ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on rhetoric, which includes the shapes of sentences, how they are structured, how long they are, and detailed issues like whether it is better to put the main point at the sentences beginning or its end. Many of Shakespeare's characters have a taste for long and complicated sentences. In order to understand something about the structure of Shakespeare's sentences it will be useful to look at the linguistics of complicated sentences. The chapter deals with: what a clause is, co-ordinate and subordinate clauses, compound and complex sentences, some main clause types, identifying antecedents of subordinate clauses. Ciceronian sentences are complex as well as long, containing many phrases, much subordination, and liberal amounts of coordination. The search for an alternative style other than Ciceronian style looked partly back towards classical times, and the Roman rhetorician, Seneca, provided a model for some seventeenth-century styles. Some call these emerging styles baroque, and they reached their zenith around the 1620's.
