Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Whenever people talk to one another there are at least two things going on at once. First, and most obviously, there is an exchange of speech. Second, and slightly less obviously, there is a negotiation about how that exchange is organised--about whose turn it is to talk at any given moment. Linguists call this second, organisational level of activity 'turn-taking' and since the late 1970s it has been central to the way in which spoken interaction is understood. In spite of its obvious relevance to the study of drama, however, turn-taking has received little attention from critics and editors of Shakespeare. Turn-taking in Shakespeare offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic text by reversing the priorities of traditional literary analysis. Rather than focussing on what characters say, it focuses on when they speak. Rather than focussing on how they talk, it focuses on how they gain access to the floor. Its central argument is that the turn-taking patterns of Shakespeare's plays are a part of what Emrys Jones has called their 'basic structural shaping'--as fundamental to dialogue as rhythm is to verse. The book investigates what it means for a character to speak in or out of turn, to interrupt or overlap with a previous speaker, to pause before speaking, or to fail to speak at all. It explores how these moments are--and are not--signalled by the Shakespearean text, how best to describe and understand them, and the implications of such questions for contemporary debates about editing, rhetoric, prosody, and early modern performance practices.

About the Author
Oliver Morgan is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a College Lecturer at Magdalene College. His research focuses on dialogue, both in the sense of fictionalised conversation (as in a play) and in the sense of literary exchange (as in an answer-poem or aparody).

Reviews
This book was a joy to read because of the many colourful twists and turns of its critical language, because the author is a meticulous and imaginative close reader, and because the argument offers a very good model for stylistic micro-analysis as a mode in Shakespeare criticism. I hope that theatre practitioners, students in drama studio programs, and critics alike will find this book of use. * Goran Stanivukovic, Renaissance and Reformation *
A galvanising new way of interpreting Renaissance plays. The mechanisms of dialogue - the sequencing of speakers, their interruptions, pauses, and failures to respond - open out new insights into character, dramaturgy, social relationships, and ideological structures. While the focus is on Shakespeare, and what Morgan stylishly argues is his brilliance in dialogue, the implications stretch to Renaissance drama more broadly. * The Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020 *
Shakespeare has seldom been read with a combination of such tact and quantificatory precision ... Morgan's learning and ingenuity are considerable, and he shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that attentiveness to the conventions of conversational exchange (and to the occasions when these conventions are ignored) offers a fresh way of comprehending the plays. * Rhodri Lewis, Prospect Magazine *


Awards
Winner of Winner of The Shakespeare's Globe Book Award 2020.



Book Information
ISBN 9780198836360
Author Oliver Morgan
Format Paperback
Page Count 300
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 380g
Dimensions(mm) 202mm * 134mm * 15mm