The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language

Description

The power of Shakespeare's complex language - his linguistic playfulness, poetic diction and dramatic dialogue - inspires and challenges students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers across the globe. It has iconic status and enormous resonance, even as language change and the distance of time render it more opaque and difficult. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language provides important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's experiments with language and offers accessible approaches to engaging with it directly and pleasurably. Incorporating both practical analysis and exemplary readings of Shakespearean passages, it covers elements of style, metre, speech action and dialogue; examines the shaping contexts of rhetorical education and social language; test-drives newly available digital methodologies and technologies; and considers Shakespeare's language in relation to performance, translation and popular culture. The Companion explains the present state of understanding while identifying opportunities for fresh discovery, leaving students equipped to ask productive questions and try out innovative methods.

Lynne Magnusson is a Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her ground-breaking articles and chapters treat topics such as the grammar of possibility in Shakespeare's language and the social rhetoric of Renaissance letters. She is the author of Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge, 1999). David Schalkwyk is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is a leading Shakespeare scholar and author of Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge, 2008) and Shakespeare, Love and Language (Cambridge, 2018).

'Even though the volume is primarily intended for students of Shakespeare, it is no less suited for teachers, theatre professionals, and researchers who seek innovative ways to mine the richness of Shakespeare's language ... What admirably binds these essays together is their careful scrutiny of the vital work that language does - what Shakespeare does with language and what the language of Shakespeare's time does to him, and what we do with Shakespeare's language and what this language does to us, in turn.' Jelena Marelj, Renaissance et Reforme