Shakespeare's Tragic Language

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72365-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 124 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 245 g

Reihe: Mini-Monographs in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

In Shakespearean tragedy, language is used to bring about the downfall of characters, but there is also a tragedy which affects language itself through the decomposition of the fundamental concepts and mythologies which give identity to both societies and individuals. This book shows how in Shakespeare’s English history plays, Roman plays, tragicomedies, and romances, characters use language to manipulate and destroy others, but also imprison themselves in false reasoning. The misuse of language creates tragedies for individuals but also for society at large, as its conceptual building blocks lose their capacity to function. For Shakespeare, tragedy happens both to individuals and to cultures, and happens both in language and to language.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hammond, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Acknowledgements

Note on Texts and Abbreviations

Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

Prologue: Tragic Language

1 Tragic Language in the Early History Plays

2 Tragic Language in Shakespeare’s Rome

3 Language and Dissolution

4 The Tragedy of Coercive Language

5 From Tragedy to Romance

Epilogue

Select Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Hammond (Litt.D., Cambridge, 1996) is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Strangeness of Tragedy (2009) and Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Racine (2022).