Seeing Shakespeare’s Style offers new ways for readers to perceive Shakespeare and, by extension, literary texts generally. Organized as a series of studies of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, poetry, and prose, it looks at the inner functioning of language and form in works from all phases of this writer’s career. Because the very concept of literary style has dropped out of so many of our conversations about writing, we need new ways to understand how words, phrases, speeches, and genres in literature work. Responding to this need, this book shows how visual representations of writing can lead to a deeper understanding of language’s textures and effects. Starting with chapters that a beginning reader of Shakespeare can benefit from, its second half puts these tools to use in more in-depth examinations of Shakespeare’s language and style. Although focused on Shakespeare’s works, and the works of his contemporaries, this book provides tools for all readers of literature by defining style as material, graphic, and shaped by the various media in which all writers work.
Preface
PART ONE: STARTING OUT WITH STYLE
1. Seeing Shakespeare’s Style
2. How to Read a Shakespeare Page
3. Shakespeare’s Verse
4. Shakespeare’s Prose
5. Shakespeare’s Imagery
PART TWO: SEEING STYLE IN PLAY
6. The Contexts of Shakespeare’s Prose
7. Letting Prose Out of the Box: Marlowe, Kyd, and the Verse/Prose System
8. Shakespeare and the Representation Market
9. Seeing the Verse in Q1 Hamlet
10. Quoting Hamlet
11. Shakespeare’s Literary Stage Directions
12. Rhyme in Arden of Faversham
13. Shakespeare’s Additional Passages to the 1602 Spanish Tragedy
Biography
Douglas Bruster is Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of English and American Literature and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His PhD is from Harvard University. Author, editor, and co-editor of a number of books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Bruster has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Paris.
