Page 68 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Planning an argument 67
Such poignancy may be only hinted in As You Like It but
it recurs too often and too explicitly in Twelfth Night to be
dismissed as incidental. Even the playful joke at Malvolio’s
expense soon becomes a serious exposure of human
vulnerability.

ORDER OF COMPOSITION
You may some time be faced by an essay title which forces you
to structure your entire answer according to the chronology in
which a series of texts was composed. Far more often you will
meet titles which merely seem to do so: ‘Trace the development
of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic art from his earlier to his
later tragedies.’ Here there is no requirement to begin with a
paragraph on the earliest play, and then simply to add
discussions of other plays following the order in which they
were written.
Indeed the title insists upon an alternative principle of
division: the answer must distinguish between Shakespeare’s
‘dramatic’ and ‘poetic’ techniques. You could even decide that
every one of your paragraphs should itself commute between
early and late plays to show advances (or, more neutrally,
alterations) in the use of a specific device. You could design a
thesis/antithesis structure around the question of whether it is
specifically as a writer of verse or more generally as a
playwright that Shakespeare changes most. In that case you
would have to remember that the etymology of ‘playwright’ has
nothing to do with writing but, like wheelwright or cartwright,
records the craftsman’s capacity to build parts into a whole
which works well and looks good.
Some paragraphs of such an answer would concentrate on
verbal texture. Others would examine the overall design which
shapes the story and the more visual moments of the text where
what characters can be seen to do is as significant as the
speeches which allow us to hear their thoughts.
You could design a developing argument that the plays
become less ‘poetic’ in one sense as in another they complicate
their poetic artistry, making the manipulations of their verbal
mannerisms less obtrusive and harder to resist. This might, or
might not, lead you to open your essay with a series of plays in