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Shakespeare and Language : Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance

The fundamental argument of this book is that the renaissance exists in a different linguistic universe to our own. Language is theorised, and popularly conceived, in terms radically different from, and at times profoundly antithetical to, those of our own culture. Thinking through these counter-intuitive issues was a difficult task, and the book questions our prototypical notions of language as written, and as having a 'standard' form; and our notion of what a 'word' is, and the location of semantic content. These ideas are not new to linguistics, but they are new, and alien, to literary studies.