Shakespeare and Language

This book features a selection of the best essays from the last forty years on Shakespeare's use of language.

Catherine M. S. Alexander (Edited by)

9780521539005, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 September 2004

304 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.41 kg

'… excellent … Shakespeare and Language challenges the ways in which the modern reader approaches the visual, oral and aural qualities of Elizabethan language.' The Times Literary Supplement

Shakespeare and language is an area of study that here includes style, speech, sound and sex. As the foremost Shakespeare publication, Shakespeare Survey has been well placed to reflect trends and developments in academic approaches to Shakespeare and to language and this collection of essays considers the characteristics, excitement and unique qualities of Shakespeare's language, the relationship between language and event, and the social, theatrical and literary function of language. A new introduction, by Jonathan Hope, explicates the differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, provides a theoretical and contextual framework for the pieces that follow, and makes transparent an aspect of Shakespeare's craft (and the critical response to it) that has frequently been opaque.

1. Shakespeare and language: an introduction Jonathan Hope
2. Shakespeare's language and the language of Shakespeare's time Stephen Booth
3. The foundations of Elizabethan language Muriel St. Clare Byrne
4. Shakespeare's talking animals Terence Hawkes
5. Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation Vivian Salmon
6. Shakespeare and the tune of the time Bridget Cusack
7. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: the places of invention Jill L. Levenson
8. Shakespeare's thematic modes of speech: Richard II to Henry V Robert Hapgood
9. Hamlet and the power of words Inga-Stina Ewbank
10. The art of the comic duologue in three plays by Shakespeare Robert Wilcher
11. Hamlet's ear Philippa Berry
12. 'Voice potential': language and symbolic capital in Othello Lynne Magnusson
13. The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus Albert H. Tricomi
14. 'Time for such a word': verbal echoing in Macbeth George Walton Williams
15. Household words: Macbeth and the failure of spectacle Lisa Hopkins
16. Late Shakespeare: style and the sexes Russ McDonald.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Theatre studies [AN]