My dissertation discussed whether Shakespeare portrayed writers he knew as characters in his plays. Juliet Dusinberre, who edited As You Like It for The Arden Shakespeare, believes that he often created characters who speak with the voice of the author of the work that was Shakespeare’s source for that particular play. Her examples are Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, Jaques in As You Like It and Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra. I show however that Shakespeare does not employ such biographical representation. My argument, however, shows what a careful and strategic artist Shakespeare was.

Poet characters in Shakespeare’s plays

First I looked at characters in Shakespeare’s plays who are poets. There are four: Gower, the chorus in Pericles; Cinna the Poet and the Poet in Julius Caesar; and the Poet in Timon of Athens. Gower was a medieval poet whose poem Confessio Amantis was the source for Pericles. Using a poet for the chorus was an out-of-date technique in Shakespeare’s day, and Shakespeare doubled that effect by having his Gower speak in ancient-sounding verse.

In Julius Caesar, there are two poets; the first is Cinna the Poet, who the Roman mob mistake for another Cinna, one of Caesar’s murderers. They tear him apart onstage. The other poet forces his way into Brutus’s tent when he is arguing with Cassius. He offers the two men three lines of terrible verse and is laughed offstage. Shakespeare seems to imply that poets have nothing to do with politics—they either look ridiculous, or worse, are victims of it.

In Timon of Athens, the Poet brings a moral poem to Timon in hope of receiving a reward. Judging by his description, in verse so obscure that it confused even Dr. Johnson, it must be very bad. But curiously, his description of its argument—a warning to Timon against flatterers—sounds suspiciously like Shakespeare’s poem, the play itself. In all three plays Shakespeare compares himself to other poets and implies that he is a superior artist.

Biographical representations of writers

Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare’s source, Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet, Brooke condemns the young lovers for their lust in pursuing a secret forbidden love. Though Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence still is a moral voice in the play, he does not condemn the teenagers. But he does help to form our response to them as seeing their love as authentic and earnest.

As You Like It

Neither Jaques nor any character analogous to him appears in the source, Thomas Lodge’ s novella Rosalynde. Because of this and also because his speeches have such depth, he is often supposed to satirize a real person, perhaps Lodge or Jonson. Lodge’s biography—traveller and libertine—is similar to Jaques’s, but their language is nothing similar. Many of Jaques’s speeches do sound Jonsonian, though their biographies have no correlation. In fact, Jaques is most like the common Elizabethan stereotypes of the satirist and the traveller.

Antony and Cleopatra

Enobarbus stems from two persons mentioned in Shakespeare’s source, Plutarch’s Life of Antonius, but a significant number of Enobarbus’s speeches are taken from Plutarch’s exposition. While this might suggest that Enobarbus is a representation of Plutarch, Shakespeare made strategic additions to his lines so that, more than any other character, Enobarbus guides the audience’s reactions to Antony and Cleopatra.

Perhaps more than anything else, by looking at these plays and these characters, it is possible to see that Shakespeare always had a specific strategy in mind for influencing his audience’s reaction, but most of all—and rather mischievously—he instructs us in his own pre-eminence among poets.

In college, one of my creative writing professors instructed that a writer is allowed a total of three exclamation points in her life—under that logic, I was too young to risk using one yet. Better to wait until I had a few more years to master my craft and learn when such a powerful spice in the soup of punctuation might be necessary. The practice deleting any exclamation point that snuck its way onto my manuscripts was drilled into my head. (How did they keep managing to appear there?)

Now I find that my pen itches to cross out these devilish little marks any time I see them: for example, when I worked at a literary agency, slush with an exclamation point on its first page was usually sent to the ‘no’ pile almost automatically. I took it as a sign of further excessive punctuation and prose style to follow.

I am not alone in my aversion to exclamation points. Here is F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”

And Terry Pratchett:

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

So how did these apparently so terrible marks begin? Exclamation points were first used in English in the fifteenth century, probably soon after William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476. It was originally called the “note of admiration,” using the Latin sense of admiration to mean wonder, which is why when Ferdinand first sees Miranda in The Tempest, he says: “O, you wonder!” (with an exclamation point).

One romantic theory of the origin of the mark itself is that it was originally the Latin word for joy, Io, printed in abbreviated form with the I above the o. It was in wide enough use by the beginning of the seventeenth century for Shakespeare to create a pun about it in The Winter’s Tale:

First Gentlemen: “I make a broken delivery of the business, but the changes I perceived in the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes.”

However, the exclamation point was not part of a standard typewriter keyboard until the 1970s, which makes me consider whether the overuse of it is a product of the past forty years. Could it be tied to the rise of the computer and the Internet? Before it became a standard keyboard feature, a writer would have to make an effort to include one in her manuscript. Certainly email and text language that commonly uses multiple exclamation points together (“How R U!!!”) may lead writers toward a tendency to overuse them in prose as well.

But there are still those who have a stronger constitution for exclamation points, such as Ariane Sherine, writing for the Guardian. Her argument is that exclamation points are innocuous next to emoticons and text-speech. If I have to pick between prose with too many exclamation points and prose that forgets how to spell out words (of which I have seen a few too many), I’ll pick the former, thanks.