Arden Student Guides: Language and Writing offer a new type of study aid which combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the critical 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. Key features include: an introduction considering when and how the play was written, addressing the language with which Shakespeare created his work, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal detailed examination and analysis of the individual text, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies discussion of performance history and the critical reception of the work a 'Writing matters' section in every chapter, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations. Written by world-class academics with both scholarly insight and outstanding teaching skills, each guide will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. At a climactic point in the play, Macbeth realises that the witches have deceived him through their ambiguous language: 'they palter with us in a double sense'. This book explores Shakespeare's own paltering in the play – the densely rich language of ambition, of blood, and of guilt that structures Macbeth . Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford, UK, where she teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature to undergraduates and graduates. Her work is mainly on Shakespeare and Renaissance dramatists. She has written extensively for an advanced student readership, as well as managed several edited collections through to successful publication. 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. Used Book in Good Condition