## Metadata - Author: [[Russ McDonald]] - Full Title: Shakespeare and the Arts of Language - Category: #books ## Highlights - Shakespeare’s language functions as a symbolic register, an instrument for recording, transmitting, and magnifying the conditions of the fictional world that the play represents—the conflicts, affinities, and changes occurring among the persons who inhabit it. In fact, dramatic speech or poetic language conforms admirably to the figure that critics call a symbol because it both represents or symbolizes something else, and yet commands attention as an entity itself. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=181)) - The ordering of experience that the playwright has arranged in a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream provides, largely by means of its patterned language, a formal substitute for the clarity and assurance we seek in the more chaotic realm of daily life. To perceive these linguistic turns or patterns and to sense the security of an artistic structure is to achieve a small intellectual victory over the disorder of normal existence. ([Location 191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=191)) - It is not too much to say that Shakespeare’s style performs a kind of social labour, not only in its power to delight listeners but also in its ability to create a community of thought and feeling. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=228)) - In the sixteenth century ‘artificial’ was not a term of opprobrium, as it usually is today, but a term of praise. And having inherited their taste for artifice from Greek and Roman literature, the Tudor pedagogues set about to appropriate classical techniques for the arrangement of verbal materials. ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=480)) - some words that we use every day appear to be Shakespearian coinages: ‘countless’ (Titus, 5.3.159), ‘assassination’ (Macbeth, 1.7.2), ‘unreal’ (Macbeth, 3.4.106), ‘frugal’ (Much Ado, 4.1.128). ([Location 668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=668)) - To the greatest of the humanist teachers such as Erasmus, rhetoric was substantially more than the systems of figures, and so it was for Shakespeare. Of much greater significance are the principles that animate these rhetorical forms, the Aristotelian argument that eloquent speech leads to the discovery of truth, and the Ciceronian refinement of this view, that the instruments of rhetoric prompt us to recognize the complexity of identifying the nature of truth. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=903)) - If poetic devices are regarded as unnecessary, then poetry itself must be regarded as unnecessary, a judgement that history prohibits. This is because poetry—or poetic language in drama—offers benefits unavailable in plain speech: insight, emotional experience, the condensation of complex ideas, memorability, pleasure. ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=961)) - Peacham’s two clauses suggest the twin pleasures of figurative language: first, the mental exercise involved in working out the specific terms of the comparison, that is, the excitement of the search; and second, the triumph of having made the identification, of having seen the object from a great distance. In short, the pleasure of seeking, and the pleasure of finding. Or the delight of not knowing, quickly followed by the delight of knowing. ([Location 1117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=1117)) - in the mature style the grammar of the sentence often propels the listener into the next line, as when the terminal word is a verb demanding an object: unto bad causes swear | Such creatures as men doubt; but do not stain | The even virtue of our enterprise.’ ([Location 1837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=1837)) - In each of the tragedies Shakespeare begins by establishing a poetic baseline for the protagonist and then violating or eroding that norm as the action proceeds. ([Location 1878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=1878)) - When the young Shakespeare began to write dramatic prose, he found in the Ciceronian stylists a syntactical shape hospitable to his most profound habit of mind. This way of looking at the world, noticed by everyone from critics to actors to acute listeners, may be described as an unfailing passion for antithesis. The taste for opposition, for comparison and contrast, for juxtaposition, helps to explain the forms adopted by his prose speakers, but it accounts for considerably more than that. It determines the word choices that fill those forms, the construction of his verse sentences, the pairing of characters, the alternation of scenes, the blending of modes (as in tragicomedy), the complementarity of ideas. ([Location 2173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00JC5UTOG&location=2173))