How to Write Like Shakespeare
"Write like Shakespeare" sounds like advice you can't act on. He's presented as a singular genius, which quietly implies the rest of us shouldn't bother trying. But a voice is not a soul — it's a set of choices, repeated. Shakespeare made specific, identifiable, learnable choices, and they are all sitting on the page waiting to be noticed.
This is a working guide to the machinery: the rhythm underneath the lines, the four devices that do most of the heavy lifting, and a worked example that takes a flat modern sentence and moves it, one step at a time, into his register. No "thee" or "thou" required — in fact, those are the first thing to leave behind.
Start with the rhythm: iambic pentameter
Most of Shakespeare's verse runs on a heartbeat. An iamb is two syllables: unstressed, then stressed — da-DUM. Pentameter means five of them in a line. Ten syllables, five beats:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
Say it aloud and tap the stresses: but SOFT, what LIGHT through YON-der WIN-dow BREAKS. That's the engine. It isn't decorative — it's chosen because it's close to the natural rhythm of spoken English. Ordinary sentences fall into iambs constantly without anyone noticing. "I have to go to work a-gain to-day" is a perfect line of iambic pentameter, and it's something you might say without a thought.
Most of it is unrhymed — blank verse. That's the default setting for his serious speech: the rhythm holds it together, and there's no rhyme to make it sing-song. When he does rhyme, especially a couplet at the end of a scene, it functions like a door closing.
What to steal: count to ten. Not religiously — Shakespeare breaks the meter constantly and the breaks are where the meaning often lives. But if your sentence lands near ten syllables with the stresses falling on the words that matter, it will sound more like him than any amount of archaic vocabulary.
Verse or prose is a decision, not a habit
Here's a structural choice most readers never consciously register: Shakespeare switches between verse and prose, and the switch means something. Broadly, verse belongs to nobility, to heightened emotion, to public and formal speech. Prose belongs to comic scenes, to servants and commoners, to madness, to letters, to plain practical business.
The interesting part is when he violates his own rule. When a noble character drops into prose, something has come loose. When a commoner rises into verse, they've been dignified. The form is carrying information that the words never state.
What to steal: decide, per passage, whether this moment is elevated or plain — and let the sentence shape carry that, instead of announcing it.
Device 1: Turn the noun into a verb (anthimeria)
This is the most distinctive Shakespearean move and the easiest to borrow. Take a word that is a thing, and use it as an action. He does this constantly. A person doesn't behave like a dog toward you — they "dog" you. A room isn't fitted with windows — it is "windowed." Someone doesn't behave like a child — they "child" it.
The linguistic term is anthimeria, or functional shift. Scholars studying it have found it produces a small, measurable jolt in the reader — the brain briefly has to work out what part of speech it's holding, and that flicker of effort registers as vividness.
He is also credited with a very large number of first recorded uses of English words. Worth a caution: "first recorded" is not the same as "invented." His plays were printed, popular and heavily preserved, which biases the record toward him. The instinct is what matters, not the scorekeeping: when no word fits, build one out of a word that nearly does.
Try it: "He hovered near the door all evening, watching" becomes "He ghosted the doorway all evening." One word, one shift, and the sentence sharpens.
Device 2: Set two things against each other (antithesis)
Shakespeare thinks in opposites. Not as decoration — as structure. The most famous line in English is a bare antithesis with nothing else in it:
To be, or not to be, that is the question
Two options, balanced on a comma. He does it everywhere: fair and foul, heaven and hell, to sleep and to wake. When the balance also mirrors itself in reverse — the AB-BA shape — it's called chiasmus, and it makes a line feel like it has clicked shut.
What to steal: when you have a point, find its opposite and put them in the same sentence, in parallel grammar. "I wanted to help" is inert. "I came to help her and stayed to hurt her" has a spine, because two halves are pulling against each other.
