Shakespeare's Language [Hardcover]

Frank Kermode (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The Bard

The true biography of Shakespeare--and the only one we need to care about--is in his plays. Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's plays all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime of thinking.The finest tragedies written in English were all composed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and it is generally accepted that the best ones were Shakespeare's. Their language is often difficult, and it must have been hard even for contemporaries to understand. How did this language develop? How did it happen that Shakespeare's audience could appreciate Hamlet at the beginning of the decade and Coriolanus near the end of it?

In this long-awaited work, Kermode argues that something extraordinary started to happen to Shakespeare's language at a date close to 1600, and he sets out to explore the nature and consequences of the dynamic transformation that followed. For it is in the magnificent, suggestive power of the poetic language itself that audiences have always found meaning and value. The originality of Kermode's argument, the elegance and humor of his prose, and the intelligence of his discussion make this a landmark in Shakespearean studies.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Among our greatest contemporary critics, Sir Frank Kermode is the author of such classics as The Sense of an Ending, and his recent memoir, Not Entitled, vividly captured a life in letters. It's no surprise, then, that Shakespeare's Language is a deeply significant publication. Reflecting many decades of writing and thinking about the Bard, it meets and often exceeds the reader's expectations.

The author begins by lamenting the fact that general readers have not "been well served by modern critics, who on the whole seem to have little time for [Shakespeare's] language." However, rather than launching into a diatribe against current literary fashions, he proceeds to offer an elegant and detailed account of how his subject transformed him into "a different kind of poet." For Kermode, the rich complexities of Hamlet or "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (an allegorical poem in which Shakespeare juggles love and Thomistic jargon like rhetorical ninepins) mark a whole new level of accomplishment. How to define the change? Kermode notes "the pace of the speech, its sudden turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can consider them. This is new: the representation of excited, anxious thought; the weighing of confused possibilities and dubious motives."

This before-and-after scenario breaks the book into two parts. In the first, Kermode deals with the plays up to 1600, controversially putting the kibosh on such warhorses as As You Like It. The second part offers 15 detailed chapters on the tragedies, problem plays, and romances. This is classic criticism, written in the mold of Johnson and Colderidge. And while Kermode never pays short shrift to the difficulties of Shakespeare's language, he's even more attuned to its prodigal, inexhaustible pleasures. --Jerry Brotton

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374226369
• ISBN-13: 978-0374226367
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #591,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sir Frank Kermode has been a prominent figure in the world of literary criticism since the 1960s. He has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He was knighted in 1991.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book needed especially now, February 28, 2001

By 

Joost Daalder "Joost Daalder" (South Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare's Language (Hardcover)

Kermode's book demonstrates an approach deeply unfashionable among many of today's academics, though it is part of a backlash against work which made a strong impact in the eighties and early nineties. As a result readers are likely to diverge widely in their reactions to it. Kermode provides an antidote to work on Shakespeare which shows little interest in the actual meaning of his text, leave alone in the artistry of his language. Yet, of all Shakespeare's outstanding qualities, it is surely especially his use of language - employed in a strikingly arresting, rich, subtle, suggestive yet revealing way - which sets him apart from other authors.

"Shakespeare's Language", as a title, may lead some to expect discussions of his syntax, semantics, prosody, etc., and there is certainly an urgent need for more work on such matters. But Kermode is - properly, I feel - concerned to explain what is ARTISTIC in Shakespeare's language: what, notably, makes it individualistic, well-crafted and imaginative rather than just representatively Elizabethan. Kermode's approach is the more essential at a time when there is a marked, and completely inaccurate, tendency to treat Shakespeare as though he was not, after all, anything special - but rather "just a product of his times". This kind of "egalitarianism" will not ultimately succeed in dwarfing this extraordinary author.

This, then, is one of several recent books (written by e.g. Brian Vickers, Graham Bradshaw, Harold Bloom) which share an urgent concern with Shakespeare's individual quality and see the need to protect that against those who for the most part treat him as having produced nothing other than "documents" (as when critics refer to "the Shakespearean text" in references to his plays). By contrast, Kermode to an extent succeeds in giving one an idea of how one's mind gets enriched and expanded by contact with what he rightly sees as the ditinctive creativity of Shakespeare's language. - Joost Daalder, Professor of English, Flinders University (see "More about me")

60 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars VERY DISAPPOINTING, July 27, 2000

By 

Michael J. Connor (Waltham, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shakespeare's Language (Hardcover)

A Very Disappointing Book I am disappointed by Kermode's book entitled Shakespeare's Language because of how little of the book is about Shakespeare's Language.

Kermode's stated purpose is to describe the "revolution" in Shakespeare's language from 1599 onwards. Kermode spends a great deal of the book discussing matters which do not explain this contention. Most of the book is given over to chapters which discuss for the most part individual plays. In these chapters far too much space is given over to plot summaries and not to questions of language. And when Kermode gets around to writing about language, it is almost always in one of two ways: lexical matters, and whether or not the passage is in verse or prose. There is much more to Shakespeare's language than these two. In his introduction Kermode states "I shall discuss "Coriolanus" in due course--its extraordinarily forced expressions, its obscurity of syntax and vocabulary, its contrasts of prose and harsh verse, its interweavings of the domestic and the military. (Page 14) His discussion of "Coriolanus" on pages 243-254 does have something to say about force expressions, and contrasts of prose and verse, but it has almost nothing to say about Shakespeare's syntax. In the chapter dealing with "Othello" Kermode treats the deletion of oaths in the folio text. Kermode writes about the soldiers swearing, found in the quarto printing of the play, but not the folio. Kermode says that the elimination of the profanities "makes a considerable difference to the tone of the play, especially to the characterization of Iago." (p. 166) Really? Is the Iago of folio any less dangerous than the Iago of the quarto? What was also curious was that Kermode almost never quotes scholars who have made considerable contributions to our understanding of Shakespeare's language. Scholars like Gorlach, Barber and A. C. Partridge are not mentioned once. The standard grammar of Shakespeare's English in English is E. A. Abbott's "Shakespearian Grammar" is referred to once, and then only in a footnote. And then there is the most curious omission is Wilhelm Franz's "Die Sprache Shakespeares in Vers und Prosa." This book is the standard Grammar of Early Modern English Period. If you want to know about Shakespeare's language you should go to books by these men.

38 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shakespear'e Language, May 20, 2000

By 

Stuart Sheffer (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shakespeare's Language (Hardcover)

One of the best if not the best books on Shakespeare I have ever read. By examining Shakespeare's failures and shortcomings, Kermode manages to make one appreciate Shakespeare's towering overall triumph in a way that someone like Harold Bloom fails to do.