"Every so often there is a rebellion against the assumption that Shakespeare is a uniquely great writer. This feeling, strong at the moment, has vociferous supporters in the academics, teachers who want to be rid of what they regard as heritage lumber. some even profess to believe that the eminence of Shakespeare is the result of an imperialist plot. There are also those, in my view almost equally wrong-headed, who continue to adore the Bard without giving much thought to the problems he sets. My belief is that, like the very critical Ben Johnson, we should admire Shakespeare "this side of idolatry"; "there was ever more to be praised in than pardoned". Like Johnson, we need not shrink from saying that some of the work is mediocre or worse. What we do need is new ways of saying why the best of him really is the best." The true biography of Shakespeare - and only one we really need to care about - is in the plays, and the plays are made of language. This book argues that something extraordinary happened to the language of Shakespeare in mid-career, somewhere around 1600.
An initial discussion of the language of some of the earlier plays looks for signs as to what was afoot, and this leads to a central testament of this turning point. The rest of the book is about what came after that, in the great works between "Hamlet" and "The Tempest".
Industry Reviews
Renowned scholar Kermode (Not Entitled, 1995) explores the evolution of Shakespeare's language in a friendly, accessible, and choppy romp through the Bard's oeuvre.From Hamlet to A Winter's Tale, from Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Kermode traces the development of Shakespeare's language from a simple expressiveness to an ornate complexity; in sum, he argues that Shakespeare grew increasingly fascinated by the force of words and his artistic power over them. Kermode begins with a comparison between the verbosity of Titus Andronicus and the taciturnity of Coriolanus; from this vantage point, he discerns Shakespeare's increasing disinterest in rhetorical explicitness and his move to a more reticent display of language. The resulting silences create challenging obscurities and interpretative conundrums that have long bedeviled both audiences and critics; as Kermode writes, `Increasing complexity in the verse of the plays matches increasing subtlety in their construction.` Shakespeare thus appears to be an author as challenging to his contemporaneous Elizabethan audience as to much of his audience today. Although primarily interested in Shakespeare's verse, Kermode also considers the question of the playwright's prose and the ways in which the two forms are mutually implicated; Shakespeare's narrative poems also receive due attention for the ways in which they contribute to his dramatic voice. This book directs its argument to the intelligent lay reader, not the Shakespearean scholar, but the attention to detail in Kermode's reading of Shakespeare's verse should be extended to a scholarly audience as well. Unfortunately, the brevity of his chapters (30 pages for Hamlet, but only 8 for Cymbeline) forecloses the development of his observations into a truly unified whole. We receive insights from a great Shakespearean reader and teacher, but in this case, the reader would be well served with more rather than less.An excellent survey of Shakespeare's language and its development, handicapped by its shortness, enhanced by its precision. (Kirkus Reviews)
