ABSTRACT
The reader who has borne with me thus far will realise that the techniques o f lexical and syntactical and rhetorical expansion, illustrated in the early chapters, are far from being innovations by Shakespeare. He produced better examples than his contemporaries, usually tailored to his context in a way that theirs were often not. He learnt a good deal about his art from the writing (and reading) o f narrative and occasional poetry. What we are evidently concerned with is a number o f group styles available to Elizabethan dramatists from the 1590s onwards and eventually developed by Shakespeare to an extent his contemporaries were either incapable o f imagining or incapable o f expressing. We are far from reality if we imagine Shakespeare scratching his head with the end o f a quill pen waiting for the appropriate language to come. For one thing the hunger o f the Elizabethan audience for new plays would make this picture unlikely. The second part o f this book will attempt to show Shakespeare exploiting some o f these accepted styles in his middle and later career. The styles I try to characterise are far from being the only ones, but they are among the most important and their description may help to sharpen the reader’s or theatre-goer’s awareness o f what was increasingly taken for granted by the more experienced and sophisticated members o f the Elizabethan audience. Hierottimo and Andronicus became shorthand terms for the flamboyance and exaggeration o f one sort o f tragic style and acting. In Beaumont’s Knight o f the Burning Pestle (produced 1607) the Citizen and his wife keep up a running commentary on the action, constantly intervene, and
once or twice change the course o f the play. Thereby they reveal not only their social pretensions but their almost complete lack o f literary sophistication: they simply want a re-run o f their favourite scenes from previous plays. Yet the same play burlesques different types of Elizabethan literature and therefore their appropriate styles. A barber is described like a giant from romance and is challenged and beaten by a ‘knight’ who is a grocer’s apprentice; another apprentice disguises himself as his own ghost.
