Customer Reviews

Discovering Shakespeare's Meaning: An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare's Dramatic Structures

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This books attempts to see the plays as more than just story and character, and search for richer meaning in chapters as Verse and Prose; Imagery and Spectacle; Shakespeare's Expositions; Plays within Plays; Parallel Actions; The Treatment of Character; The Use of the Soliloquy; Art and Artifice. The variety of plays discussed in each chapter was welcome when I was familiar with the plays, but was largely lost on me for plays I did not know (such as Cymbeline, Pericles, Richard II).

In each chapter Scragg, provides examples where the structure provides deeper meaning, for example patterns of rhyme in Coriolanus "are functioning very like the background music in a television drama". Shakespeare's use of Plays within Plays is legendary, and this chapter really shines in showing how these are more than mere diversion, but notably in Love's Labour's Loss that "the events of the play-within-the play act as commentary upon the events of the `real' world". I thought the chapter on character was weak, but it seeks to emphasize her point "the meaning of a Shakespearian play does not derive exclusively from the progress of its central figures; it is also a product of the kind of dramatic language that is employed, the disposition of the characters of the play, the degree of distance between play and spectator, and the relationship between the levels of action.".