'Much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes
him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it
persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not
stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving
him the lie, leaves him.' Porter, Macbeth, II i. Why would
Elizabethan audiences find Shakespeare's Porter in Macbeth so
funny? And what exactly is meant by the name the 'Weird' Sisters?
Jonathan Hope, in a comprehensive and fascinating study, looks at
how the concept of words meant something entirely different to
Elizabethan audiences than they do to us today. In Shakespeare and
Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance, he
traces the ideas about language that separate us from Shakespeare.
Our understanding of 'words', and how they get their meanings,
based on a stable spelling system and dictionary definitions,
simply does not hold. Language in the Renaissance was speech rather
than writing - for most writers at the time, a 'word' was by
definition a collection of sounds, not letters - and the
consequences of this run deep. They explain our culture's inability
to appreciate Shakespeare's wordplay, and suggest that a rift
opened up in the seventeenth century as language came to be
regarded as essentially 'written'. The book also considers the
visual iconography of language in the Renaissance, the influence of
the rhetorical tradition, the extent to which Shakespeare's late
style is driven by a desire to increase the subjective content of
the text, and new ways of studying Shakespeare's language using
computers. As such it will be of great interest to all serious
students and teachers of Shakespeare. Despite the complexity of its
subject matter, the book is accessibly written with an
undergraduate readership in mind.
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