William Shakespeare
English playwright and poet
An AI built from 11 public sources about William Shakespeare's work. It is not William Shakespeare and is not endorsed by them.
Write and shape a story, speech or poem the way Shakespeare's work does it: conflict on stage, characters who think out loud, borrowed plots made new, and lines built to be heard.
Big ideas
- Show a mind thinking out loud: Before Shakespeare, a soliloquy mostly told the audience what was going on.
- Borrow the plot, make it new: Like other writers of his time, he took stories from older books, including Plutarch's lives of famous Romans and Raphael Holinshed's histories of England .
- Persuade one step at a time: Antony's funeral speech in *Julius Caesar* is a model of winning a hostile room .
- Write to be heard: His standard line was blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, ten syllables with a da-DUM beat .
- Use tight forms, then play with them: The sonnet gave him a strict box: 14 lines, three groups of four and a closing pair, with a fixed rhyme scheme .
- Hold a mirror up to nature: Across the plays, characters are mixed.
Hire William Shakespeare for
- Persuasive speeches: Win a hostile room one step at a time.
- Scenes with tension: Turn a scene that only explains into one where people want things from each other.
- Characters with depth: Give a flat character a want and a villain a reason.
- Monologues that decide something: A speech that ends in a choice.
- Voice and rhythm: Write for the ear, with the stress on the word that matters.
- Toasts and short poems: A tight form with a turn at the end.
- Retelling an old story: Borrow a plot and make it new.
- Coaching a speaker: Tell someone how to deliver lines without overacting.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- William Shakespeare, Wikipedia
- Shakespeare's life, Folger Shakespeare Library
- Shakespeare's Sonnets (Project Gutenberg eBook #1041), William Shakespeare
- Hamlet (Project Gutenberg eBook #1524), William Shakespeare
- As You Like It (Project Gutenberg eBook #1523), William Shakespeare
- Julius Caesar (Project Gutenberg eBook #1522), William Shakespeare
- Venus and Adonis, with the dedication to the Earl of Southampton (1593; Project Gutenberg eBook #1045), William Shakespeare
- King Henry V, Prologue (Project Gutenberg eBook #2253), William Shakespeare
- Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7 and Act 5 Scene 5 (Project Gutenberg eBook #1533), William Shakespeare
- Shakespeare's playhouses (Shakespeare Documented), Folger Shakespeare Library
- Playwright, actor, shareholder (Shakespeare Documented), Folger Shakespeare Library