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.

Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, USA. Author of Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, Engendering a Nation (with Phyllis Rackin, 1994) and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy (2001), she has edited six collections of essays, including the four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works (2003). General Editor of the Bedford contextual editions of Shakespeare, Howard is Past President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. At Syracuse University she received the Wasserstrom Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and at Columbia University the University Graduate Mentoring Award.