Description
Oxford Forensic Shakespeare 2018 Edition by Quentin Skinner
Forensic Shakespeare illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet) and on three early Jacobean dramas, (Othello, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well), Quentin_x000D_Skinner argues that major speeches, and sometimes sequences of scenes, are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case, either in accusation or defence. Some of these works have traditionally been grouped together as 'problem plays', but here Skinner offers a different explanation for their frequent_x000D_similarities of tone. There have been many studies of Shakespeare's rhetoric, but they have generally concentrated on his wordplay and use of figures and tropes. By contrast, this study concentrates on Shakespeare's use of judicial rhetoric as a method of argument. By approaching the plays from this perspective, Skinner is able to account for some distinctive features of Shakespeare's vocabulary, and also help to explain why certain scenes follow a recurrent pattern and arrangement. More_x000D_broadly, he is able to illustrate the extent of Shakespeare's engagement with an entire tradition of classical and Renaissance humanist thought._x000D_ Table of Contents :- _x000D_
Introduction 1: Classical Rhetoric in Shakespeare's England 2: Shakespeare's Forensic Plays 3: The Open Beginning 4: The Insinuative Beginning 5: The Failed Beginning 6: The Judicial Narrative 7: Confirmation: Juridical and Legal Issues 8: Confirmation: The Conjectural Issue 9: Refutation and Non-Artificial Proofs 10: The Peroration and Appeal to Commonplaces Appendix: The Date of All's Well That Ends Well Bibliography Index_x000D_