Product Description: The Language of Queen Elizabeth I presents one of the first diachronic accounts of the language – the idiolect – of the Tudor monarch who ruled England and Ireland from 1558-1603. Suggests that Elizabeth I was a leader of language innovation and change, using it to build her complex social identity as a female monarch in a masculine position of power Examines a number of the monarch’s letters, speeches, and translations Establishes Elizabeth I’s participation in ten morpho-syntactic changes and explores her spelling practice Develops theoretical and methodological frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics through the analysis of the individual speaker Argues for the significance of style as a linguistic and material property in our account of language variation and change...read more

Addresses the challenge faced by Shakespearan actors to deliver his words as they were intended as well as in an understandable and dramatically effective manner, offering advice on dramatic resonance, breathing, and placement.

Product Description: In How to Speak Shakespeare, authors Cal Pritner and Louis Colaianni teach readers how to make sound and sense out of the Bard. Their methods have taught thousands of people—from high school students to English literature and theater arts graduate students, from beginning actors to professional actors—how to understand and effectively communicate the poetry of Shakespeare...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study shows how Shakespeare exploiots the social conventions of speech to dramatic effect. It is concerned less with linguistic detail than with the rhetorical strategies of common usage. Since Shakespeare's plays are written texts designed to be heard rather than read, it follows that pragmatic models of converstaional practice are likely to be relevant in any discussion of his linguistic usage - espcially conversational analysis and the Gricean maxims...read more