Shakespeare And The Rhetoricians

Raphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? How do they manage to be so inventive when they are perplexed? Their dense, complex, articulate speeches at intensely dramatic moments are often seen as psychological - they uncover and investigate inwardness, character and motivation - and as rhetorical - they involve heightened language, deploying recognisable techniques. Focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Cymbeline and the Sonnets, Lyne explores both the psychological and rhetorical elements of Shakespeare's language. In the light of cognitive linguistics and cognitive literary theory he shows how Renaissance rhetoric could be considered a kind of cognitive science, an attempt to map out the patterns of thinking. His study reveals how Shakespeare's metaphors and similes work to think, interpret and resolve, and how their struggle to do so results in extraordinary poetry.

Classical Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, formed the sum and substance of Shakespeare's education and was the basis of his understanding of the power of language and how it worked to move, delight and teach. Rhetoric, which seeks to explain the way that language works to influence others, provides a powerful, transformative tool for approaching text in performance. This book helps you understand the key concepts of rhetoric. It gives clear explanations, stripped of jargon, and examples of rhetorical technique in the plays. It also provides engaging, practical exercises to unlock character and to identify themes in the plays through the lens of rhetoric. Academically rigorous, based on more than a decade of practical experience in the use of rhetoric in drama at the highest level, it is an ideal companion for anyone engaging with Shakespeare in performance.

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today's classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources.--From publisher description.

This persuasive book analyses the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts at transgendered ventriloquism that are indebted to Ovid's work, she argues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This vividly original book makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

Classical Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, formed the sum and substance of Shakespeare's education and was the basis of his understanding of the power of language and how it worked to move, delight and teach. Rhetoric, which seeks to explain the way that language works to influence others, provides a powerful, transformative tool for approaching text in performance. This book helps you understand the key concepts of rhetoric. It gives clear explanations, stripped of jargon, and examples of rhetorical technique in the plays. It also provides engaging, practical exercises to unlock character and to identify themes in the plays through the lens of rhetoric. Academically rigorous, based on more than a decade of practical experience in the use of rhetoric in drama at the highest level, it is an ideal companion for anyone engaging with Shakespeare in performance.

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Learning materials - English, grade: A, Northern Arizona University (College of Arts and Letters), course: ENG 562, language: English, abstract: This paper will investigate the fact that even if Shakespeare did possess a great knowledge of classic rhetorical concepts, something that was a normal part of the literary studies during his lifetime; he did not follow the concepts precisely. Did Shakespeare create his own rhetoric? His critical weapons in fact were the figures of language, which he used in a very effective and persuasive manner, such as personification, malapropism, metonymy, and rhetorical questioning, among others. Rhetoric after all is the art of effective use of language, which can be very persuasive, and, one must always keep in mind the reasons for its use and the goals it seeks to achieve. In order to illustrate the point of this paper, the following characters and works, will be looked at: Hamlet, Falstaff and prince Hal from "Henry IV", and Dogberry from "Much Ado About Nothing".