num_pages: 211
description: 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 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.
language: English
title: Shakespeare and the Arts of Language
titlecomplete: Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford Shakespeare Topics)
genres: Reference, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 36
publisher: Oxford University Press