'Shakespeare in Art' looks at the huge variety of painters who made Shakespeare's extremes of passion, his evocations of nature, his spirit world and his eternally familiar characters the subjects of their own work. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Western culture.

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.

Othello remains one of Shakespeare's most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlight’s the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has. In twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in Othello the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him. The first play in the Seeing Shakespeare Series, Othello is illustrated by English contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Future titles in the series include A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Marcel Dzama and The Merchant of Venice with images by Jordan Wolfson.

Grammar-school students in Shakespeare's time were taught to recognise the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources (from amphibologia through onomatopoeia to zeugma). This knowledge was one element in their thorough grounding in the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, known as the trivium. In Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language Sister Miriam Joseph writes: "The extraordinary power, vitality, and richness of Shakespeare's language are due in part to his genius, in part to the fact that the unsettled linguistic forms of his age promoted to an unusual degree the spirit of creativeness, and in part to the theory of composition then prevailing . . . The purpose of this study is to present to the modern reader the general theory of composition current in Shakespeare's England." The author then lays out those figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else. Originally published in 1947, this book is a classic.

In this, her last book, Rosalie L. Colie suggests that by linking "forms"—verse forms, devices, motives, themes, conventions, genres—to the culture from which a writer springs and to his selection and organization of materials, we can understand the processes by which he becomes what he is, and is enabled to do what he does. She is particularly concerned with uncovering the ways in which Shakespeare used, misused, criticized, re-created, and sometimes revolutionized the received topics and devices of his craft. In this sense, Shakespeare's plays are seen as problem plays, each exploring the problematics of his craft and revealing his assessment of what was problematical. The author has chosen for study topics which connect Shakespeare with the long and rich continental Renaissance, in the hope that in the future Shakespeare might be, like Dante and Cervantes, an essential author in a comparatist's education. Usually a single topic dealing with some formal aspect of a play—the use of stereotypes to create a character highly original in stage practice, or the various manipulations of a mode (the pastoral, for example) rich in potentialities—is used to try to see in what particular ways Shakespeare shaped works that are still unique. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Analyzes all of Shakespeare's sonnets in terms of their poetic structure, semantics, and use of sounds and images.

Revised and Expanded Edition of The Secret of Shakespeare Reveals the full scope of Shakespeare's plays as sacred visionary dramas, illuminating the bard's greatest works and the man behind them • Reveals how, through the use of esoteric symbol and form, Shakespeare's plays mirror the inner drama of the journey of all souls • Conveys a heightened understanding of the plays through examining the theatrical rendering of their texts Through his study of such plays as Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth, and King Lear, Lings supplies expert and inspiring guidance to the beautifully wrought words and worlds of William Shakespeare. Lings's particular genius lies in his ability to convey, as perhaps no one else has ever done, the theatrical renderings of these texts, leaving readers with deep and lasting impressions not only of these masterpieces of dramatic artistry, but of the extraordinary man behind them as well.

'Russ McDonald... offers an initiation into Shakespeares English.... Like a good musician leading us beyond merely humming the tunes, he helps us hear Shakespearean unclarity, revealing just how expression in late Shakespeare sometimes transcends ordinary verbal meaning.... particularly recommendable.' -Ruth Morse, Times Literary Supplement 'Oxford University Press offer a mix of engagingly written introductions to a variety of Topics intended largely for undergraduates. Each author has clearly been reading and listening to the most recent scholarship, but they wear their learning lightly.' -Ruth Morse, Times Literary SupplementOxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) 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 - especially in verse drama - can seem alien. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language offers practical help with linguistic and poetic obstacles. Written in a lucid, nontechnical style, the book defines Shakespeare's artistic tools, including imagery, rhetoric, and wordplay, and illustrates their effects. Throughout, the reader is encouraged to find delight in the physical properties of the words: their colour, weight, and texture, the appeal of verbal patterns, and the irresistible affective power of intensified language.

Shakespeare’s Verbal Art is a profoundly important study of the newly rediscovered anagrams that lie hidden below the surface of all Shakespearean texts. It explains the essential role played by these concealed figures in Classical and Renaissance poetry, demonstrating the revelatory function of anagram by reference to the close analysis of a wide range of examples. Special attention is given to Shakespeare’s use of these sub-textual devices to clarify meaning and intention. The focus is first on Shake-speares Sonnets of 1609, and secondly on Hamlet, Othello and Twelfth Night, all of which are found to be composed around the concealed anagrams that render these works self-interpreting. A new kind of language use is revealed, in terms of which pre-Enlightenment text is envisaged as existing in two distinct dimensions – the overt and the covert – both of which must be read if any particular poem or play is to be fully understood. In effect, a wholly new set of Shakespearean texts is made available to the reader, who will find Shakespeare’s Verbal Art an essential guide to the new discoveries. The book will also be indispensable in the fields of Classical and Renaissance literature, linguistics, poetics, rhetoric, and literary history, and in relation to the pre-Enlightenment text in general, and will interest both the specialist and the general reader.

Who was William Shakespeare, and what made him one of the greatest writers in history? This comprehensive survey explores the life and works of the Bard of Avon, from his humble beginnings in Stratford-upon-Avon to his meteoric rise to fame in London's theatrical world. With in-depth analysis of his plays and poems, as well as a wealth of historical context, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the work and legacy of this literary icon. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.