Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance

Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance PDF Author: Jonathan Hope
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408143747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
'This book is nothing short of brilliant. It is bursting with new observations, pithy readings and sensitive analyses. One of Hope's skills is to show us that 'language' is not separable from 'ideas'; both are systems of representation. This is a book about words, conventions, artifice, mythology, innovation, reason, eloquence, silence, control, communication, selfhood, dialect, 'late style' and much, much more. After reading Hope's book you will never read Shakespeare in the same way.' (Professor Laurie Maguire, Magdalen College, Oxford) Our understanding of words, and how they get their meanings, relies on a stable spelling system and dictionary definitions - things which simply did not exist in the Renaissance. At that time, language was speech rather than writing; a word was by definition a collection of sounds not letters - and the consequences of this run deep. They explain our culture's inability to fully appreciate Shakespeare's wordplay and they also account for the rift that opened up between Shakespeare and us as language came to be regarded as essentially 'written'. In Shakespeare and Language, Jonathan Hope considers the ideas about language that separate us from Shakespeare. His comprehensive study explores the visual iconography of language in the Renaissance, the influence of the rhetorical tradition, the extent to which Shakespeare's late style is driven by a desire to increase the subjective content of the text, and contemporary ways of studying his language using computers.

Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance

Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance PDF Author: Jonathan Hope
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408143747
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
'This book is nothing short of brilliant. It is bursting with new observations, pithy readings and sensitive analyses. One of Hope's skills is to show us that 'language' is not separable from 'ideas'; both are systems of representation. This is a book about words, conventions, artifice, mythology, innovation, reason, eloquence, silence, control, communication, selfhood, dialect, 'late style' and much, much more. After reading Hope's book you will never read Shakespeare in the same way.' (Professor Laurie Maguire, Magdalen College, Oxford) Our understanding of words, and how they get their meanings, relies on a stable spelling system and dictionary definitions - things which simply did not exist in the Renaissance. At that time, language was speech rather than writing; a word was by definition a collection of sounds not letters - and the consequences of this run deep. They explain our culture's inability to fully appreciate Shakespeare's wordplay and they also account for the rift that opened up between Shakespeare and us as language came to be regarded as essentially 'written'. In Shakespeare and Language, Jonathan Hope considers the ideas about language that separate us from Shakespeare. His comprehensive study explores the visual iconography of language in the Renaissance, the influence of the rhetorical tradition, the extent to which Shakespeare's late style is driven by a desire to increase the subjective content of the text, and contemporary ways of studying his language using computers.

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos PDF Author: Jonathan P. A. Sell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100040787X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare’s liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright’s sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language PDF Author: Lynne Magnusson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107131936
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Illuminates the pleasures and challenges of Shakespeare's complex language for today's students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers.

Error in Shakespeare

Error in Shakespeare PDF Author: Alice Leonard
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030351807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The traditional view of Shakespeare’s mastery of the English language is alive and well today. This is an effect of the eighteenth-century canonisation of his works, and subsequently Shakespeare has come to be perceived as the owner of the vernacular. These entrenched attitudes prevent us from seeing the actual substance of the text, and the various types of error that it contains and even constitute it. This book argues that we need to attend to error to interpret Shakespeare’s disputed material text, political-dramatic interventions and famous literariness. The consequences of ignoring error are especially significant in the study of Shakespeare, as he mobilises the rebellious, marginal, and digressive potential of error in the creation of literary drama.

Renaissance Drama 40

Renaissance Drama 40 PDF Author: Jeffrey Masten
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Rather than assemble a retrospective, the editors of Renaissance Drama use the release of their fortieth volume to survey the present and to attempt a view into the future. Scholars working on different kinds of Renaissance drama contributed brief essays addressing the state of their field, "field" being convenient shorthand for the practical but productive lack of a firm definition under which they and their colleagues study, do research, and write.

Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources

Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources PDF Author: Laura Sangha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317222016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources is an introduction to the rich treasury of source material available to students of early modern history. During this period, political development, economic and social change, rising literacy levels, and the success of the printing press, ensured that the State, the Church and the people generated texts and objects on an unprecedented scale. This book introduces students to the sources that survived to become indispensable primary material studied by historians. After a wide-ranging introductory essay, part I of the book, ‘Sources’, takes the reader through seven key categories of primary material, including governmental, ecclesiastical and legal records, diaries and literary works, print, and visual and material sources. Each chapter addresses how different types of material were produced, whilst also pointing readers towards the most important and accessible physical and digital source collections. Part II, ‘Histories’, takes a thematic approach. Each chapter in this section explores the sources that are used to address major early modern themes, including political and popular cultures, the economy, science, religion, gender, warfare, and global exploration. This collection of essays by leading historians in their respective fields showcases how practitioners research the early modern period, and is an invaluable resource for any student embarking on their studies of the early modern period.

Medieval Shakespeare

Medieval Shakespeare PDF Author: Ruth Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107310903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
For many, Shakespeare represents the advent of modernity. It is easy to forget that he was in fact a writer deeply embedded in the Middle Ages, who inherited many of his shaping ideas and assumptions from the medieval past. This collection brings together essays by internationally renowned scholars of medieval and early modern literature, the history of the book and theatre history to present new perspectives on Shakespeare and his medieval heritage. Separated into four parts, the collection explores Shakespeare and his work in the context of the Middle Ages, medieval books and language, the British past, and medieval conceptions of drama and theatricality, together showing Shakespeare's work as rooted in late medieval history and culture. Insisting upon Shakespeare's complexity and medieval multiplicity, Medieval Shakespeare gives readers the opportunity to appreciate both Shakespeare and his period within the traditions that fostered and surrounded him.

Shakespeare's Englishes

Shakespeare's Englishes PDF Author: Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493734
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Claims that Shakespeare resists an emergent, exclusionary post-reformation ideology of 'true' Englishness in his early plays.

The Life of William Shakespeare

The Life of William Shakespeare PDF Author: Lois Potter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118231775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World

Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World PDF Author: Subha Mukherji
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110661993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.