Speech Perform Shakespeare Sonnet
Cambridge University Press, 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521036337, ISBN10: 052103633X
Paperback, 276 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the language of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive, and bases this distinction on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. 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. In a provocative discussion of the question of proper names and naming events in the sonnets and plays, the book seeks to reopen the question of the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
the sonnets
1. Performatives
the sonnets, Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It
2. Embodiment
the sonnets, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night
3. Interiority
the sonnets, Hamlet and King Lear
4. Names
the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello
5. Transformations
the sonnets and All's Well that Ends Well
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.