On Shakespeare’s Poetry & Language
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Shakespeare and the Arts of Language
Written by Russ McDonald
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.
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms
Written by Richard Lanham
With a unique combination of alphabetical and descriptive lists, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms provides in one convenient, accessible volume all the rhetorical terms―mostly Greek and Latin―that students of Western literature and rhetoric are likely to come across in their reading or will find useful in their writing.
The Second Edition of this widely used work offers new features that will make it even more useful:
* A completely revised alphabetical listing that defines nearly 1,000 terms used by scholars of formal rhetoric from classical Greece to the present day
* A revised system of cross-references between terms
* Many new examples and new, extended entries for central terms
* A revised Terms-by-Type listing to identify unknown terms
* A new typographical design for easier access
Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language
Written by Sister Miriam Joseph
This was the first book which presented, in a complete manner, a general theory of composition then current in Renaissance England. Its particular contribution is the reorganization of the two hundred figures of speech, distinguished by Renaissance rhetoricians, into a simple, understandable pattern basic in Aristotle's Rhetoric: grammar logos, pathos and ethos. The purpose of the book is to provide a handbook of the theory of composition then current during the English Renaissance and to show Shakespeare's use of this theory by simple illustration from his plays and poems. The book is addressed to the wide audience of teachers of English and Renaissance literature, the philologist, the Shakespearian scholar, and to students and teachers of all Romance languages.
Written by Stanley Malless, Jeffrey McQuain, & R. O. Blechman
The first book ever to focus on Shakespeare's coinages. Discover terms and meanings still used today. Includes fun quizzes on Shakespearean trivia. A must for Bardophiles everywhere!
Written by George T. Wright
This is a wide-ranging, poetic analysis of the great English poetic line, iambic pentameter, as used by Chaucer, Sidney, Milton, and particularly by Shakespeare. George T. Wright offers a detailed survey of Shakespeare's brilliantly varied metrical keyboard and shows how it augments the expressiveness of his characters' stage language.
Shakespeare's First Texts: Folio Scripts
Written by Neil Freeman
Designed for both general reader and the actor, Shakespeare's First Texts is about possibility and imagination. It shows the differences between the way the texts of Shakespeare's were first presented to the world, and the highly changed way they appear now.
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Written by Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler, widely regarded as our most accomplished interpreter of poetry, here serves as an incomparable guide to some of the best-loved poems in the English language.
In detailed commentaries on Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Vendler reveals previously unperceived imaginative and stylistic features of the poems, pointing out not only new levels of import in particular lines, but also the ways in which the four parts of each sonnet work together to enact emotion and create dynamic effect. The commentaries--presented alongside the original and modernized texts--offer fresh perspectives on the individual poems, and, taken together, provide a full picture of Shakespeare's techniques as a working poet. With the help of Vendler's acute eye, we gain an appreciation of "Shakespeare's elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent."
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