Word against Word offers a new approach to Shakespearean drama, and
in particular to Shakespeare's Richard II, through an extended
engagement with the Bakhtinian concept of art as a form of social
utterance. The book is the first to explore this central Bakhtinian
conception and its associated notions of social accent, dialogism,
and heteroglossia in the context of drama and of Shakespeare
studies.
James R. Siemon begins by examining the variety of accents,
discourses, and behaviors that competed for the social space of
early modern England. He surveys Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, including dramatists, poets, and other writers, in
order to document early modern attitudes toward the implications of
sociolinguistic behavior in a heteroglot environment. While ranging
broadly, the book takes Richard II as an exemplary instance of
Bakhtinian utterance, showing the play to be, despite its apparent
thematic and formal unities, an arena marked by struggles among
competing groups and orientations, with their socially defined
languages and assumptions. The figure of Shakespeare's King Richard
emerges as a revealing example of a form of subjectivity
constructed amid the demands of conflicting voices.
Taking his lead from V. N. Volosinov's stress on the social
implications of formal elements of utterance, Siemon argues for the
utility of formal analysis in historical and new historical study.
To this end he reconsiders the social implications of such features
as tonality, diction, timing, gesture, and metaphor. His analysis
extends not only to Richard II but also to the materials on which
historians and new historians have based arguments about the
sociopolitical location of the theater,the role of honor culture,
the rise of agrarian enclosure, and the cultural polarization of
English society.
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