Performative Acts in the Plays of Shakespeare

Abstract

Shakespeare, one of the greatest writers of Elizabethan drama, has given language a new shape. This paper tries to analyze the locutionary, illocutionary and the perlocutionary effects in the dramas of Shakespeare. This paper also tries to analyse the performative acts in the works of Shakespeare from Foucault’s point of view––that even if a sentence is clear, there remains ambiguity in its meaning, as there may be a possibility that the meaning transferred may not be clear or taken in another way by the receiver. Another philosopher Derrida says that there are infinite meanings of a sentence spoken by the speaker. The present paper takes into accounts the relevance of performative acts in Shakespeare’s plays.