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- Publisher
- Brill
- Copyright
- © Copyright 1991 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
- ISSN
- 0098-2474
- eISSN
- 2352-6963
- DOI
- 10.1163/23526963-90000131
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
"All yet seems well, and if it ends so meet": Ambiguity and Tragic Language in All's Well That Ends Well Tita French Baumlin During the last decade of the sixteenth century-from The Taming of the Shrew to The Merchant of Venice to Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like Itl-the creative power of language and its comic potentialities characterize Shakespeare's drama. As I have argued elsewhere,2 a mark of the youthful Shakespeare seems to be the creation of characters whose maladaptive habits of language isolate them from the community or prevent their own health, growth, or love. Such early maladaptive rhetors are typically defeated or, where possible, transformed by and through generative language-a language wherein worlds are created, recreated, transformed through words which rename and reshape reality. Not that these comedies do not explore the complexities and very often the failures of language in the human community: however, the very efficacy of language-complex though it may be-remains relatively unquestioned in what we may term the youthful "comic phase" of Shakespeare's work. Yet, after the turn of the century, his dramatic artistry shows an increasing ambivalence toward the powers of language. Hamlet appears with its thorough exploration of
Journal
Explorations in Renaissance Culture – Brill
Published: Dec 2, 1991