This study analyzes the role of the sentenia (proverb, maxim, adage) in the rhetorical process of invention and, particularly, Shakespeare's use of the proverb as a master theme. The plays have a characteristic structure in which the thematic statement is initiated in the early scenes and then repeated, with variations, throughout. In Hamlet, for instance, the sententia all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity is exemplified and concretized in scene after scene. Donker demonstrates that Shakespeare was a product of his schooling in Tudor England in which simple proverbial material was considered to be the substance of moral philosophy, the subject to be developed, varied, and amplified in school exercises. He was also following the dictate of Horace in Ars poetica that moral philosophy was the proper subject of the poet, that the adage was to be the theme of fiction, to be modulated in a wide range of registers and tones throughout the work, Shakespeare was using the adage as central to the process of invention. Previous scholars have analyzed the sententia as a hallmark of style in Shakespeare's plays, but not as the controlling theme. This is a well explicated argument that will be of interest and value to Shakespearean scholars and students of the history of rhetoric, with broader applications to the study of Greco-Roman and Elizabethan cultures, the history and theory of drama, and humanistic studies.

While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A final chapter, which considers ballads with Shakespearean connections in the seventeenth century, shows how popular culture immediately after his time used Shakespeare.

The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintsev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are realted to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these were used by Marlowe, Tourneur, Webster and Middleton. For this second edition, Professor Bradbrook has revised her material and written a new introduction. A new final chapter on performance and characterization describes the conventions of role-playing. Dramatists before and after Shakespeare are compared with him in their methods of showing a complex identity on stage. This chapter also considers the work of Marston, Chapman and Ford in relation to the themes and conventions studied in earlier chapters.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

This volume freshly illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs, practices and issues, and their representation in Shakespeare's plays.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This collection of essays is the first to reassess a range of Shakespeare's plays in relation to carnivalesque theory. Contributors re-historicize the carnivalesque in different ways, offering both a developed application, or critique of, Bakhtin's thought.

"In this book Rhodri Lewis argues that Shakespeare's tragedies are a series of experiments that attempt to tell the truth about the world as Shakespeare sees it, and to discover how far he can stretch tragic affirmation to accommodate the darker aspects of this vision. Lewis argues that Shakespeare worked hard to develop an understanding of what tragedy might be good for; that this understanding emerged from his engagement with the traditions of tragic writing and theorizing that had gone before him; that he used this understanding to shape his tragic plays as carefully patterned aesthetic wholes; and that Shakespeare's understanding of the tragic has "as little to do with Hegel as it does with the unities of tragic time, place, and action that many of Shakespeare's peers and successors busied themselves abstracting from Aristotle's Poetics." Lewis begins the book by tracing the ideas and practices of tragedy as they were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century. He then takes a chronological approach to Shakespeare's plays, ultimately seeking to affirm the status of dramatic art in Shakespeare's time as a medium for telling the truth about the human experience in a world that is not fully susceptible to rational analysis"--