Customer Reviews

The Age of Shakespeare

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In this nifty little book, author and historian Frank Kermode gives us a new insight into the life and works of William Shakespeare. Beginning with a quick introduction to Elizabethan England, the author then goes on to trace Shakespeare's life, putting each of the plays into context, relative to what was happening in his life and in England at the time. Overall, I found this to be an entertaining and highly informative read. In particular I enjoyed the many insights that the author gave me into how Elizabeth drama worked and how it operated. I really loved this book, and highly recommend it to you!

A combination of lit crit, history and biography, this brief book ultimately feels like an appetizer rather than a meal, despite its nearly 200 pages. A tasty appetizer however as it is brimming with fascinating facts about Elizabethan theater and Shakespeares plays (and language). Extremely readable, it may be too superficial for Shakespearean scholars but for the general reader who wants a quick overview of things Shakespeare, this lovely little book should fit the bill.

Not all things that come in small packages are undilutedly good. There are both many invigorating and some annoying aspects in this slim volume of chronologically arranged essays from Frank Kermode.

The best aspects arise when Kermode stays true to this title. That is, the book is finest when describing the milieu and preoccupations of Elizabethan England (or "Britain", since that distinction proves important to attitudes at the accession of James I) and relating those to the plays. Some of what struck me as the most interesting examples of this: Queen Elizabeth's belief that she was descended from the Roman Emperor Constantine and how that was reflected in "Antony and Cleopatra"; the issuing by King James in 1607 of a proclamation deploring crowds assembling "riotously in multitudes" and how that concern informs "Coriolanus"; and the customary conflating of "Macbeth" with the Gunpowder Plot enriched by a discussion of the play's use of the term "equivocation".

Among many fascinating aspects that go beyond the content of the plays, Kermode is especially informative about the distinction between the acting companies made up of boys and those of adult men players and the effect this had on many aspects of the theatrical environment. And there's his revelation that it was customary for the company to "dance a jig" after a play, even a tragedy.

Kermode's language is inventive and compelling, accessible for the most part even to someone -- like myself -- lacking knowledge of much of his context. Occasionally however his sentences become pretzel-like, circling back on themselves and becoming indigestible just when their meaning seems within grasp.

My primary and overarching complaint is that this is a small book (4 ½ x 7, 214 pages). Some of the author's most interesting discussions are abbreviated by the limitations of the format. The publisher has nonetheless thought it just to price it at $21.95.

Like many in the seemingly hermetically-sealed world of Shakespearean scholarship, Kermode can not resist providing unjustifiable biographical details. Despite an early warning against it, we find tell-tale language such as "we may guess that", "was almost certainly", and "as he must have". He assures us that Shakespeare preferred horses to walking. And it may have been the limitations of the format that forced him to present as unarguable such disputatious concepts as the existence of an "ur-Hamlet" and that Robert Greene's attributed attack on "Shake-scene" was definitely referring to the author of the plays.

It's clear that Frank Kermode has a deep and unique understanding of both the plays and the times that produced them. "The Age of Shakespeare" allows him to, by apposing, illuminate them.

A few things come off very nicely in Kermode's "The Age of Shakespeare." What it lacks in detailed analysis of Shakespeare's poetry and dramaturgy, it makes up for by providing a sense of Shakespeare's time, the growth of theater in the 16th and 17th centuries (thanks, in part, to Mr. Shakespeare himself), and the many ways Shakespeare adapted his craft to suit evolving sensibilities. For the first time I appreciated Shakespeare as a business-person who used everything at his disposal in order to succeed at his chosen profession (or, at least, the one he ended up practicing after failing to find reliable patronage as a professional poet).

It is apt that this book is part of Modern Libary's Chronicle Book series, as chronolgoy is key here. Although scholars don't always know the exact sequence in which the plays were written, there seems to be enough of a consensus that Kermode can make some useful observations and generalizations. For instance, plays that were written for the Globe, a large outdoor theater, are different in some noticeable ways from the late Romance plays produced for the more intimate setting of the Blackfriars theater (with its higher-priced tickets that necessarily excluded groundlings). Such claims, of course, need to be tested by a careful rereading of the plays--in chronilogical order, rather than by genre or broad categories.

One warning, there are no plot summaries here. You pretty much need to be familiar with Shakespeare's plays in order to follow Kermode's arguments.

The book includes a brief "Bibliographical Note" to direct readers to other reliable resources on various aspects of life, religion, art, and theater in Shakespeare's time.

The Modern Library Chronicles series has distinguished itself with stand alone historical perspectives written by experts who have a gift for clarity. What could be so many volumes of Cliffs Notes for significant historical passages or eras are instead a variety of deft studies rendered in strong, attractive voices matched. The latest edition, Sir Frank Kermode's THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE, raises the bar even higher. It is nothing short of marvelous.

