British: Shakespeare

Question 0

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Answer 0

William Shakespeare’s Sonnets
There are lots of sonnets to study, but only a few really likely ones. Remember to also look at the rhyme scheme of a sonnet to help you identify who wrote it. The Shakespearean sonnet has an abab, cdcd, efef, gg scheme. It is three quatrains and a couplet, usually with a break between the octave and the sestet.

A good website to look at more sonnets is http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com

Number 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/xviiicomm.htm

Number 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn02.htm#anchor055

Number 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn03.htm#116

Number 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

I highly suggest you read the commentary on this at http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn03.htm#130

Question 1

Overview

Shakespeare

Answer 1

Shakespeare
One of the most discouraging things about studying for the GRE is confronting Shakespeare. An exam on Shakespeare alone could keep you studying for some time.

But don’t worry. Shakespeare will be on the exam; there’s no doubt about it. But of the 230 questions, at most 9 of them will concern Shakespeare, and of those, 4 or 5 will deal with reading it, as opposed to identifying it.

Here’s what you do: if your goal is to score high on the GRE, and you want to know the answer to every question, pick five plays that you think have a good shot of appearing on the exam. Strong candidates are King Lear, Hamelt, MacBeth, Henry IV parts I and II, and maybe Othello. For this, read the Spark Notes summaries of the plays and characters, and maybe the significant speeches from those plays. Apart from that, don’t waste your time too much.

Another thing to do is to look at famous Shakespeare characters. Below I link to a few likely candidates who, though their plays probably aren’t worth studying, their characters are.

And don’t forget that of those 9 questions on Shakespeare, probably 3 of them are going to be on sonnets. I list a few likely candidates, but again, even if you don’t spot a sonnet as Shakespeare’s, you can still get most of the questions by being able to read and interpret it well. Also, Shakepearean sonnets have a recognizable form.

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets*
• Shakespeare’s Characters*