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Exercises Close Reading: Pick a single word or phrase (2-3 words) and explore its special resonances in the text. These resonances might include multiple meanings or connotations, repetition of the same or related words/phrases in the text, antithetical meanings (internal to a phrase, most pronounced in the figure of oxymoron, but also often more subtly present), or sounds and rhythms. For a more complete list of suggestions, see close reading tips. Textual cruxes or variations: Textual cruxes are portions of a text that make no sense, and that editors change (or "correct") in some way to make sense of them. Textual variations are points where two early texts (say, of Hamlet) vary--maybe one has one word and one has another, or one includes a passage and one leaves it out. Pick a textual crux or variation in one of the plays, and consider the significance of "correcting" the crux one way rather than another, or of choosing one variation over another. This consideration will involve close reading, since you'll need to think about how the crux or variation you examine makes a difference. To find significant cruxes or variations, consult the textual notes of your edition. In your paper, describe where the textual problem comes from (for example, a different word in the quarto or folio edition of the play) and then consider its significance. Which would emendation of the crux or variation in the text would you choose, and why? A tip: pick a crux or variation that's treated differently in different editions. You can go to the library or a bookstore to find these different editions. If you find different treatments, you'll know you've hit on an interesting problem. Words, Words, Words: Shakespeare was a gifted rhetorician in an age that learned and loved its rhetoric. Pick a passage from one of the plays, and identify as many rhetorical figures as you can. For an online guide to Renaissance rhetoric, read around the Rhetorica Silvae. The page on schemes and tropes (schemes are stylized arrangements of words, tropes are turnings of words away from their literal meanings) should be especially helpful, as it gives a guide to different categories of schemes and tropes that will help you find particular rhetorical figures. Reading Around: What did Shakespeare's
audience know that we didn't? Find an interesting word in a play, and
then do a seach for it on Early English Books Online (EEBO), an amazing
database of over 100,000 scanned books from 1475-1640, and over thousands
of full text titles from the same period. Searching just the full text
books, put in your word and find out what non-literary texts of the time
were saying about it. For example, I searched for "dagger" (Macbeth:
"is this a dagger I see before my eyes?") and found out that
there was concern in the seventeenth century about the dagger as a concealed
weapon, and King James tried to ban them. Write what you found, the text
you found it in, and why it matters. For example, knowing that the dagger
was a concealed weapon helps me understand that having Macbeth see a dagger
as opposed to a sword conveys the secrecy of his violent intentions. A
tip: To find EEBO use the Mason
library databases page. EEBO can be found by clicking on the letter
"e" or going to the "literature and language" group
of databases. |