Shakespeare's Late StyleCambridge University Press, 2006 M08 10 - 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. |
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 |
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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 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.