Aaron Bentley, Michael Roesemenn, Danielle Chavez-Davis, Justin Cole

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, like in other contemporary works, poetics play a pivotal role. Not only does Shakespeare use rhymed couplets at the end of certain scenes to add emphasis and drama, but he also switches from the ordered iambic pentameter lines to prose (and "paragraph form") in several places throughout the play. This change is more visible to the reader than it is to an audience, however, the lack of order contributes to the frenzy of the spoken lines. These changes in meter are used to signal the reader/audience to potentially important details, namely, Hamlet's decline into madness.