Device 3: Say one thing as two (hendiadys)
This one is subtle and very Shakespearean. Instead of using an adjective and a noun, he uses two nouns joined by "and" — where logically one should modify the other. "Sound and fury" rather than "furious sound." "Slings and arrows" of outrageous fortune.
The effect is a slight unbalancing. The reader half-expects a modifier and gets a second full thing instead, so the phrase feels larger and slightly unstable — which is precisely right for speech under emotional pressure. Scholars have noted the device clusters in his most psychologically strained passages, and it's rare in his early work: he grew into it.
Try it: "hopeless waiting" becomes "the waiting and the hopelessness." Same content, more weight.
Device 4: Put the feeling in the body
Abstractions get physical anchors. Not "I am deeply anxious" but a mind "full of scorpions." Not "I am grieving" but grief that fills the room up of an absent child, that walks about, that lies in the bed. The emotion is given a location and an action.
This single substitution does more to make prose sound Shakespearean than any archaic vocabulary. When you want to name a feeling, instead name the part of the body it occupies and what it is doing there.
Device 5: Let the speaker fail to decide
The soliloquies land because the speaker isn't announcing a conclusion — he is visibly unable to reach one. The doubt is on the page in real time. "To be, or not to be" is not a man who has decided; it's a man watching himself not decide.
Modern writing is trained to state the thesis and then support it. His way is to stage the argument and let the reader feel the pendulum. If you resolve the tension in your first sentence, you have thrown away the device.
Worked example: plain to Shakespearean
Start with something deliberately flat:
"I'm worried this project will fail and I don't know whether to keep going."
Step 1 — put the feeling in the body. Don't say worried; say where it lives.
"My stomach turns at the thought this project fails."
Step 2 — delay the weight. Move the payload to the end of the line so it has somewhere to arrive.
"At the thought this project fails, my stomach turns."
Step 3 — add antithesis. Find the opposite and set it against the first half.
"At the thought it fails, my stomach turns; at the thought it thrives, it turns the more."
Step 4 — refuse to resolve, and count to ten.
"At thought of failing, so my stomach turns; / at thought of thriving, turns it all the more. / To press, or leave off pressing — I know not / which of the two undoes me the faster."
Read that last version aloud. It is recognisably in his register. And notice what never appeared: no thee, no thou, no hath, no forsooth. The voice came entirely from structure.
Most people imitating Shakespeare reach for the costume. The devices above are the actor.
What to avoid
Three failure modes, in order of how common they are.
- The costume. Sprinkling thee, thou, hath and -eth endings over modern sentence structure. This reads as a Renaissance fair, not as Shakespeare. His grammar was contemporary for his audience; the archaism is an accident of four centuries passing.
- Uniform grandeur. Everything elevated, all the time. He constantly undercuts — a joke inside a tragedy, a porter after a murder. The high register only registers as high because there's a low one nearby.
- Metrical rigidity. Ten syllables enforced with no variation produces a metronome. His best lines break the pattern exactly where the emotion breaks.
When this is the wrong tool
Worth saying plainly: this register is bad at some jobs. Instructions, technical documentation, anything where the reader needs to extract information quickly and act on it — antithesis and delayed weight just slow them down. The devices are built for speech under emotional pressure. Use them where feeling is the payload, not where facts are.
Why bother at all?
Not to produce pastiche — nobody needs more of that. The value is that once you can see these levers in his writing, you notice your own prose has the same levers and you've been leaving them all in the default position. You've been naming feelings instead of locating them. Stating conclusions instead of staging them. Reaching for an adjective when a second noun would hit harder.
Borrow the ones that teach you something. Drop the rest. That's what imitation is actually for.
If you'd rather see this happen to your own sentence than read about it, that's exactly what our tool does — choose Shakespeare from the author list, paste a line, and watch which levers move.
Related reading: more on capturing a distinctive voice through repeatable technique, not costume — how to write like Hemingway, how to write like Jane Austen, and how to write like Rumi.