Shakespeare and Language by Hope Jonathan

Author:Hope, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

CHAPTER FIVE

AGENCY AND UNCERTAINTY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SYNTAX

The term ‘syntax’ has a range of meanings across various disciplines. In linguistics, it tends to refer to the highly theoretical, abstract approach to language and grammar characterized by the work of Noam Chomsky, with ‘descriptive grammar’ reserved for more traditional, taxonomic studies of grammar. In literary studies, ‘syntax’ tends to refer to high-level relationships between sentence elements and their meanings, in a usage which can be traced back to the classical theory of sentence construction centred on compositio , which governed the structural order of sentence parts. In the Renaissance, ‘syntax’ often had a lower-level reference simply to the morphological agreement markers between individual words in a sentence.1 In this chapter, I will take ‘syntax’ to mean primarily the arrangement of elements in a sentence, and the grammatical roles those elements have. This to some extent combines the definitions given above, though I will not be considering Shakespeare’s syntax from a theoretical point of view, nor will I be commenting extensively on morphology. My concern here is to try to show, by a series of small-scale studies of Shakespeare’s language, the ways in which syntax produces characteristic types of Shakespearean effect and meaning.

Within classical theory, compositio was informed by two areas of knowledge and practice: grammar (‘recte dicere’ – correct speaking), the duty of finding the correct concord between words in terms of inflectional endings; and also by rhetoric (‘bene dicere’ – good speaking), the higher-level arrangement of sentence elements. The shift from ‘recte’ to ‘bene’ here, with the move from objectivity to subjectivity that is implied, indicates why rhetoric generally is such a rich area of linguistic thought, and why aesthetics is so close to it. The shift from scholastic to humanist grammar discussed in Chapters 1 and 4 can also be seen as a shift from a focus on recte (the compliance with pre-determined rules to produce ‘correctness’) to an increased focus on bene (the emulation of exemplars of good style to produce ‘eloquence’). This art of rhetorical arrangement was held potentially to appeal to three areas of mental process:2

(i) intellective – the rational mind

(ii) psychological – the emotions (for example, the use of disrupted word order to represent a disturbed mind)

(iii) sensual – the use of euphony, rhythm or sound patterning.

In the final section of this chapter, I will argue that Shakespeare’s late style is characterized by an increase in rhetorical features designed to appeal to the psychological – that this in a very large degree constitutes what we call his ‘late style’. Before then, however, I want to consider some lower-level features, which classical theorists would probably have included under grammar, but which I will argue have powerful stylistic effects on the rational mind.

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