<P> Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter . In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable . The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones . It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony . Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow . This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet . Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind: </P> <P> Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep . Methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes . Rashly--And prais'd be rashness for it--let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...</P> <P> After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies . The literary critic A.C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects . These included run - on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length . In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7. 35--38); "...pity, like a naked new - born babe / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air ..." (1.7. 21--25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense . The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity . </P> <P> Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre . Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed . He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible . This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama . As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech . He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however . In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre . </P>

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