Shakespeare s Language

The great English tragedies were written in the first decade of the 17th cent.; the best, by far, were by Shakespeare. These great plays are inescapably associated with kinds of language which are difficult for us, & must have been hard for Shakespeare s contemporaries. Something happened to Shakespeare s language in mid-career, somewhere around 1600. We feel the pace of this language, its sudden turns & backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us & disappearing even before we can grasp them. Discusses the language of the earlier plays, looking for signs as to what was afoot, & then studies what came after that, in the great works between Hamlet & The Tempest.