Shakespeare S Verse

Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest English-language playwright of all time. He was a natural poet, writing some long narrative poems, many sonnets and much of his plays in rhyming or blank verse. His sonnets have been praised as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time. This beautifully bound and illustrated book contains a carefully chosen selection of the bard's verse, from Sonnet 18's 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?' and Sonnet 116's 'Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds', to Hamlet's speech 'To be, or not to be'. It would make a very special gift to any fan of Shakespeare.

For this new edition, first published in 1971, Ted Hughes augmented his original selection of Shakespeare's poems and dramatic speeches and completely rewrote his accompanying essay, intending to restore to the common reader much of what, in Shakespeare, was instinctively available to the audience of his day, and to show how Shakespeare's language unites in its sinews and substance the full range of Elizabethan preoccupations, philosophical and social.

Thematically arranged excerpts from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

This book presents a magisterial linguistic-metrical study of Shakespeare's verse in the context of the English poetic tradition. Marina Tarlinskaja concentrates on the correlation between phrasal stresses and the iambic metrical scheme and goes on to explore links between meter, grammar and semantics. Her exhaustive statistical analysis helps to define minute idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare's particular type of iambic pentameter, shedding new light on the problem of chronology and authorship. Tarlinskaja also studies Shakespeare's use of verse rhythm for expressive purposes, e.g. to oppose character types. The book will interest not only students of Shakespeare and literary theory, but also people such as theatre directors and actors interested in Shakespeare's own interpretation of his dramatis personae.

Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through the drama and poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries to the editing of blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond. Alternative in its argumentation as well as its arguments, Shakespeare's Blank Verse tries out fresh ways of thinking about meter—by shunning doctrinaire methods of apprehending a writer's versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, historical, and social questions that animate Shakespeare's drama.