112 ENGLISH LANGUAGE

critical practice of new historicism with the powerful descriptive tools provided by
discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics. Availing herself of Brown and
Levinson's politeness theory, Magnusson explores Elizabethan family letters from
Sidney's household, Burghley's state letters, Shakespearean plays (including Henry
VIII, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello) and some of his sonnets in
order to develop a rhetoric of social exchange in which both vertical and horizontal
relations find their articulation in discourse. This novel approach shows how the
power relations implicit in social activities such as service or friendship are rooted
in verbal negotiation. Magnusson's analysis of letters is so rich and fruit ful because
she also takes into consideration the practice advocated by Elizabethan epistolary
handbooks (including those by Erasmus and Angel Day). Her analysis of
Shakespearean plays next to Elizabethan public and private letters also reveals how
Shakespeare's language is grounded in everyday Elizabethan rhetorical activity.
Shakespeare and Social Dialogue is divided into three sections, entitled 'The
Rhetoric of Politeness', 'Eloquent Relations in Letters' and 'A Prosaics of
Conversation'. In the first of these, Magnusson includes a politeness theory analysis
of dramatic character in Henry VIII and an exploration of language and service in
letters and in Shakespeare's sonnets. Part II is dedicated to three interrelated studies:
an exploration of how the epistolary manuals by Erasmus and Day contribute to the
dissemination of both vertical and horizontal social interactions; an analysis of the
intricacies of Elizabethan negative politeness in courtly and administrative letters to
Sir William Cecil and Queen Elizabeth; and a study of how two Elizabethan letter-
writing manuals illuminate social stratification and merchant discourse as displayed
in verbal encounters in Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The
Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens. Finally, in par. III, Magnusson tackles the
analysis of three Shakespearean plays and studies the pragmatics of repair in Lear
and Much Ado before undertaking a reading of language as symbolic capital in
Othello. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue is an important contribution to the field
of stylistics because it opens up new ways of discussing dramatic character, offering
a study of the linguistic performance of Shakespeare's characters in which a
character is not seen as an autonomous subject but rather as the locus in which social
interactions and power relations are enacted.
Although not centrally concerned with stylistic analysis, three other books have
been published this year which may be helpful for stylistics courses and stimulate
research in language and literature. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, The
Discourse Reader is a handy volume which brings together influential texts on the
study of discourse. It contains an introduction followed by six sections on meaning
and context, methods and resources for analysing discourse, sequence and structure,
negotiating social relations, identity and subjectivity, and finally, power, ideology
and control. The volume includes well-known texts by Jakobson, Austin, Grice,
Sacks, Labov, Goffman, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Bourdieu, together with other texts
which are more difficult to get hold of. Students, and particularly graduate students
doing research in related areas, are bound to find it extremely useful-if they are not
acquainted with these texts they had better be-but teachers will also find that it is a
convenient teaching tool to keep within easy reach. James Paul Gee, An Introduction
to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, does not provide a comprehensive
account of the field, but it has the advantage of offering a very personal view. As
with all personal choices, it will please some and annoy others, but it must be

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