Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, and: Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, and: Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century, and: Shakespeare and Masculinity, and: Shakespeare's Reading (review)

The Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, aiming to "provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship," should indeed prove helpful in the classroom.

Russ McDonald's Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, heralding a welcome resurgence of attention to style and language, promises to be as useful a teaching tool as his Bedford Companion to Shakespeare (1996). "Aural and other rhetorical pleasures have been slighted in recent years," McDonald notes, "and there is no denying that the current interest in historical conditions, political influences, gender conflicts, and other such contextual phenomena, renewing and constructive though it is, has necessarily diverted attention from the formal and material attributes of words" (3-4). However, "The analysis of poetry . . . is not incompatible with this recent enthusiasm for discursive context. Indeed, it ought to be the beneficiary of such interest. Students of poetry should heed the motto of cultural materialism: 'Always historicize'" (31).

Because the topics of style and language have long lain neglected, reference to existing scholarship requires excavation of long-unfashionable students of language. McDonald's title conjures that venerable, unsurpassed study of Shakespeare and classical rhetoric, Sister Miriam Joseph's Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (1947). Older readers may at times experience such excavations of stylistic analysis as a return to the bad old days: having worked in the trenches of essay-grading in the 1960s and '70s, I (for one) had hoped never again to revisit the topic of eye imagery in King Lear, as McDonald does on pages 75-76. But despite noting with a wry smile Caroline Spurgeon's inclusion of "His Sympathy for Snails" among the running heads for her chapter "Shakespeare's Tastes and Interests" in Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (1936), McDonald rightly finds continuing interest in Spurgeon's insight that Shakespeare "return[s] to a few prominent discursive fields as sources of figuration" (71 and 77). Scholars born after about 1960—distressingly numerous nowadays—will likely not feel jaundiced by the return of imagery study; and on the whole it is refreshing to hear older scholarly work treated with respect, rather than (as so often) smugly dismissed as a Cave of Error from which we have emerged.

McDonald writes well on Shakespeare's achievement in word coinage, patterning, figurative language, sound effects, and deployment of classical rhetorical tropes. One excellent chapter, "Loosening the Line: Shakespeare's Metrical Development," is an accessible discussion of Shakespeare's gradual uncoupling of sentences and lines over the course of his career. Meter is notoriously difficult to teach, and McDonald effortlessly helps us to hear it. (It's worth noting, however, that Martin Wiggins's book, reviewed below, attributes to all dramatists of the late 1590s, not merely to Shakespeare, the "increasingly flexible use of verse, without the magnificent metrical regularity and end-stopping that characterized Marlowe's writing" [Wiggins, 56]). Also excellent is McDonald's chapter on Shakespeare's prose. A solid background chapter on the state of the English language in the Renaissance is enlivened by moments such as Ralph Lever's patriotic proposals for substituting Anglo-Saxon-based terms for Latinate words: "witcraft for 'logic', endsay for 'conclusio', ifsay for 'propositio conditionalis', and, perhaps best of...