Ebook: Shakespeare’s Common Language

While the past several decades of Shakespeare studies have considered Shakespeare’s style, his linguistic innovation and the taxonomies of his grammar, there have been few attempts to integrate adequately the fields of language theory and literary criticism. A gap remains, and fruitful developments in linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis have rarely approached Shakespeare’s use of language in a comprehensive way. Shakespeare’s Common Language demonstrates how recent developments in language criticism can uncover fruitful new approaches to Shakespeare’s work, while also historicizing Shakespeare’s language to take into account the critical effects, and creative potential, of language change and linguistic variation. The book thus helps to repair a longstanding gap in the field of early modern literature. In mapping the tools of grammar and linguistics onto the study of literature, Shakespeare’s Common Language frames a methodology that offers a fresh approach to reading dramatic language.