scholarly journals Can in Shakespeare and Marlowe

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55
Author(s):  
Monika Skorasińska
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modal Verb

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to present the main meanings and the use of the modal verb can in the plays of two Early Modern English playwrights, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. In particular, the study aims at presenting a comparative analysis and provides descriptive as well as quantitative data. The research is based on the analysis of the corpus consisting of the plays written by Shakespeare and Marlowe between 1593-1599. The choice of the works is not random but includes the plays which bear the strongest resemblance in terms of theme, structure, and most importantly, the language of both authors.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Futile Pleasures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey McEleney
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modern Era

Futile Pleasures examines the contradictory role that pleasure played in early modern English writers’ attempts to justify the utility and value of poetry. Drawing on the methodological resources of deconstruction and queer theory, the book offers close readings of works by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, exploring the ambivalence these writers displayed toward the possibility of poetry’s vain futility. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, the book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, the book both theorizes and performs the pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, the book argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

scholarly journals The development of the Englishbe+ V-ende/V-ingperiphrasis: from emphatic to progressive marker?

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
KRISTIN KILLIE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old English ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Reinforcing Effect ◽  
Early Modern English

The article discusses the grammaticalization of thebe+ V-ende/V-ingperiphrasis as a progressive marker. On the basis of quantitative data, it is claimed that the periphrasis started out as an emphatic alternative to the simple tenses. Its length, unusualness and optionality made it well suited as an emphatic marker. In the Early Modern English period (c. 1500–1700), the periphrasis was reinterpreted as an emphatic progressive marker. The prototypical – so-called focalized – use of the construction gradually became obligatory (from the nineteenth century onwards). This caused the focalized use of the periphrasis to lose its emphasis, while the so-called durative use of the construction has remained optional and emphatic to this day, like the subjective uses of the periphrasis. The article also explores the question of influence from Latin on the periphrasis in the Old English period (i.e. up toc.1100), concluding that any such influence is likely to have consisted in a reinforcing effect.

scholarly journals Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of Early Modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare

ICAME Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Demmen
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Language Style ◽  
Spelling Variation ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Historical Play ◽  
Over Time

AbstractIn this article I discuss the issues and challenges of compiling a corpus of historical plays by a range of playwrights that is highly suitable for use in comparative, corpus-based research into language style in Shakespeare’s plays. In discussing sources for digitised historical play-texts and criteria for making a selection for the present study, I argue that not just any set of Early Modern English plays constitutes a suitable basis upon which to make reliable claims about language style in Shakespeare’s plays relative to those of his peers. I point out factors outside of authorial choice which potentially have bearing on language style, such as sub-genre features and change over time. I also highlight some particular difficulties in compiling a corpus of historical texts, notably dating and spelling variation, and I explain how these were addressed. The corpus detailed in this article extends the prospects for investigating Shakespeare’s language style by providing a context into which it can be set and, as I indicate, is a valuable new publicly accessible resource for future research.

Christopher Marlowe and Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Classical Mythology ◽  
First Contact ◽  
English Culture ◽  
The Church

To many of his contemporaries Marlowe was associated not with religion but, publicly and repeatedly, with irreligion. This chapter begins by suggesting that all Marlowe’s major works are in effect first contact narratives, and can be seen as responding in one way or another to Elizabethan encounters with other civilizations, and that this might be a possible reason why a man apparently initially destined for the Church ended his life as a playwright and poet. It then examines some of the various representations of religion in his works, including his use of classical mythology as well his inclusion of Jewish and Muslim characters, and finally attempts to trace some of the effect these had on his contemporaries. Ultimately it argues that Marlowe exerted a major influence on ways of both thinking about and writing about religion in early modern English culture.

scholarly journals Of “You” and “Thou,” Lips and Pilgrims in the Translation of Romeo and Juliet’s “Shared Sonnet”: A Hands-On Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-35
Author(s):  
Anca Ignat ◽  
Alexandru M. Călin
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The Third ◽  
Language History ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hands On ◽  
The Difference

Abstract It is not a recent discovery in the field of language history that the address pronouns thou and you were not, in Shakespeare’s time, used indiscriminately. If the speaker did have a choice between the two forms, that choice was by no means random, idiosyncratic or arbitrary, but always dictated by the social, relational or attitudinal context of a speech act. Nonetheless, all 20th-century Romanian translations of Romeo and Juliet (and of other Shakespearean plays) – from Haralamb Leca’s rather loose rendering (1907) to Ștefan-Octavian Iosif’s and to Virgil Teodorescu’s more refined versions (1940 and 1984, respectively) – seem to ignore the difference in associative meaning between the two forms, which is sometimes essential for a correct assessment of the relationships between characters. The latest Romanian translation of the play, which we have jointly submitted for publication within the Shakespeare for the Third Millennium project (William Shakespeare. Opere XIII, 2018) acknowledges the importance of the various associative meanings that the two pronouns carry and strives to restore these meanings to the text, though not without difficulty, given the rather restrictive form of the original, i.e. iambic pentameters, often with strict rhyme schemes. Thus, focusing on the well-known “shared sonnet” as one of the most relevant instances of pronoun alternation in the play, our paper discusses the uses of you and thou in Early Modern English and sets out to assess how much is lost in 20th-century translations, to show how our own translation restores the associative meanings of the two pronominal forms and finally to exemplify how we managed to overcome translation difficulties entailed by the metrical and stylistic demands of the text.

scholarly journals Pragmatic Marker I Pray in Early Modern English

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-42
Author(s):  
N. Yu. Merkuryeva
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Word Order ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Pragmatic Markers ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modal Verb ◽  
Linguistic Material

Te article deals with the sentences that contain pragmatic marker I pray you / thee and its variants as a parenthetical clause. Te linguistic material for synchronic analysis is taken from the texts of the plays written by the English authors during the 16−17th centuries. Te examination of the lexicalgrammatical and stylistic characteristics of the structures under analysis shows that the greatest variety of the marker forms is achieved at the beginning of the period under consideration. Te following processes are seen to be the sources of the diversity: the increase of expression by means of an adverb (now, still, hartyly) or a modal verb, the change of the pronunciation of the constituent words followed by modifcations of their representation in the text (comes into I prythee with variants prithee, pr’ythee), the elimination of subject and / or object (resulting in the forms pray, pray you, I pray). Towards the end of the period under consideration, in the second half of the 17th century, the diversity of the variants of the marker decreases, predominantly the following structures continue to exist: I pray, pray and I prythee. Te parenthetical clause is studied in diachrony as well. Te forms of the marker constituents, the peculiarities of the marker word order, the position of the clause in the sentences, the combination with other pragmatic markers are compared with the sentences from the texts of the 14−15th centuries.

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