Shakespeare's World of Words

302 Pages·2015·3.92 MB·English

by  Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s
World of Words
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Shakespeare’s
World of Words
Edited by Paul Yachnin
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare
50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are
trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
© Paul Yachnin and Contributors, 2015
Paul Yachnin and the Contributors have asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of
this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can
be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-1529-2
ePDF: 978-1-4742-5291-1
ePub: 978-1-4742-5290-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shakespeare’s world of words / edited by Paul Yachnin.
pages cm. -- (Arden shakespeare library)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4725-1529-2 (hardback)
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Knowledge--Languages. 2. English
language--Early modern, 1500-1700--Rhetoric. 3. Shakespeare, William,
1564-1616--Language. 4. Literature and society--England--History--16th
century. 5. Literature and society--England--History--17th century. I. Yachnin,
Paul Edward, 1953- editor.
PR3069.L3S53 2015
822.3’3--dc23
2015006698
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Paul Yachnin
1 Well-Won Thrift 33
Michael Bristol and Sara Coodin
2 Proper Names and Common Bodies: The Case
of Cressida 59
David Schalkwyk
3 Antique / Antic: Archaism, Neologism and the
Play of Shakespeare’s Words in Love’s Labour’s
Lost and 2 Henry IV 77
Lucy Munro
4 Learning to Colour in Hamlet 103
Miriam Jacobson
5 Recasting ‘Angling’ in The Winter’s Tale 125
J. A. Shea
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vi CONTENTS
6 ‘What may be and should be’: Grammar Moods
and the Invention of History in 1 Henry VI 147
Lynne Magnusson
7 Othello and Theatrical Language 171
Sarah Werner
8 Slips of Wilderness: Verbal and Gestural
Language in Measure for Measure 187
Paul Yachnin and Patrick Neilson
9 ‘Captious and Inteemable’: Reading
Comprehension in Shakespeare 211
Meredith Evans
10 ‘Time is their master’: Men and Metre in The
Comedy of Errors 237
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Bibliography 263
Index 279
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support of a number of
individuals, institutions and organizations. The work on this
book, first of all, has been fostered by the Shakespeare and
Performance Research Team, which is headquartered at McGill
University and which, from its inception in 1993, has been
committed to crossing the boundaries that usually separate
the fields of literary history, performance studies and theat-
rical practice. The Shakespeare Team has received generous,
long-term funding from agencies of the Quebec government,
first FCAR (Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à
la recherche) and then FQRSC (Fonds québécois de recherche
sur la société et la culture). I am grateful for the support.
The McGill Department of English has also been a valued
supporter of the work of the Shakespeare Team.
I am grateful to the members of the Shakespeare Team who
took part in the work that led to the present book, especially
those who participated in the November 2010 Shakespeare
Language Workshop at McGill. That includes Michael Bristol,
Sara Coodin, Meredith Evans, Wes Folkerth, Leanore Lieblein,
Patrick Neilson, Karen Oberer and J. A. Shea. At that workshop,
we were joined by a number of distinguished guests – Miriam
Jacobson, Lynne Magnusson, Lucy Munro, David Schalkwyk,
James Siemon and Sarah Werner. James Siemon was not able
to contribute his essay to the book, but his work was valuable
for our thinking then and has remained valuable since. To the
other visitors, who very graciously did give their work to this
book, I am profoundly grateful – for their creativity, extraor-
dinary scholarship, collegiality and great patience.
Finally, I must acknowledge the support and unfailing
patience of Margaret Bartley at Bloomsbury Publishing. This
book could not have had a better friend.
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NOTES ON
CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor of English Emeritus
at McGill University. Much of his work has been concerned
with situating Shakespeare’s works in the social context of
their production and reception. His books include Carnival
and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority
in Renaissance England; Shakespeare’s America / America’s
Shakespeare; and Big-Time Shakespeare. He has edited or
co-edited several books, including Shakespeare and the Modern
Theatre: The Performance of Modernity; Print, Manuscript,
and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in
Early Modern England; and Shakespeare and Moral Agency.
His most recent publication is ‘Macbeth the Philosopher:
Rethinking Context’ in New Literary History.
Sara Coodin is Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters
at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on
classical philosophy’s importance to thought and action
in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as classicism and Christian
Hebraism in Renaissance England. She has published on these
topics in several Shakespeare journals and edited collections,
and is currently completing a book-length study of the moral
agency of Shakespeare’s Jews that focuses on the use of
biblical citation in The Merchant of Venice.
Meredith Evans is Associate Professor of English at
Concordia University, Montreal. She has published articles on
Enlightenment philosophy and literature, seventeenth-century
natural philosophy, critical theory and, most recently, on
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Renaissance drama. Her current work on Shakespeare and
political theory focuses on the highly equivocal value of action
and personal agency.
Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at
the University of Georgia and the author of Barbarous
Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early
Modern England, a book that examines how trade with
Asia and the Levant reconfigured early modern English
attitudes toward classical poetry. Jacobson locates evidence
of early modern Mediterranean trade in poets’ importation
and appropriation of new, non-Western words and concepts.
In addition to her work on trade, language and classical
antiquity, Jacobson has published essays on material texts in
the natural world, and is at work on a book about mummies,
corpses and the resurrection of the past in early modern
drama and poetry.
Lynne Magnusson is Professor and Director of Graduate
Studies in English at the University of Toronto, with research
interests in Shakespeare’s language, the social rhetoric of
the early modern letter, early modern women’s writing, and
discourse analysis. The author of Shakespeare and Social
Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters, she
has recently edited Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the Norton
Shakespeare and is working on Shakespeare’s Language and
the Grammar of Possibility and co-editing The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare’s Language. She is past Director of
the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and has
served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America
and on the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly. Recent
honours include election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford,
and the Canada Council’s Killam Research Fellowship.
Lucy Munro is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern
Drama at King’s College London. Her research focuses on
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