SERIOUSNESS OF LITERATURE

An Essay Making Fun of the Seriousness of Literature

An Essay Making Fun of the Seriousness of Literature

Introduction

When asked to compile a dictionary of Shakespeare's informal English within a series published by Athlone Press (now taken over by Continuum Books), I naturally reviewed what the attraction of compiling such a dictionary might be. Informal language is a neglected topic—at least from a historical standpoint. There are dictionaries and glossaries devoted to other aspects of Shakespeare's language like legal and military language, sexual innuendo, and neologisms, but his informal language has not been covered though it forms so large a part of conversation. As Shakespeare is primarily a dramatist and he is one of the first dramatists to use informal language for conversation, his informal English should be a major topic of investigation. Indeed, his informal language is often ignored by editors and commentators, who often interpret informal as formal and/or grammatical. This paper presents a critique of Shakespeare literature by highlighting the flaws to criticize the reality of Shakespeare's style.

Discussion

Informal language assessment used by the Shakespeare enable us to learn more about Shakespeare, conversational language in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and to what extent we may need to change our views about Shakespeare through studying this aspect of his linguistic usage (Sokol & Mary, 2000). However, although all dictionaries have fuzzy boundaries, topic-based dictionaries are especially problematic because the boundaries of any given topic are less clearly defined than what constitutes the standard forms of a language.

Shakespeare wrote both poems and plays. It is in the plays, which are conversation based, that one expects to find examples of informal language, because the poems are rhetorical and elevated in their language, dealing as they do with love, and in the longer poems this passion is set in a distant past and treated in an almost epic manner (Williams, 1997). The lover in the Sonnets can exclaim 'But out alack, he was but one hour mine (33.11)', where out and alack are examples of informal language with parallels in the plays. When in Venus and Adonis Adonis's stallion sees a mare, he cares little for what his master shouts:

(1) What recketh he his riders angrie sturre,

His flattering holla, or his stand, I say, (283-284).

Here, holla, stand, and I say are all examples of informal language—that language which a rider addresses to his horse or which people use to others whom they are ...