Shakespeare's Language

Plumbing the sweet mysteries of Shakespeare's "language," the author argues that the Bard's tragedies were probably difficult even for his contemporaries to understand and identifies a shift in Shakespeare's use of language around 1600.

Pleasure is not usually associated with reading literary criticism, but this work of beauty and grace by one of our most distinguished critics is in no way typical textual analysis. Aiming less at specialists than at "a non-professional audience with an interest in Shakespeare that has not... been well served by modern critics," Kermode writes from a conviction that "every other aspect of Shakespeare is studied almost to death, but the fact that he was a poet has somehow dropped out of consideration." Kermode's thesis is both basic and subtle: around 1600, he argues, the Bard's already masterful works "moved up to a new level of achievement and difficulty"; Kermode associates a "turning point" with Hamlet and the poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle." In proof of this, he demonstrates certain linguistic "matrices" that become "fundamental to Shakespeare's procedures" and identifies passages that represent a new linguistic "suppleness" and "muscularity." He devotes particular attention to the four great tragedies written at the height of Shakespeare's powers: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. While Kermode's concern is with the Bard's verse, he betrays no simplistic notions about literary language operating in a vacuum. A careful, close analysis of passages in each play is informed by a breathtaking knowledge of Elizabethan history and culture, as well as by the entire history of Shakespeare criticism from Coleridge to Eliot and the new historicists. Kermode's volume succeeds in doing the two things a great work of literary criticism should: it makes us want to read and reread the original texts in light of the critic's findings, and it makes us wonder how the literary world has been getting along without this work for so long.
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At a time when many critics are busy slicing Shakespeare up to fit into their historical and political case studies, it falls to senior scholar Kermode to restore a sense of wholeness by reminding us of the Bard's unmatched achievement as a dramatic poet. Kermode's analysis authenticates the genius that outgrew not only the classical tropes of Shakespeare's early nondramatic poetry but even--in the later plays--the constraints of logic and grammar. In adumbrating the metamorphosis of Shakespeare's poetic style, Kermode carefully guides the nonspecialist through the plays, highlighting the impulses that transformed the lucid rhetoric of early works into the baffling yet rich obscurities of the post-Hamlet works. In such obscurities, we behold a remarkable new departure for dramatic verse, one capable of representing the dark intensity of minds in crisis. We also see a great artist's willingness to take risks, challenging his audience to follow him into an enlarged perspective on a perplexing world. In his perceptive response to the later poetry, Kermode demonstrates why the best readers continue to vindicate Shakespeare's risks by accepting his challenge. Bryce Christensen
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Kermode, one of the foremost British scholars of 16th- and 17th-century literature, has written a host of highly regarded studies. Here he turns his finely tuned literary ear to Shakespeare's linguistic development by concentrating on the poetic evolution of the Bard from 1594 to 1608. Kermode maintains that between the creation of Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus Shakespeare grew into a different kind of poet, developing a more complex and more ambiguous poetics. Kermode explores this development by diving into Shakespeare's language, pulling and pushing at the verse to reveal its secrets and illustrate his thesis. He revels in the wonder of Shakespeare's words and constructions as he works his way through play by play, explaining what is going on, explicating the verse, showing how the change, both subtle and powerful, affects the heart of the work. His take on Shakespeare, view of the plays, and summation of the Shakespearean world are all explained with finely crafted prose. This long-awaited work is an essential purchase for all large public and academic libraries.
---Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.