Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure

Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780192834225

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When Claudio breaks the new laws against vice in Vienna by getting his financee, Julietta, pregnant, a series of ethical issues is brought under scrutiny. His sister's virtue is held to ransom by the deputy rule of the city until justice is done, mercy shown, and order restored.This is among Shakespeare's most vivid dramatic projections of moral duplicity. The introduction discusses the origins of his treatment of the well-known story and examines his sources. The editor also sets the play in its historical context and offers the most comprehensive available account ofthe text's theatrical life from Restoration adaptations to present-day productions.


Writing in Nonstandard English

Writing in Nonstandard English

Author: Irma Taavitsainen

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9781556199455

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This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest.The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.


A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature

A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature

Author: Gordon Williams

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2001-09-13

Total Pages: 1650

ISBN-13: 0485113937

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Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.