eBook Think On My Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language ePub

Having studied linguistics, I'm sensitive to the way language works; the way words go together to arrive at a result. Any fan of Shakespeare knows that the result is stunning, and it's worth looking into how these words work together to create such masterpieces. David Crystal, a well-known British popularizer of language and linguistics, looks at the variegated elements of Shakespeare's words, from spelling and punctuation, to pronunciation and meter, from Shakespeare's coinages (not as many as we think), to his influences. You don't need to know anything about linguistics to understand this book; Crystal explains all the technical terms and concepts briefly and sufficiently, but if you do know about language, the book may interest you more. You won't find any criticism of the plays, or the Bard's style, in this book, but you will end up with a better appreciation of the many variables that fit together to make a Shakespeare play.

As a Shakespeare fan and an admirer of David Crystal (try his fascinating survey on the English language, for example), I had high hopes for this book. I was looking for a combination of Mr. Crystal's scholarly and linguistic abilities with a close analysis of the language of the Bard, and while he delivers in that respect, the overall effect is inconclusive and unsatisfying.

The book is occupied with patterns of changing usage, typesetters' conventions, grammar in flux, etc., and its point seems to be that everything was in such a state of change that the variability you find in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the like doesn't necessarily meaning anything. Fair enough, but I think those points could have been made in an essay.

On the other hand, Mr. Crystal does lead the reader through a careful, scholarly consideration of each of the topics, imparting a sense of what close textual analysis involves, and does give an excellent introduction to the difficulties in deciding upon an "authoritative" text (impossible), as well as the lack of significance of that problem.

If you really like Shakespeare and Crystal, check this out, but don't have great expectations.