Rhodes Neil. Shakespeare and Origins of English

Oxford University Press Inc. New York, 2004. — 271 p. — ISBN: 978–0–19–924572–7; ISBN: 978–0–19–923593–3.This book is about what there was before there was a subject called English and about how that became English. It may have something in common with those searches for origins that proliferated in the mideighteenth century, rather brusquely dismissed by Dugald Stewart,
Adam Smith’s first biographer, as ‘conjectural histories’. Those dubious investigations would certainly include Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, but perhaps also Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the first English Studies textbook and a work that derives from similar sources. The present book is focused specifically on Shakespeare’s role in the origins of the subject, and is therefore very much concerned with Shakespeare and education, though it concentrates on the early modern period, up to the late eighteenth century, before his canonical status became absolutely secure. It deals with the kinds of literary and educational practice that would have formed his experience and shaped his work. What it attempts to do is to trace the origins of English in certain aspects of the educational regime that existed before English literature became an established part of the curriculum. It then presents Shakespeare as both a product of
those disciplines in the Renaissance and, in the eighteenth century, as an agent of their transformation into the subject that emerged as the modern study of English.Renaissance articulations.
Language as Living Speech.
Hamlet’s Media Studies.
Did Shakespeare study creative writing?.
School Ties.
Writing against the Academy.
Both sides now.
Speech-Writing.
Problems at Work.
Shakespeare’s Controversial Plots.
Vernacular values.
Native Feet.
Shakespeare the Barbarian.
Commonplace Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s Computer.
Resources for English.
The origins of English.
From Rhetoric to Criticism.
Shakespeare and the Language of the Heart.
Afterword.
Select bibliography.