Bilingual Shakespeare describes how teachers working with children at secondary level, and especially those who speak English as a second language, can encourage them to respond enthusiastically to Shakespeare's plays.

This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare’s vocatives construe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern, Shakespearean, and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, Hallidayean grammar, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, socio-historical linguistics, sociology, and theatre semiotics. This study contributes, thus, not only to Shakespeare studies, but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

How do names attach themselves to particular objects and people and does this connection mean anything? This is a question which goes as far back as Plato and can still be seen in contemporary society with books of Names to Give Your Baby or Reader's Digest columns of apt names and professions. For the Renaissance the vexed question of naming was a subset of the larger but equally vexed subject of language: is language arbitrary and conventional (it is simply an agreed label for a pre-existing entity) or is it motivated (it creates the entity which it names)? Shakespeare's Names is a book for language-lovers. Laurie Maguire's witty and learned study examines names, their origins, cultural attitudes to them, and naming practices across centuries and continents, exploring what it means for Shakespeare's characters to bear the names they do. She approaches her subject through close analysis of the associations and use of names in a range of Shakespeare plays, and in a range of performances. The focus is Shakespeare, and in particular six key plays: Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. But the book also shows what Shakespeare inherited and where the topic developed after him. Thus the discussion includes myth, the Bible, Greek literature, psychological analysis, literary theory, social anthropology, etymology, baptismal trends, puns, different cultures' and periods' social practice as regards the bestowing and interpreting of names, and English literature in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; the reader will also find material from contemporary journalism, film, and cartoons.

Shakespeare's international status as a literary icon is largely based on his masterful use of the English language, yet beyond Britain his plays and poems are read and performed mainly in translation. Shakespeare and the Language of Translation addresses this apparent contradiction and is the first major survey of its kind. Covering the many ways in which the translation of Shakespeare's works is practised and studied from Bulgaria to Japan, South Africa to Germany, it also discusses the translation of Macbeth into Scots and of Romeo and Juliet into British Sign Language. The collection places renderings of Shakespeare's works aimed at the page and the stage in their multiple cultural contexts, including gender, race and nation, as well as personal and postcolonial politics. Shakespeare's impact on nations and cultures all around the world is increasingly a focus for study and debate. As a result, the international performance of Shakespeare and Shakespeare in translation have become areas of growing popularity for both under- and post-graduate study, for which this book provides a valuable companion.

Spanish Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries offers aselection of the most significant studies on Shakespeare and hiscontemporaries from a variety of perspectives in order to present a freshand inclusive vision of Shakespearean criticism in Spain to reach aworldwide readership. Plurality, maturity, and diversity are itsoutstanding characteristics as the transition has given shape to newcritical attitudes, readings, and approaches in the analysis and study ofShakespeare in the new Spain.

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on Latinx productions and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on Latinx productions and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.

Publisher Description

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. For the modern reader or playgoer, English as Shakespeare used it can seem alien and puzzling: vocabulary and grammar are in transition, pronouns and verb-forms can seem unfamiliar. Moreover, the conventions of poetic drama may also pose an impediment. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language provides a clear and helpful guide to the linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of the plays and poems. 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. Throughout, Russ McDonald helps his readers to appreciate a play's concerns and theatrical effects by thinking about its language in relation to other writings of the period. He also emphasizes pleasure in the physical properties of Shakespeare's words: their colour, weight, and texture, the appeal of verbal patterns, and the irresistible power of intensified language.

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