Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing volumes offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare's texts. The books' core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare's complex dramatic language and expanding your own critical vocabulary as you respond to his plays. Each guide in the series will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. King Lear : Language and Writing reveals how the play's elemental power springs from its language, which is at once simple, relentless and resonant, as well as from its full-blown double plot that multiplies unbearably both the follies and the pain of its protagonists. Chapters explore the play's status as a tragedy, its stagecraft, primary source material and both its textual and theatre history. The 'Writing Matters' section at the end of each chapter provides suggestions for activities that can further enhance your understanding of the play. This is an indispensable guide to Shakespeare's rich and complex dramatic language and will improve and develop your critical writing skills. “How I wish I could take a class with Jean Howard! She is the perfect guide to the complexities and demands of King Lear . Throughout, this book is wise and inviting, subtle and engaging, provocative and helpful. This is a perfect book for students – but not only for students: everyone will learn from and be made to think by reading it, however well we suppose ourselves to know this astonishing play.” ― Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA A study aid which explores and dissects King Lear 's themes, issues, motifs and language, allowing students to engage critically with this major tragedy. Jean Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, USA. Her many books include Marxist Shakespeares (edited with Scott Shershow, 2000) and four Companions to Shakespeare (edited with Richard Dutton, 2001). She is co-editor of The Norton Shakespea re and General Editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare . From 1999-2000 she was President of the Shakespeare Association of America. Dympna Callaghan is William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Syracuse University. She has published widely on the playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance and was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2012-13. Callaghan has held fellowships at the Folger, Huntington and Newberry Libraries, at the Getty Research Centre in Los Angeles, and, most recently, at the Bogliasco Center for Arts and Humanities in Liguria, Italy.