Rhetorical readings, dark comedies, and Shakespeare's problem plays

Abstract

In very early 1600s, Shakespeare began writing that have proved troubling for audiences. Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida came to be known as the plays - ostensibly written as comedies but without a clear comic resolution. Clark argues that key to understanding these complicated works is discovering their most prominent rhetorical features. This book is first to frame discussion in terms of rhetorically based readings. Drawing upon a wide base of reading in late Tudor-early Stuart drama, Clark offers a formal anatomy of problem play genre, which serves as a primary context for reading three plays. He also resuscitates methodological resources of new formalism in light of more recent theoretical approaches - not only through his reexamination of historiography of dramatic genre but also through his foregrounding of history and theory of rhetoric. In a departure from approaches of other rhetorical studies in early modern literature, Clark emphasizes actual readings of literary texts rather than history of rhetorical theory, offering useful summaries of scholarship on particular aspects of rhetoric in period (particularly chiasmus and gnomic sententium) in support of close readings. He employs language of early modern rhetoric to demonstrate what others have approached through different means - artful fusion of matter and manner in Shakespeare's writing - and provides a set of case studies that will be especially useful for teachers of Shakespeare in undergraduate classrooms, where formal patterns can often provide verifiably significant places of entry into a text.