Earliest Shakespeare: Bombast and Authenticity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2014.6.7Keywords:
bombast, improbability, drama, literary influence, Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Christopher MarloweAbstract
The essay explores bombast as one of the defining features of Shakespeare’s style of writing in the earliest, pre-1594 phase of his career as a dramatist. The qualifier ‘earliest’ is an operative term which refers to the part of Shakespeare’s canon that has not been explored in recent criticism. Bombast is considered as both a logical and rhetorical instrument of knowing. At the cognitive dimension of text, improbability, which is the key feature of bombast, plays an important role in ‘earliest’ Shakespeare because it captures competing currents of thought that fill dramatic plots, as they were described in the Elizabethan practices of playwriting, and moves the action forward. ‘Earliest’ Shakespeare is both under the spell of Christopher Marlowe’s bombastic blankverse, but he also looks beyond Marlowe, turning bombast into a tool of opening up new possibilities for drama performed within the specific context of London’s burgeoning theatre scene in the 1590s.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Goran Stanivuković
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