have you eyes?” he asks her. “Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten on this
moor? Ha, have you eyes? / You cannot call it love.”
In the lines that follow, Hamlet tries to figure out exactly what prompted Gertrude to enter into this second, “incestuous” match. He rules out
“love” which, at her age, “waits upon the judgment, and what judgment / Would skip from this to this?” (That is, what could make her or anybody
choose the picture of Claudius over the picture of King Hamlet?) Lines 72–77, which introduce the passage we paraphrased, are a methodical
analysis of what Renaissance psychology called “judgment of sense”—an unconscious choice made by our senses prior to any reasoned
decision. We don’t need to follow Hamlet’s subtle logic to grasp his conclusion here. He proves to himself and Gertrude that, unless all five of her
senses were defunct, their failure cannot possibly have led her to make such a wrong choice between husbands.
Having ruled out a false judgment based on defective sense, Hamlet turns to the only alternative explanation: his mother was hoodwinked by the
devil into accepting Claudius in place of his brother. (In other words, hers wasn’t a real choice: when she embraced Claudius her judgment was
totally impaired, as if she were drunk or high on drugs.) It follows, then, that her (literally) senseless behavior lessens her guilt; still, once her
senses recover, she’s got to feel shame (even a drunkard with no more “judgment” than Christopher Sly will feel ashamed on waking up). In the
rest of the speech, Hamlet as is his wont tries to universalize Gertrude’s lapse from sensible behavior, contrasting it with the more excusable
impetuousness of youth. (We can infer that Hamlet, as the avenging son, places himself somewhere in the spectrum between matronly “frost” and
“flaming youth.”)
Paraphrase
What devil was it, then, that cheated you in this game of blindman’s buff (i.e., thrust Claudius into your arms when you were blindfolded and
couldn’t see your right husband)? Eyes in the absence of touch, touch alone without the help of sight, hearing in the absence of both touch and
sight, or just smelling by itself—even the sickliest part of any of the five senses (Shakespeare avoids absurdity by skipping over Gertrude’s sense of
taste!)—could not be so dull and unresponsive in choosing, if it were still active (and therefore all her senses must have been rendered inactive by
this hellish lust, the topic to which Hamlet now turns).
O Shame (personified), why don’t I find thy blush here in my mother’s cheek? Rebellious Lust (personified), if thou canst raise a mutiny in a
matron’s bones (indicating the dryness or “bloodless” asexuality of old persons; compare Ado 2.1.112, describing Antonio’s palm), then a highblooded or fully sexed (“flaming”) youth seized with Lust is going to treat Virtue (personified) as so much wax that melts in her (Virtue’s) own
fire. Don’t cry “shame!” when the powerful desires of youth burst out or attack, seeing that Lust can enkindle the “frost” of age and subject the
Reason (personified as the characteristic excellence of old persons whose “blood” is tame) to the Will (personified) for whom it panders (instead of
giving it deliberative advice). (The metaphor of lust as an out-of-control fire in the blood—compare line 70—is stressed repeatedly: flame and
melting wax, “compulsive” (as if shot from a cannon) and “ardor” (from Latin ardere, to burn), “charge” (of gunpowder?), and actively burning
frost.)