Reviews for How to Speak Shakespeare

The average rating for How to Speak Shakespeare based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-26 00:00:00 John Lloyd Wow, what a great book for Shakespeare language junkies! You really get inside the language, not just meanings but word and syllable emphasis, verbs and the whole shooting match. Pritner and Colaianni give you many lines to paraphrase, punctuation lessons and rhyme scheme info not just on the plays but on W S's poetry too. The back has a chapter on language re acting, and also a good bibliography. This is a book I know I will turn to again and again.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-22 00:00:00 Mikel Rhodent A great counterweight to George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy, published shortly beforehand (in the 1960s). Steiner: Tragedy issues from the bleak worldview of pagans. Optimism (Christianity, Enlightenment) was fatal to it; belief in progress makes it impossible. Kaufmann: Aeschylus was optimistic and committed most of the 'fatal acts and impossibilities'. Greek tragedies were quite happy not to end in catastrophe. Tragedy merely meant 'immense suffering' on stage, such that an end of grace cannot erase the anguish from our minds. Tragedy is entirely possible today. It is the most humane of arts, as it works on sympathy, often for unlikely persons. It believes in courage and nobility, as comedy did not. Despair is the only killer of tragedy. Both value poets above the commentators on poets; both are deeply versed in the poems, and love them intimately; both write to be understood and enjoyed; both are traumatised by the first half of the twentieth century, both remain humanists. Read both.