This ground-breaking book reveals the prophetic, revolutionary vision that drives Shakespeare's tragedies, tracing its unbroken development from its beginnings in the Henry VI plays and Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, right through to his last, Coriolanus. The four full-length studies at the heart of the book focus in depth on Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespearean Tragedy engages with each of these titanic masterpieces as a singular, complete work of dramatic art with its own distinctive concerns and critical challenges, but with the same unmistakably Shakespearean tragic vision at its core. Through compelling new readings of the plays, grounded in close analysis of their language and form, Kiernan Ryan shows how Shakespeare dramatizes the tragic realities of his world from the standpoint of the transfigured future that our world still awaits.

Twenty-seven soliloquies are examined in this work, illustrating how the spectator or reader is led to the soliloquy and how the drama is continued afterwards.

The Shakespearean Inside is a study of all soliloquies and solo asides (dubbed "e;insides"e; for short) in Shakespeare's complete plays. The first step in the research process was the creation of the Shakespearean Inside Database (SID) where these speeches were annotated according to variables of genuine literary interest (such as act, dramatic subgenre, probable time of composition, dramatic speech acts, selected figures of speech, and character attributes such as gender and class). Such comprehensive and detailed data makes it possible to generalize dependably about Shakespeare's authorial habits, and, by extension, to identify situations where the author departs in interesting ways from his habitual practices. The monograph uses these broad patterns and significant exceptions as a backdrop for fresh interpretations of various Shakespeare plays (from early works such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona to mature tragedies like Hamlet and late plays like The Tempest and The Two Noble Kinsmen).

THE AUTHORITATIVE, COMPREHENSIVE, AND EASY-TO-USE THESAURUS FAVORED BY WRITERS AND STUDENTS ALIKE * One simple alphabetical listing * More than 11,000 main entries * More than 200,000 synonyms and antonyms * Sample sentences for every main entry * Parts of speech shown for every main entry, synonym, and antonym * Extensive coverage of all levels of vocabulary and usage, with informal and slang words identified * Edited and designed for easy access * All entries edited to help in vocabulary building The Random House imprint has long stood for excellence in the reference field. Random House reference books--prepared by its permanent lexicographic staff with the assistance of many hundreds of scholars, educators, and specialists--have been widely acclaimed for their outstanding quality and usefulness.