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The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

Online ISBN:
9780191756634
Print ISBN:
9780199607747
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

Jonathan Post (ed.)
Jonathan Post
(ed.)
UCLA
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Jonathan F. S. Post is Distinguished Professor of English at UCLA and the founding director of the UCLA Summer Shakespeare Program in Stratford and London. His publications include studies with a special focus on poetry of the early modern and modern periods: English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 1999, rpt. 2002); Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric (California, 2002); and The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He is currently writing a critical study of Anthony Hecht’s poetry for Oxford University Press.

Published online:
1 October 2013
Published in print:
1 July 2013
Online ISBN:
9780191756634
Print ISBN:
9780199607747
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The sound of Shakespeare’s words is intrinsic to their meaning and dramatic effect. This essay understands poetry as word music whether written as verse or prose. My approach to the theme invokes Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio, Edmund Kean, John Keats, Herbert Farjeon, Edith Evans, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf. I then present a survey of how the musicality of Shakespeare’s language has been discussed by three influential theatrical practitioners of the last forty years: John Barton, Cicely Berry, and Adrian Noble, and notice their difficulty in approaching Shakespeare’s word music even whilst recognizing it as crucial to his poetry and dramatic art. There then follow close readings of an example of verse (Twelfth Night, or what you willto approach the theme 1.5.257-65) and prose (Macbeth 5.1.18-64), the better to illustrate my recommendations of how readers might experience Shakespeare’s word music for themselves, and enrich Shakespeare when performed.

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