Title: Shakespeare's language : perspectives, past and present /
Authors: Johnson, Keith, 1944-
Year: 2019
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, Language.; Shakespeare, William, Literary style.; Shakespeare, William,; Language and languages; Literary style
Abstract: "In Shakespeare's Language, Keith Johnson offers an overview of the rich and dynamic history of the reception and study of Shakespeare's language from his death right up to the present. The historical approach provides a comprehensive overview, plotting the attitudes towards Shakespeare's language, as well as a history of its study. This approach reveals how different cultural, literary and linguistic climates have moulded these attitudes and reflects changing linguistic climates. Shakespeare's Language is therefore not only an essential guide to the language of Shakespeare, but offers crucial insights to broader approaches to language as a whole"--
Contents: The seventeenth century: "true sublimity ... but puffy style" -- "Retrieving original purity": The eighteenth century -- Measuring and classifying: the nineteenth century -- Making Shakespeare difficult: the early twentieth century -- From oxcart to computer: lexical studies -- "A richness of variant forms": grammar -- Shakespearean "rules of use": pragmatics -- Original pronunciation: "pronounced out of Ireland"? -- "Multifarious liberty and gay individualism": Shakespeare in print -- Verse and prose: changing a "sorry bed" -- Rhetoric: "maggot ostentation"? -- Where the future lies.