When Shakespeare gave up tragedy around 1607 and turned to the new form we call romance or tragicomedy, he created a distinctive poetic idiom that often bewildered audiences and readers. The plays of this period, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, as well as Shakespeare's part in the collaborations with John Fletcher (Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen), exhibit a challenging verse style - verbally condensed, metrically and syntactically sophisticated, both conversational and highly wrought. In Shakespeare's Late Style, McDonald anatomizes the components of this late style, illustrating in a series of topically organized chapters the contribution of such features as ellipsis, grammatical suspension, and various forms of repetition. Resisting the sentimentality that frequently attends discussion of an artist's 'late' period, Shakespeare's Late Style shows how the poetry of the last plays reveals their creator's ambivalent attitude towards art, language, men and women, the theatre, and his own professional career.

Shakespeare scholars give an account of particularly important or interesting features of Shakespeare's use of language.

Shakespeare’s Style presents a detailed consideration of aspects of Shakespeare’s writing style in his plays. Each chapter offers a detailed discussion about a single feature of style in a chosen Shakespeare play. Topics examine include: a discussion of a key image or images, both verbal and nonverbal; consideration of the way a character is put together; reflection of the changing audience response to a character; and audience response to an account of the speech rhythms of a single play. This book will be of interest to audiences who see Shakespeare’s plays, readers of the printed page, and students aiding them in concentrating on the significant ways that Shakespeare expresses himself.

First published in 1980. At their most successful, Shakespeare's styles are strategies to make plain the limits of thought and feeling which define the significance of human actions. John Baxter analyses the way in which these limits are reached, and also provides a strong argument for the idea that the power of Shakespearean drama depends upon the co-operation of poetic style and dramatic form. Three plays are examined in detail in the text: The Tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville and Richard II and Macbeth by Shakespeare.

Seeing Shakespeare’s Style offers new ways for readers to perceive Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized as a series of studies of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, poetry, and prose, it looks at the inner functioning of language and form in works from all phases of this writer’s career. Because the very concept of literary style has dropped out of so many of our conversations about writing, we need new ways to understand how words, phrases, speeches, and genres in literature work. Responding to this need, this book shows how visual representations of writing can lead to a deeper understanding of language’s textures and effects. Starting with chapters that a beginning reader of Shakespeare can benefit from, its second half puts these tools to use in more in-depth examinations of Shakespeare’s language and style. Although focused on Shakespeare’s works, and the works of his contemporaries, this book provides tools for all readers of literature by defining style as material, graphic, and shaped by the various media in which all writers work.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry contains thirty-eight original essays written by leading Shakespeareans around the world. Collectively, these essays seek to return readers to a revivified understanding of Shakespeare's verbal artistry in both the poems and the drama. The volume understands poetry to be not just a formal category designating a particular literary genre but to be inclusive of the dramatic verse as well, and of Shakespeare's influence as a poet on later generations of writers in English and beyond. Focusing on a broad set of interpretive concerns, the volume tackles general matters of Shakespeare's style, earlier and later; questions of influence from classical, continental, and native sources; the importance of words, line, and rhyme to meaning; the significance of songs and ballads in the drama; the place of gender in the verse, including the relationship of Shakespeare's poetry to the visual arts; the different values attached to speaking 'Shakespeare' in the theatre; and the adaptation of Shakespearean verse (as distinct from performance) into other periods and languages. The largest section, with ten essays, is devoted to the poems themselves: the Sonnets, plus 'A Lover's Complaint', the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. If the volume as a whole urges a renewed involvement in the complex matter of Shakespeare's poetry, it does so, as the individual essays testify, by way of responding to critical trends and discoveries made during the last three decades.

The New York Times Best Seller Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialogue by everyone from Darth Vader to R2D2. Return once more to a galaxy far, far away with this sublime retelling of George Lucas’s epic Star Wars in the style of the immortal Bard of Avon. The saga of a wise (Jedi) knight and an evil (Sith) lord, of a beautiful princess held captive and a young hero coming of age, Star Wars abounds with all the valor and villainy of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy. Zounds! This is the book you’re looking for.

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

Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in the early sixteenth century through thedrama and poetry of Shakespeare's contemporaries to the editing of blank verse in the eighteenth century and beyond.Alternative in its argumentation as well as its arguments, Shakespeare's Blank Verse tries out fresh ways of thinking about meter--by shunning doctrinaire methods of apprehending a writer's versification, and by reconnecting meter to the fundamental literary, dramatic, historical, and socialquestions that animate Shakespeare's drama.