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  • Chapter 3 - The Language and Style of Early Shakespeare

  • Edited by Rory Loughnane, University of Kent, Canterbury, Andrew J. Power
  • Book:
    Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594
    Published online:
    17 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020, pp 76-101

  • Summary

    This chapter illuminates the authenticity and variety of the rhetorical styles of writing in a selection of Shakespeare’s earliest plays and the epyllion, Venus and Adonis. Focusing on bombast and repetition as two of the most frequent and representative rhetorical techniques that stand out in Shakespeare’s early writing, and addressing the earliest attack on Shakespeare’s writing craft, the chapter explores different ways in which Shakespeare turns rhetoric into an instrument that produces meaning. Critical attention is paid on examining how Shakespeare produces originality in collaborative and solo works and on radical uses of rhetoric for unrhetorical purpose. Comparing Shakespeare to some of the contemporaries that inspired his writing, like Marlowe, Greene, and Lodge, the chapter offers an insight into forms of imitation and creative resistance to existing models, on examples that have not yet been explored, and within the debate about styles in poetic and rhetorical treatises of the late Elizabethan period.