Shakesplish: How We Read Shakespeare's Language (Square One: First-Order Questions in the Humanities) - Softcover

Blank, Paula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503607577 ISBN 13: 9781503607576

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

For all that we love and admire Shakespeare, he is not that easy to grasp. He may have written in Elizabethan English, but when we read him, we can't help but understand his words, metaphors, and syntax in relation to our own. Until now, explaining the powers and pleasures of the Bard's language has always meant returning it to its original linguistic and rhetorical contexts. Countless excellent studies situate his unusual gift for words in relation to the resources of the English of his day. They may mention the presumptions of modern readers, but their goal is to correct and invalidate any false impressions. Shakesplish is the first book devoted to our experience as modern readers of Early Modern English. Drawing on translation theory and linguistics, Paula Blank argues that for us, Shakespeare's language is a hybrid English composed of errors in comprehension―and that such errors enable, rather than hinder, some of the pleasures we take in his language. Investigating how and why it strikes us, by turns, as beautiful, funny, sexy, or smart, she shows how, far from being the fossilized remains of an older idiom, Shakespeare's English is also our own.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Blank (1959–2016) was Margaret L. Hamilton Professor of English at the College of William and Mary and the author of Broken English (1996) and Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Man (2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503607577
• ISBN 13: 9781503607576
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232