Shakespeare’s World of Words

Description

Was Shakespeare really the original genius he has appeared to be since the eighteenth century, a poet whose words came from nature itself? The contributors to this volume propose that Shakespeare was not the poet of nature, but rather that he is a genius of rewriting and re-creation, someone able to generate a new language and new ways of seeing the world by orchestrating existing social and literary vocabularies. Each chapter in the volume begins with a key word or phrase from Shakespeare and builds toward a broader consideration of the social, poetic, and theatrical dimensions of his language. The chapters capture well the richness of Shakespeare's world of words by including discussions of biblical language, Latinity, philosophy of language and subjectivity, languages of commerce, criminality, history, and education, the gestural vocabulary of performance, as well as accounts of verbal modality and Shakespeare's metrics. An Afterword outlines a number of other important languages in Shakespeare, including those of law, news, and natural philosophy. FC Half Title Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Paul Yachnin 1. Well-Won Thrift: Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin 2. Proper Names and Common Bodies : The Case of Cressida: David Schalkwyk 3. Antique / Antic : Archaism, Neologism and the Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 2 Henry IV: Lucy Munro 4. Learning to Colour in Hamlet: Miriam Jacobson 5. Recasting ‘Angling’ in The Winter’s Tale: J. A. Shea 6. ‘What may be and should be’: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI: Lynne Magnusson 7. Othello and Theatrical Language: Sarah Werner 8. Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural Language in Measure for Measure: Paul Yachnin and Patrick Neilson 9. ‘Captious and Inteemable’: Reading Comprehension in Shakespeare: Meredith Evans 10. ‘Time is their master’: Men and Metre in The Comedy of Errors: Jennifer Roberts-Smith Bibliography Index