ENG 2530: Course Description (Summer1996)
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Course Description: ENG 2530Y (Shakespeare's Language)

Instructor: Professor Ian Lancashire
Office: Wetmore Hall, New College, 300 Huron, Room 122
Voice: 978-8279
Fax: 978-0554
E-mail: ian@chass.utoronto.ca
URL: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~ian/index.html
Summer office hours: By appointment

General description

We will analyze the language of representative plays and poems by Shakespeare from the early 1590s to 1613 in the context of original resources for the study of Early Modern English during this 25-year period and will use this analysis as a basis for a new critical understanding of the plays. The texts will be Titus Andronicus, Loves Labours Lost, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, The Sonnets, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Houghton Mifflin, 1974). In class we will study the language of the plays in selected scenes with the intent of recovering the meaning of the text as Shakespeare and his audience would have understood it.

Our method will be inductive, beginning with the texts and the many language texts produced by the English Renaissance. The resources on which we will rely include treatises and grammars on the language by such as William Lyly (1549), Edmond Coote (1596), and Ben Jonson (1640); bilingual Latin-English, Italian-English, Spanish-English, and French-English dictionaries by such as Thomas Thomas (1587), John Florio (1598), John Minsheu (1599), and Randall Cotgrave (1611); and monolingual English dictionaries by Robert Cawdrey (1604), John Bullokar (1613), Henry Cockeram (1623), Thomas Blount (1656), and John Garfield (1657).

A computer database of a dozen of these dictionaries, prepared at Toronto over the past ten years with the help of graduate students in this department, will provide the class with a huge untapped resource of information about Renaissance English. The Early Modern English Database here now includes about 225,000 word entries. Information about English words in these bilingual dictionaries cannot be easily found manually (the works are organized mainly by foreign-language word) and so has not been available to the OED lexicographers. Other computer-searchable databases include old- spelling electronic texts of the sonnets, the plays, and other works, and electronic texts of the Oxford complete edition by Wells and Taylor.

Because Renaissance dictionaries and grammars tell us much about how Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood word-meaning, we will encounter theoretical problems in defining how they understood word-meaning. Such issues appear to have important consequences for critical studies of most works before 1700.

Conduct of Course

We will work by lecture-discussion. All students should obtain accounts on CHASS, since we will be drawing material from the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database there. Students will deliver a combination of in-class reports and one or more term papers. Papers may be critical or language- oriented. Students will also be expected to contribute to close readings of the plays and poems as we move through them in class.

Report Requirements

Reports on books should introduce the class to the importance of the work in contributing to our knowledge of Shakespeare and the language of the English Renaissance. Reports on a play should be a detailed and original analysis of the language of a passage of between 50 and 250 lines from that play -- using all the linguistic resources available to us. Ensure that the delivery length does not exceed 25 minutes. Please hand in a printout one week after it is delivered in class (follow the MLA Handbook).

Course Grade Breakdown

Text

The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Houghton Mifflin, 1974), is recommended.

Schedule

We will begin by reading William Lyly's Short Introduction of Grammar (1549) and Edmond Coote's The English School-Maister (1596) for a grounding in how the Renaissance understood the English language. Then we will take up the plays and poems in chronological order.