Shakespeare's Binding Language download

Shakespeare's Binding Language John Kerrigan
Publisher: Oxford University Press

John Kerrigan's focus in this absorbing, beautifully written study is on the oaths, vows, and pledges we hear uttered by Shakespeare's characters in his plays as they commit themselves to marriage, to legal obligations, and to religious observances, or as they express themselves in the casual profanity of day-to-day gossip. This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges, and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. The play suggests that Shakespeare found these pledges ridiculous and possibly tragic. In other chapters, Kerrigan addresses oaths of revenge, money and its bonds, matrimonial pledges, promises of loyalty to government, and swearing to God or gods. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Shakespeare's Binding Language is an innovative, substantial but highly readable study exploring the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other verbal and performative acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In the scintillating chapter on Measure for Measure at the heart of his book, John Kerrigan explores the ways in which “binding language” structures the play's meditation on that “restraint” which comes, as Claudio sardonically observes, “ from too much liberty”. This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In Macbeth, he dramatizes the bonds imposed on others by spells and charms, and the riddling, equivocal nature of utterances associated with witchcraft. Shakespeare's works do not end there, however, and binding language remains active in his last play, co-written with Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen. Roman fides (faithfulness, in testimony and promise) was regarded as exemplary, for all that Christian sources were held to qualify the pagan virtues. Shakespeare's works do not end there, however, andbinding language remains active in his last play, co-written with Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen. During Shakespeare's lifetime, the giving of counsel to princes was important as both a topic (in humanist writings) and a practice (at court). The Epilogue looks for, and partly finds, synthesis and resolution in Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest. Arguments about oaths and obligation in early modern England owe much to classical Rome, especially to the work of Cicero. Shakespeare is typically interested in the sorts of binding language—oaths, vows , promises, and the like—that impose obligations on the self.