Dimensions
162 x 241 x 31mm
The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays, and the plays are made of language. This intriguing book argues that something extraordinary happened to the language of Shakespeare in mid-career, somewhere around 1600. An initial discussion of the language of some of the earlier plays looks for signs as to what was afoot, and this leads on to a central treatment of this turning point. The rest of the book is about what came after that, in the great works between Hamlet and The Tempest. The greatness of Shakespeare's best plays is inescapably associated with kinds of language which seem increasingly difficult to us, and must sometimes have been hard even for his contemporaries. How did his language develop, and how did it happen that in spite of all linguistic difficulties Shakespeare had an audience capable of understanding Hamlet at the beginning of the decade and Coriolanus near the end of it?
