Shakespeare and Language (review)

In Shakespeare and Language, Catherine Alexander has assembled an eclectic assortment of essays from Shakespeare Survey that deal with language and its linguistic and cultural dimensions. In his introductory essay, Jonathan Hope notes that English in the early modern period was in a state of "drift," a tenuous state rife with morphological and phonological forms that reflect an English in transition, a language drifting to a standardized form as it arrived in the nascent print culture of Shakespeare's England. The collected essays reflect that "drift"; the authors consider the historical and dramatic force of an English that Shakespeare consciously and subconsciously employs for metrical and dramatic effects.

Stephen Booth's essay examines the "substantively insignificant semantic relationship" in Shakespeare's verse that gives his poetry coherence and associative force, arguing that the incidental frisson produced by assonance, consonance, and other metrical devices conveys the conscious and unconscious energy of Shakespeare's dynamic imagination. While Muriel St. Clare Byrne characterizes the Lisle Letters as a prosaic touchstone for reaffirming Elizabethan speech patterns, Terence Hawkes's famous essay on Shakespeare's "talking animals" similarly elevates the oral dimension of Shakespeare's verse, but not as means of affirming the written text but rather as an abjuration of the written form: Love's Labor Lost indeed undermines the modern ideological preference for the written text by elevating the authenticity of the spoken word. Vivian Salmon takes her cue from Elizabethan word-formation practices; in addition to drawing on standard compounding practice in word-formation, Shakespeare also engages in more complex word formations in order to exert pressure on the deep structure of words for dramatic, lexical effect. Bridget Cusack's essay frames the topic in the context of morphological shifts resonating in early modern speech (e.g., third-person verb suffixes of -eth and -s, monosyllabic/disyllabic pronunciation of suffixes) to suggest Shakespeare's inclusion of these fluid forms for metrical and dramatic effect.

In Romeo and Juliet, Jill Levenson notes that despite the inexorable pull of the play towards its tragic coda, rhetorical embellishment pushes against the tragic boundary to reveal the emotional and psychological states of the characters trapped by circumstance. If rhetorical amplification is used as a discursive register for tragedy, Robert Hapgood asserts that each play of the second tetralogy has a dominant discursive mode that is reflective of the play's historical disposition: denunciation in Richard II; retrospection and rumors in 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV;and in Henry V a disputational mode appropriate for an invading monarch. Through- out these plays, Hapgood argues that the rhetorical mode echoes the thematic dimensions of each play.

Robert Wilcher examines the comic dualogue of clown and fool characters. In his trenchant analysis, Wilcher traces Shakespeare's modulation of these comic "double acts" from As You Like It to Twelfth Night and Hamlet. Wilcher observes that the status of the fool and his foil is fluid and open-ended, shifting as social relationships change both between and within scenes. Philippa Berry's essay argues, persuasively, that Hamlet's disenfranchisement from the family unit and from the throne engenders his verbal adeptness, a fluid excess (punning on "heir/air/ear") that represents the loss of inherited kingship and the acquisition of mutable identities predicated on homophonic dislocation. Inga-Stina Ewbank's essay on the "power of words" also concerns Hamlet and the need for characters to "translate" their verbal environment; for Hamlet to acquiesce to familial demands, language must be translated, analyzed, and reasserted on his own terms as he proceeds to the bloody revenge demanded of him. Pierre Bourdieu informs Lynne Magnusson's essay on Othello and the "voice potential" of its chief characters. Bourdieu's notion that language is the capital of a discursive economy with operative power explains Iago's ability to control and alter the discursive fields in which he engages other characters.

Albert Tricomi's essay on Titus...