Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Download or read book Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays written by David Schalkwyk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the la nguage of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive. In a wide-ranging analysis of both the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets and the Petrarchan discourses in a selection of plays, Schalkwyk addresses such issues as embodiment and silencing, interiority and theatricality, inequalities of power, status, gender and desire, both in the published poems and on the stage and in the context of the early modern period.