Reading Shakespeare S Dramatic Language

Collection of short essays in two parts: Pt. 1: The language of Shakespeare's plays: Pt. 2: Reading Shakespeare's English.

The first in an occasional series of student guides to be published by the Arden Shakespeare, this interdisciplinary volume addresses a fundamental need in education in language, literature and drama. Many of today's students lack the grammatical and linguistic skills to enable them to study Shakespearean and other Renaissance texts as closely as their courses require. This practical guide should help them to understand and use the structures and strategies of written and dramatic language. Eleven short essays on aspects of literary criticism and performance by an eminent team of contributors are followed by a more detailed exploration of the history of language use, grammar and spelling, plus a glossary of terms offering definitions, contexts and examples. Together these provide an informed historical understanding of dramatic language in the early modern period.

In recent years the language of Shakespearean drama has been described in a number of publications intended mainly for the undergraduate student or general reader, but the studies in academic journals to which they refer are not always easily accessible even though they are of great interest to the general reader and essential for the specialist. The purpose of this collection is therefore to bring together some of the most valuable of these studies which, in discussing various aspects of the language of the early 17th century as exemplified in Shakespearean drama, provide the reader with deeper insights into the meaning of Shakespearean text, often by reference to the social, literary and linguistic context of the time.

Among the most enduring poetry of all time, William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets address such eternal themes as love, beauty, honesty, and the passage of time. Written primarily in four-line stanzas and iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s sonnets are now recognized as marking the beginning of modern love poetry. The sonnets have been translated into all major written languages and are frequently used at romantic celebrations. Known as “The Bard of Avon,” William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest English-language writer known. Enormously popular during his life, Shakespeare’s works continue to resonate more than three centuries after his death, as has his influence on theatre and literature. Shakespeare’s innovative use of character, language, and experimentation with romance as tragedy served as a foundation for later playwrights and dramatists, and some of his most famous lines of dialogue have become part of everyday speech. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare’s vocatives construe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern, Shakespearean, and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, Hallidayean grammar, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, socio-historical linguistics, sociology, and theatre semiotics. This study contributes, thus, not only to Shakespeare studies, but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600. The originality of Kermodes's writing, and the intelligence of his discussion, make this book a landmark.

Shakespeare and Social Dialogue deals with Shakespeare's language and the rhetoric of Elizabethan letters. Moving beyond claims about the language of individual Shakespearean characters, Magnusson analyses dialogue, conversation, sonnets and particularly letters of the period, which are normally read as historical documents, as the verbal negotiation of specific social and power relations. Thus, the rhetoric of service or friendship is explored in texts as diverse as Sidney family letters, Shakespearean sonnets and Burghley's state letters. The book draws on ideas from discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics, especially 'politeness theory', relating these to key ideas in epistolary handbooks of the period, including those by Erasmus and Angel Day and demonstrates that Shakespeare's language is rooted in the everyday language of Elizabethan culture. Magnusson creates a way of reading both literary texts and historical documents which bridges the gap between the methods of new historicism and linguistic criticism.