Vickers - ˜Theœ Artistry of Shakespeares Prose

Routledge Library Editions

THE ARTISTRY OF
SHAKESPEARES PROSE

SHAKESPEARE

Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

CRITICAL STUDIES

In 36 Volumes

THE ARTISTRY OF
SHAKESPEARES PROSE

BRIAN VICKERS

First published in 1968

Reprinted in 2005 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1968 Brian Vickers

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

The Artistry of Shakespeares Prose

ISBN 0-415-35307-6

ISBN 0-415-33086-6 (set)

Miniset: Critical Studies

Series: Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

It is very pleasing that The Artistry of Shakespeares Prose is being reissued. The book had its genesis in 1962, when the examiners for the Cambridge University Harness Prize Essay (John Northam and Anne Barton) fortunately chose Shakespeares Prose as its topic. Coincidentally, I had been working for three years on a doctoral dissertation on the prose style of Francis Bacon and his use of traditional forms and techniques, and had steeped myself in classical rhetoric. Turning to Shakespeare from this perspective I was able to appreciate the pioneering work of two American scholars in the 1940s, T.W. Baldwin and Sister Miriam Joseph, who had shown the extent to which Shakespeares grammar-school education had trained him in the compositional techniques codified by Renaissance humanism, especially the arts of language. Suddenly I could see how Shakespeare had deployed these skills in prose, no less than in verse, and how he had integrated the schemes and tropes so fluently into dramatic speech that they had gone virtually unnoticed for over three hundred years. My sense of rediscovery, of being a modern who could live with the ancients on their terms and in their idioms, lent an excitement to the writing of this book which is still tangible, Im glad to say. (Although I could wish that some of the sentences were shorter.) Having won the prize, I expanded my essay into a book which apperared in 1968, the same year in which I published Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge University Press), an unusual feat.

That intensive training in Renaissance rhetoric and practice, literary theory (under the helpful guidance of Robert Bolgar, a scholar whose vast learning went with a disarming modesty and an infectious sense of humour), set one direction of my subsequent research and writing, in such books as Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Macmillan, 1970; revised edition Southern Illinois University Press 1989), In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press 1989, 3rd edition 1997), and English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press 1999 for 2000). All three deal with Shakespeare incidentally, and I published some more detailed essays on related topics: Shakespeares Use of Rhetoric, in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, eds K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (Cambridge University Press 1971), reprinted in A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama, eds V. Salmon and E. Burness (Amsterdam: Benjamins 1987); Rhetoric and Feeling in Shakespeares Sonnets, in Shakespeare Today, ed. K. Elam (Florence 1984); and Rites of Passage in Shakespeares Prose in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1986), reprinted in my own collection of essays, Returning to Shakespeare (London: Routledge 1989). I have not yet written the parallel book I have long had in mind, on rhetoric in Shakespeares verse, but the inspiration may yet come to me.

Two final notes: all Shakespeare quotations come from C. J. Sissons edition (London 1953) with line-references to the Globe edition; and the chapter title Gay Comedy uses an older, more innocent sense of the word.

Brian Vickers

London, July 2004