Shakespeare's Figures of Speech

This book will change the way you read Shakespeare. It will also change your perception of how Shakespeare wrote his plays. The twenty-first century reader looks at the language of Shakespeare for meaning, sonority, rhythm, and connotation; and after four hundred years of changes in the English language, achieving just this level of understanding is often a challenge. However, Shakespeare gives the reader another key to his intention: his use of the verbal patterns called linguistic or literary figures of speech. When he was a child at school, Shakespeare was taught these patterns as crucial means of expression. Like every other schoolboy of his age, Shakespeare learned to name the figures, then practiced translating them from Latin into English, after which he and his schoolmates were challenged to recreate the figures in Latin and English writings of their own. So, for Shakespeare as an adult playwright, these patterns existed in his mind as learned and well-practiced usages. When we read Shakespeare’s plays with a knowledge of, and sensitivity to, his patterns of language, an entirely new level of emotion and meaning emerges: we perceive a heightened union of form and content without which we cannot experience the deepest aesthetic pleasure his great works offer.