Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters

by Lynne Magnusson

• ISBN13: 9780521641913
• ISBN10: 0521641918
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Shakespeare and Social Dialogue deals with Shakespeare’s language and the rhetoric of Elizabethan letters. Moving beyond claims about the language of individual Shakespearean characters, Magnusson analyses dialogue, conversation, sonnets and particularly letters of the period, which are normally read as historical documents, as the verbal negotiation of specific social and power relations. Thus, the rhetoric of service or friendship is explored in texts as diverse as Sidney family letters, Shakespearean sonnets and Burghley’s state letters. The book draws on ideas from discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics, especially ‘politeness theory’, relating these to key ideas in epistolary handbooks of the period, including those by Erasmus and Angel Day and demonstrates that Shakespeare’s language is rooted in the everyday language of Elizabethan culture. Magnusson creates a way of reading both literary texts and historical documents which bridges the gap between the methods of new historicism and linguistic criticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(16)
PART I. THE RHETORIC OF POLITENESS	17	(44)
1 Politeness and dramatic character in Henry VIII	17	(18)
2 "Power to hurt": language and service in Sidney household letters and Shakespeare's sonnets	35	(26)
PART II. ELOQUENT RELATIONS IN LETTERS	61	(80)
3 Scripting social relations in Erasmus and Day	61	(30)
4 Reading courtly and administrative letters	91	(23)
5 Linguistic stratification, merchant discourse, and social change	114	(27)
PART III. A PROSAICS OF CONVERSATION	141	(42)
6 The pragmatics of repair in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing	141	(22)
7 "Voice potential": language and symbolic capital in Othello	163	(20)
Notes	183	(25)
Bibliography	208	(9)
Index	217