Structural Secrets: Shakespeare's Complex Chiasmus

2014

A study of Shakespeare's language

When we speak of Shakespeare, at least three aspects of his magical personality seem to be unveiling. In the first place, he was a man who lived like other men of his times and died 400 years ago. We hardly know this man to a satisfactory extent and whatever we know is less than significant. Secondly, there is the dramatic genius whose plays are acted and performed all over the world and bring thousands of people from the globe to flutter around theatres to see the plays like moths around a light. When we look at the variety of people who come to see and hear these plays, we realize that the first remark ever made about Shakespeare’s admirers is still the best one. It is the opening sentence of the preface to the first Folio: “From the most able to him that can but spell. There you are numbered.”

2003

In her chapter on As You Like It, Thorne contrasts Alberti's insistence on a single viewpoint in his system of artistic perspective with As You Like It's guarded celebration of multiple viewpoints. From Touchstone to Rosalind, characters in this Shakespeare play use the rhetorical commonplaces to turn 'an idea into more shapes than Proteus himself'(17).

This brief paper examines some imagetic patterns that pervade the language of Shakespeares's Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet. We discuss the characterization of an specific set of images for each play and propose another one, built on the notion of 'unnaturalness', as the big picture that unifies the plays and promotes a deeper undestranding of Shakespeare's use of imagery.

Theatre Survey, 2004

This article tends to study the subversive Shakespeare's religious discourse in the Renaissance England. An adaptive multi-disciplinary dimension of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is applied to lay bare the discursive strategies appropriated by William Shakespeare to safely express his political and religious philosophy in the last scene of the play of Hamlet. This study attempts to bring together linguistic, sociocognitive, and critical metaphorical aspects in one single CDA framework. Serving methods and tools of analysis from various well-known CDA approaches such as Fairclough (

Kalbotyra, 1995

الممارسات اللغوية, 2014

Stylistics is a new course introduced in the curricula of English departments in Algeria. It stems from the LMD system which started eight years ago at some universities and has become widespread in recent years. The aim of this article is to introduce the field first by glancing at its main characteristics and then to illustrate it with an analysis of Act 3, scene 3 of William Shakespeare's Othello. We shall end with a comparison with a classical literary analysis of this same scene. Our past research in the field of stylistics makes us draw the following characteristics: it is first an area of mediation between literary criticism and linguistics or between language and literature. It is mainly based on the relation between pattern and meaning, namely that structure and meaning form one. Besides, the areas stylistics is linked to are linguistics, civilization, history, psychology. It began in the 1960's with Roman Jacobson's Russian Formalism and the material studied is mainly literary. It is interested in a pattern in a clause, paragraph, or text at large which is purposefully repeated that might signal a foregrounding, namely, linguistic features are highlighted, made prominent for specific effects and contribute to the text's total meaning. Repetitive patterns of sound or syntax, for example, strike the reader's conscious attention as unusual. Foregrounding includes linguistic deviations, parallelisms, and repetitions which authors use for specific effect and communicative purposes and which contribute to the general interpretation of the text. In his book Text and Discourse, M.A.K Halliday defines it as patterns of prominence in a poem or prose text, regularities in the sounds or words or structures that stand out or may be brought out by careful reading; and one may often be led in this way towards a new insight through finding that such prominence contributes to the writer's total meaning (98).If we look at Act 3,scene 3, we are going to notice that there is a shift of pronouns from first-person to third-person and vice versa very repeatedly and from general statements to personal involvements in a conspicuously repeated fashion; this is what we call

Prooftexts 22, 3 pp. 273-304, 2003