Paul Dry Books' edition of this 1947 classic has been produced with
the highest publishing standards as a companion to our edition of The
Trivium
"Sister Miriam Joseph's Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language
remains, after more than half a century, an immensely valuable aid to
serious students of the greatest of all writers. The book manifests
enormous learning and real wisdom in applying that erudition to the
needs of contemporary readers."--Harold Bloom
"The importance of this book is that it makes clear what we ought to
mean when we call Shakespeare an artist in language...The average person
today knows two figures of speech if he knows any...Shakespeare knew two
hundred."--Mark Van Doren, New York Herald Tribune
As part of their education in the trivium (the liberal arts of logic,
grammar, and rhetoric), grammar school students in Shakespeare's time
were taught to recognize the two hundred figures of speech that
Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources. Sister
Miriam Joseph views this theory of composition as integral to
Shakespeare's mastery of language. In her classic 1947 book, she lays
out these figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and
explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his
plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than
perhaps anyone else.
Sister Miriam Joseph (1898-1982) earned her doctorate from Columbia
University. A member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Sister Miriam was
professor of English at Saint Mary's College from 1931 to 1960.
