Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language

By Alison Thorne

This book contends that Shakespeare's enduring preoccupation with issues of viewpoint needs to be understood in the context of the visual and rhetorical culture of his day. Early chapters thus investigate the complex attitude of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to what was for them the novel Italianate device of pictorial perspective. Through an extensive comparison of Italian and English aesthetic theory, Alison Thorne shows how this device was appropriated and transformed to suit the needs of a very different cultural milieu. In keeping with the practice of reinterpreting continental artistic ideas, she argues, Shakespeare exploited long-established connections between vision, space and language in order to construct rhetorical equivalents for perspective. The remaining chapters offer detailed readings of five Shakespearean plays, locating their self-consciously experimental handling of viewpoint in relation to various aesthetic topoi and artistic forms, from miniatures to court masques. Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0333659392
• ISBN13: 9780333659397
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"