Shakespeare's Late StyleCambridge University Press, 10. aug 2006 - 260 pages 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 28
Page 1
... is no change in dramatic style so striking as that between the final tragedies and the late romances.”1 Barber and ... what to call these seven plays, indeed can scarcely agree on what to call any one of them: comedy? romance? pastoral ...
... is no change in dramatic style so striking as that between the final tragedies and the late romances.”1 Barber and ... what to call these seven plays, indeed can scarcely agree on what to call any one of them: comedy? romance? pastoral ...
Page 2
... What makes these plays still strike us as enigmatic and elusive is neither their engrossment in recondite topical allusions nor their veiled subscription to the perennial mysteries of myth and religion. It is the fact that we have not ...
... What makes these plays still strike us as enigmatic and elusive is neither their engrossment in recondite topical allusions nor their veiled subscription to the perennial mysteries of myth and religion. It is the fact that we have not ...
Page 3
... It is followed by a summary of the comparatively little work done on the late style, and then by a consideration of dramatic kind: what nomenclature best suits these works? Since one of my aims is to identify the points of ...
... It is followed by a summary of the comparatively little work done on the late style, and then by a consideration of dramatic kind: what nomenclature best suits these works? Since one of my aims is to identify the points of ...
Page 5
... what they hear is as important as what they see, and in fact what they hear to some extent determines what they see. Recognizing the theatrical status of the medium is one of the ways in which the analysis performed in this book differs ...
... what they hear is as important as what they see, and in fact what they hear to some extent determines what they see. Recognizing the theatrical status of the medium is one of the ways in which the analysis performed in this book differs ...
Page 6
Russ McDonald. To acknowledge that origin is not, however, to insist that it constitutes the only legitimate context ... what was written are complicated by some uncertainty about who wrote what. According to MacDonald Jackson, with ...
Russ McDonald. To acknowledge that origin is not, however, to insist that it constitutes the only legitimate context ... what was written are complicated by some uncertainty about who wrote what. According to MacDonald Jackson, with ...
Contents
Section 1 | 66 |
Section 2 | 76 |
Section 3 | 77 |
Section 4 | 81 |
Section 5 | 96 |
Section 6 | 99 |
Section 7 | 106 |
Section 8 | 156 |
Section 10 | 195 |
Section 11 | 199 |
Section 12 | 206 |
Section 13 | 219 |
Section 14 | 226 |
Section 15 | 229 |
Section 16 | 233 |
Section 17 | 244 |
Section 9 | 181 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
alliteration Antony and Cleopatra appears Arcadia artifice assonance audience aural Cambridge chapter characters clauses Comedy complex consonants Coriolanus creates Cymbeline delight dramatic echoes effect Elizabethan ellipsis elliptical English episodes especially example female feminine figure gender grammatical Henry VIII illusion Imogen implies irony Jacobean Kenneth Burke kind King Lear language last plays late plays late style late verse Leontes listener literary London Macbeth Marina masculine meaning metaphor metrical mode narrative Noble Kinsmen omission Oxford passage Patricia Parker patterns Paulina Perdita Pericles perspective phrases playwright pleasure plot poet poetic poetry Princeton Prospero's Puttenham Queen reader reiterative relation repeated repetition reunion rhetorical rhythm rhythmic romance fiction scene seems self-conscious semantic sense sentence sexual Shakespeare Shakespearean romance Simon Palfrey sounds speak speech Stephen Booth stories structure stylistic syllables syntactical syntax Tempest theatre theatrical thee thou tion tragedies University Press verb verbal vowels Winter's Tale women words
Popular passages
Page 253 - SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here maintained, it would have been my duty to develope the various causes upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection ; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude.
Page 49 - Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave* of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast,— Lady M, What do you mean ? Macb. Still it cried' Sleep no more !' to all the house ' Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.
Page 180 - Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' th' taper Bows toward her and would under-peep her lids To see th' enclosed lights, now canopied Under these windows white and azure, lac'd With blue of heaven's own tinct.
Page 200 - t in a woman's key, like such a woman As any of us three ; weep ere you fail; Lend us a knee ; But touch the ground for us no longer time Than a dove's motion, when the head 's pluck'd off; Tell him, if he i' the blood-siz'd field lay swoln, Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, What you would do ! Hip.