The Language of Hardy

The play has never been republished since the 1923 edition by Macmillan which has an engraving on the cover of Tintagel by Hardy. The language itself is wonderful he's using all of these a lot of kind of local words so for example he describes a puffin as a scene and you get that sense of Hardy as this kind of linguistic magpie who borrowing terms from you know local dialect. There's a terrific kind of richness to this language but he also mimicking the sort of patterns and the sound of medieval verse I mean particularly the illiterative pattern of medieval verse.