Symmetry of Shakespeare

In Shakespearean comedies generally the first four acts are all about confusion, false identities, masks, all of that, and in the fifth act he ties them all up, and the idea is to make it as complicated as possible, and tie it all up brilliantly in one act. And usually there are three couples, you know the hero couple, the second hero couple, and then the other couple, and they all get married, and that’s just the way of it. Macbeth interestingly enough, the number is three all the way through it.

There are three witches. The rhythm of the poetry is often in threes, for example “If it were done when it is done, to well it were done quickly”, “It will have blood they say, blood will have blood”, knocking on the door is always in threes, “Thrice to thine, thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine”. There is a whole lot of threes in there because three is a scary number. So yeah I’ve noticed quite a lot of symmetry in Shakespeare.

They follow forms, but the beauty of Shakespeare too, is that he will look around and go oh, I see, this is how that works, now I will do it to the extent that no one else can do it, and he often breaks his own rules because he can, cause he is a genius. So yeah, there are all kinds of symmetries that you will find in Shakespeare, all kinds of rhythms.

And for example in Hamlet the overwhelming imagery is of decay, in Macbeth it’s of blood. The word blood is used so many times in Macbeth. You count them. There is heaps of it. They all have their own sort of imagery. So he is very good at doing that. Very good at picking up links all the way through, so you may not even react to them consciously. Quite often with Shakespeare, it goes in and you don’t even know that it’s gone in, and then later you will remember something. He was pretty clever.