Shakespeare’s history play reimagined by Naomi Iizuka.

Following the events of the final two years of his life, Richard II interrogates royal power and the forces that threaten it. After banishing his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Richard begins to lose grip of his throne and strives to find meaning in the churn and chaos of the events unfolding around him. In her new translation, Naomi Iizuka ventures into the mystery of the work, scraping away the layers of received wisdom and cracking the play open for contemporary audiences.

This translation of Richard II was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present work from “The Bard” in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style is the first full-scale, systematic study using an examination of Shakespeare’s syntax as a key to the interpretation of his work.

Dolores M. Burton presents information on the application of linguistic and statistical techniques to the description and analysis of style, and she has applied the insights and techniques of the major schools of linguistic inquiry, including those of London and Prague.

Just as studies of imagery and vocabulary have aided interpretations of the plays, so an examination of the grammatical features of Shakespeare’s language indicates that they, too, perform a poetic and dramatic function. For example, noun modifiers like possessives and definite articles yield insights into a speaker’s point of view or subtly aid in defining the fictional world of the plays. With respect to stylistic development, Shakespeare’s handling of word order moved from a concentration of dislocated sentences and clause constituents to greater emphasis on varied and frequent permutations in nominal and verbal phrases.

A computer-generated concordance of function words facilitated the study of syntactic features, which included an examination of formal aspects of diction, nominal group structure, the function and frequency of relative clauses, and the classification of sentences by mood and type. Several problems associated with quantitative and linguistic studies of a full-length literary work are discussed and exemplified.

Style itself is defined mathematically as a propositional function S(A), and from this definition stylistic parameters are derived by correlating critical notions like fictional world, point of view, and characterization with differences in the syntax of the two plays.