Shakespeare has become synonymous with grand, flowery language (which isn’t entirely fair), but he still used his character Hamlet to advise other creative types, as I suggested previously, not to overdo it. This is still good advice for writers, even writers for the beer and spirits industries, who are conscious of developing a compelling, effective online voice.
Hamlet’s speech continues beyond his advice not to chew the scenery—and for a good reason. One should not be too bombastic or wordy, sure, but one should also not be too cautious:
| Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion | |
| be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the | |
| word to the action; |
It’s almost too obvious: write to the occasion. Consider your audience, the medium, and the ideas, and choose the appropriate words without being too elaborate nor too mechanical or formal. Obviously, it’s not as obvious as it sounds, which is one reason Hamlet bothers to say it. But there’s a little more going on here, too.
Getting a Little Philosophical
You might remember from Philosophy 101 Aristotle’s “Golden Mean.” The ancient Greek thinker believed human virtue depended on finding the right middle between extremes. Heroism is a mean between cowardice and rashness. Generosity is a mean between miserliness and profligacy.
Shakespeare is almost certainly channeling this line of thought, here (it was the Renaissance, after all, the period of European recovery of ancient Greek and Roman thought).
Via Hamlet, then, Shakespeare associates creativity with virtue and claims it, too, has a mean: Style is a mean between the bland and the showy.
A Little More Philosophical
Let’s get even a little more philosophical (because Shakespeare does). The reason one should seek that mean between extremes is that creative work has an intrinsic responsibility to reality (or “nature” to the bard):
| . . . . . . . . with this special o’erstep not | |
| the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is | |
| from* the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the |
outside
|
| first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the | |
| mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, | |
| scorn her own image, and the very age and body of | |
| the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, | |
| or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful | |
| laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the | |
| censure of the which one must in your allowance | |
| o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be | |
| players that I have seen play, and heard others | |
| praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, | |
| that, neither having the accent of Christians nor | |
| the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so | |
| strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of | |
| nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them | |
| well, they imitated humanity so abominably. |
Writing that holds the mirror up to nature makes us go, “Yeah, that’s it; it’s just like that!”
The Power of the Nature Mirror
Think about what Hamlet means when he says good acting (writing) shows virtue “her own feature.” It’s actually very powerful.
Mirrors do more than just copy or reproduce: they reveal. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you’re given a perspective you do not naturally have; you see how you look to others, you see your own eyes. Good creation reveals things about the world to us; the Nature Mirror helps us see the world as it is when we don’t normally see it as it is.
Bad writing, like bad acting, is awkward, uncomfortable, even monstrous. In Hamlet’s somewhat elaborate image, it suggests one of Nature’s students had made the performer—and mucked it up pretty good.
If you’re tracking with Hamlet to this point, then you want your writing to be of the Nature Mirror type, not a Journeyman Abomination. You want your writing to share your story, to reveal to your customers who you are and what you’re about, even, to get a little grand, to show them their lives as they’ve never seen them before.
Image credit: Mirror to the Sky, by Alosh Bennett/Flickr.com
