Shakespeare and the Shape of Words
Will be published approx. on 30. September 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
300 pages
978-1-009-47957-8 (ISBN)
Description
Expanding our understanding of the moments which define Shakespeare's practice, this collection richly combines literary studies with analyses based on new advances in computational scholarship. Ranging widely across Shakespeare's dramatic writings, it invites us to pay close critical attention to the points at which words are shaped into something new or surprising. Bringing together a distinguished team of international scholars, the chapters show that Shakespeare's creative morphology is also an act of collective meaning-making, where what might be shaped through words - their creative potential - is transformed into something 'strange and admirable'.
Reviews / Votes
'Shakespeare and the Shape of Words is a wonderfully rich assessment of Shakespeare as wordsmith. Offering a creative variety of approaches, essays move thoughtfully between small-scale attention to single words and large-scale critical interpretation, whether illuminating specific plays or wider cultural concepts.' Lynne Magnusson, Professor of English, University of Toronto 'This wonderful collection offers a new angle on Shakespeare's artistry, bringing linguistics, philology and etymology into lively conversation with the politics of race and gender. Recognising the shape of words reveals surprising cultural junctures, but also exposes inequity and friction in the early modern world. Words are materially workable and can be melted, cut, woven and repaired. As dynamic shape-shifters, they create radical change amongst and between the subjects who ply them.' Katharine A. Craik, Professor of Early Modern Literature, Oxford Brookes UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
ISBN-13
978-1-009-47957-8 (9781009479578)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Richard Stacey | Adrian Streete
Shakespeare and the Shape of Words
Book
approx. 09/2026
Cambridge University Press
€136.50
Not yet published
Persons
Richard Stacey is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published work on Shakespeare and early modern drama in numerous collections and journals such as Studies in Philology and Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press), and has written an introduction to Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 3 for Oxford World Classics. Adrian Streete is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Religion at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as being the editor of several volumes, and the author of numerous articles and essays.
Content
Introduction Richard Stacey and Adrian Streete; Part I. Shaping Words: 1. Vicious Shakespeare: rhetoric, invention, and error Sophie Read; 2. Lead us not into tentation: Shakespeare's extenuating circumstances Eric Langley; 3. 'What's in a name?': Noun-verb conversion in Shakespeare Laurie Maguire; Part II. Shaping Words at Work: 4. Sequent Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore; 5. Shakespeare and the syntax of scripture Jonathan P. Lamb; 6. Shakespeare's affixes Jonathan Culpeper, Sean Murphy and Ellen Roberts; Part III. Shaping Words on Stage: 7. The sound and sense of Shakespeare's reduplicatives Jakub Boguszak; 8. The jest's the thing Indira Ghose; 9. Shakespeare's pretty players Richard Stacey; Part IV. Shaping Words in the World: 10. 'All is stained' by white supremacy: 'follow[ing] the act of othering home' in Othello's exposition David Sterling Brown; 11. 'Words are very rascals': ambivalent language in twelfth night Miriam Jacobson; 12. 'Where America, the Indies?': a lexical geography of Shakespeare's Atlantic Lauren Working.