Jul 25, 2008

Shakespeare's Work | Shakespeare's Poetic Techniques

Until this century, the prevailing critical view held that Shakespeare was an untutored genius, a gifted creator of characters, poetry, and dramatic situations, but a careless and not entirely conscious artist. The adverse part of that judgment has now been almost wholly reversed. Closer textual analysis and the development of a modernist literature scrupulously attentive to the patterning of images and the dramatic control of symbolic design and mythic reference have helped us to discern in Shakespeare's text a range of artistic patterns and effects that earlier readers often sensed but...