When Shakespeare began writing for the stage, he had already mastered over two hundred rhetorical figures inherited from the long tradition of the language arts-grammar, logic, and rhetoric-stretching from Aristotle to his own time. These figures, which to us may appear merely decorative, were for Shakespeare the very medium of speech, and as his art developed, his figures became more and more subtly expressive of meaning.

Shakespeare's Rhetorical Figures: An Outline provides convenient access to this crucial dimension of Shakespeare's art. It includes all Shakespeare's rhetorical figures in outline form, each accompanied by a definition and examples, and a cross-referenced alphabetical glossary.