Katie Wales

“I Am Thy Father’s Spirit”: The First-Person Pronoun and the Rhetoric of Identity in Hamlet

The discourse pronouns thou and you have been much discussed and analysed in literature of earlier periods in English, especially in the genres of poetry and drama. However, there has been very little stylistic interest in the first-person pronoun, although its rhetorical function is well known in poetry and children’s fiction. In this chapter, I focus on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and within that play specifically on the scenes in Act 1 between Hamlet and the Ghost. I argue that Shakespeare’s use highlights the play’s theme of claims to identity and manipulates contemporary schemas of ghost discourse and ontology, as well as acting as a means of plot suspense. As a result, conventional views of the pronoun I in general and its semiotic functions can be re-assessed.

The Language of Landscape

Landmarks is a book difficult to classify, yet it is of great interest to students of the English language. It is also a book that on publication in early 2015 struck such a chord with the general readership that it spent several months in booksellers’ ‘top ten’ lists.

Celebrating variation: Harold Orton and dialectology, 1898–1998

A centenary discussion of the work and the on-going influence of a pioneering English dialectologist

A response to David Jowitt's response…

I must apologise to David Jowitt for having so clearly upset him by an article that was so clearly meant to be light-hearted. It was also oriented towards the stereotypical portrayals of the language of royalty, and the ways myth and reality frequently coincide. If I did not make the distinction clear enough, I apologise; but in places I did not really intend a distinction. Moreover, it was the editor himself, Tom McArthur, who suggested I extend the term ‘royalese’ to the (alleged) features of royal speech (and also the speech of the aristocracy), instead of restricting it just to the literary or satirical representations. I decided this would indeed be an apt way of suggesting the blur between fact and fiction, between dialect and stage-dialect, as it were : hence my inevitable use of the phrase ‘literary royalese’, which still seems perfectly clear to me, despite David Jowitts stricture.