UNIT 5
SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare’s Punctuation
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Shakespeare wrote his plays using prose, blank verse and rhymed verse. Therefore, the script of a Shakespearean play looks quite like a poem in places and very different to a modern play script. When you are reading a Shakespeare play, you need to get into the habit of looking at the punctuation, not the line break (where the sentence jumps down onto the next line). Just because a line finishes and the text moves to the next line, this does not mean that the sentence has ended. How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
How lines look in the script
I wake before the time that Romeo
How lines should be read
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Come to redeem me?
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How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo come to redeem me?
PERFORMING
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ACTIVITY
Go to your activity book and complete the oral language tasks on reading Shakespeare’s punctuation (see pages 113–114).
Ed
Shakespeare’s Words Inventions
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If Shakespeare could not find the exact word he was looking for, he often invented words himself. In fact, Shakespeare was the most productive inventor of words for the English language in the history of the world, ever. There are 422 words in the Oxford English Dictionary that Shakespeare invented. So, how did he do this? Turn the page to find descriptions of the different techniques Shakespeare used to invent words.
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