Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford Shakespeare Topics) - Softcover

McDonald, Russ

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0198711719 ISBN 13: 9780198711711

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Written in a lucid, non-technical style, the book starts with the story of how the English language changed throughout the sixteenth century. Subsequent chapters define Shakespeare's main artistic tools and illustrate their poetic and theatrical contributions: Renaissance rhetoric, imagery and metaphor, blank verse, prose speech, and wordplay. The conclusion surveys Shakespeare's multiple and often conflicting ideas about language, encompassing both his enthusiasm at what words can do for us and his suspicion of what words can do to us.

About this title

About the Author

Russ McDonald is at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Review

"Shakespeare and the Arts of Language has its own challenges: how to write about Shakespeare's language in ways that don't seem either pedestrian or pretentious? McDonald's keen ear and shrewd eye for the specificity of wordplay, for the social relations embedded in spoken language, for figure and meter, for the power of prose, and indeed for the limits of language in the physical forms of theater are, however, more than up to the challenge."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Makes a difficult subject enlivening and thought-provoking. [McDonald] achieves the difficult task of making linguistic dissection seem meaningful to undergraduates...excellent."-Renaissance Quarterly

"In Oxford University Press's excellent series on Shakespeare Topics, Michael Taylor in Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century and Russ McDonald in Shakespeare and the Arts of Language offer admirable scholarship presented with welcome readability. This series ought to be in every library."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

"The book is not only a solid and thorough treatment of its subject; it is often imaginative and original. The style is perspicuous, and the arrangement and treatment of Shakespeare's mastery of language are sensible and effective.... If someone wishes to require supplemental reading of a Shakespeare class, this would be time and twenty dollars well spent."--Ben Jonson Journal

"This book is a helpful guide to Shakespeare's language, pitched at students and the general public rather than scholars (but offering wonderful footnotes for the scholar-teachers using it with their classes).... A thorough, insightful, informed book."--Sixteenth Century Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0198711719
• ISBN 13: 9780198711711
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222