Shakespeare means a variety of things to different people. Kermode manages to gather up all the threads, looking at the impact of the man on his age and the age, commonly known as the Elizabethan Age, on the man. It was a time of remarkable cultural strides. Against the backdrop of the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism, dramatic arts moved from morality plays and oratory to the magnificent Shakespearean canon, from stagings that were out of trunks, to theaters that sat 2,000 - 3,000. Theater wasn't just art, it became a thriving commerce. Kermode moves through time, looking at Shakespeare's poetry, then his plays as they reflected the Elizabethan zeitgeist (and we think of them as being so universal!). He looks at the community of poets and playwrights who were not exactly comradely drinking pals, in fact sometimes they would argue to the point of murder, but who did find a way to work together. He provides readings of the plays and their sources, as well as an overview of critical readings in the 4 centuries since their debut. He sorts out what matters and does so in graceful prose, under 200 pages. When I reached the last page, I did something I have not done with a book in a long, long time: I turned back to the first page and began anew.

It's that good.

This is an interesting and instructive little book, but it is hard to figure out just what its target audience might be-or even indeed, its precise topic. Kermode calls it "the /Age/ of Shakespeare," and the first chapter does, indeed, open, with some provocative insights about the world that surrounds Shakespeare and his plays. Later on, he offers a useful introduction to the physical world of London theatre (or theatres). But most of the book is more conventional in its organization: commentary on the plays, more or less one by one and more or less in chronological order. The comments are unfailingly insightful and often original (or at any rate, new to me). But they are fragmentary and so presented that they aren't likely to be of much help if you aren't reasonably familiar with the plays already. Taken together, they are perhaps too modest for a specialist work and too concentrated for a beginner. What it sounds like is a quick recap of a course in Kermode's Cambridge classroom, for students who know something, but not too much-but here (is this an occupational hazard for professors?) I wonder if he misgauges his audience.

The particular commentaries are diverse, but I'd say that Kermode is particularly good on the poetry, closely defined: the language and the rhythm-a fitting achievement, I suppose, for a man who wrote the admirable "Shakespeare's Language." He has a happy knack for picking the illustrative example and, particularly, for the illustrative example that shows you how Shakespeare changes and grows over time.

As a general intro to the playwright and his times, I would still favor Jonathan Bate's "The Genius of Shakespeare." But so long as you know what you are getting, Kermode is still good fun. Here's a teaser: of all the items new to me in this book, perhaps none is more memorable than the brief vignette of one Richard Topcliffe interrogator and torturer so far up in his profession that he was allowed to keep a rack in his own home. Evidently we have Topcliffe's own copy of a history of the Jesuit mission to England with (as Kermode says) "his gloating marginalia: beside the name of a missionary the words `I racked him,' beside the name of someone hanged a little stick figure dangling from a gallows." The Age of Shakespeare was not an age for the faint of heart.

I became interested in putting together a "listmania" list on Shakespeare and so I subsequently bought a few new books or some that I had not yet read. One was the older 1970 biography "Shakespeare" by the prolific author Anthony Burgess where - with some fiction based on partial records but mostly fact - he creates something akin to what we are used to in reading a modern biography. The present book was recently written by the Cambridge scholar and world Shakespeare expert Frank Kermode. Here the author uses a more conservative and a more scholarly approach, in some ways similar to Burgess, but with essentially no small fictional embellishments and with a lot more emphasis on explaining the various plays of Shakespeare in detail - albeit briefly - and adding comments on various usually at least one passage from each play.

The present book is about 200 pages long with a very brief 4 page bibliographical note at the back. It is part of a series called Modern Library Chronicles that appear to have over 40 titles on various subjects, the Kermode book being one. The book consists of basically three parts - my division not the authors i.e.: the Reformation and England of Elizabeth (about 30 pages of background historical details), the early Shakespeare (70 pages) with many social comments, and then Shakespeare at the Globe and Blackfriars (the last 100 pages and Shakespeare's most fruitful period). In each of these broad segments the author weaves the current political climate, problems faced by the theaters, censorship, actors, rivals, other writers, owners, finances, descriptions of theater construction, etc. As the author makes his way through the last two parts, he comments on the importance of each play, what others think are the merits, important passages, references for more reading, how it relates to prior or future plays by Shakespeare, etc. - again all very briefly but he does provide some historical and literary perspectives.

The book is rich with details, comments, quotes, and insights and it is a delightful but slow read to absorb the facts. It is an excellent but small book 5 stars. It does not replace the Burgess book, it is just different and seems more accurate. Subsequent to this being published, the new book "Will In The World" by Greenblatt has been published. It is by far the best book on Shakespeare's life and work.

As other reviewers have observed, Kermode manages to pack a tremendous amount of information about Shakespeare and his times into 200 pages. Never does it seem rushed or superficial. The introductory section is especially useful, and in it Kermode addresses the increasingly discussed question of Shakespeare's "Catholicity." Although he states the evidence doesn't prove the matter decisively, Kermode recognizes it as an important part of the conversation.

Likewise, he reviews the current state of research into the English reception of the so-called "Elizabethan Settlement" that definitively protestantized England and Wales. Fans of the Whig interpretation of history, which postulates that a break with Catholicism was an inevitable phase of English history, won't find much comfort here. Kermode summarizes the myth-shattering work of Eamon Duffy, whose "Stripping of the Altars" demonstrated a dozen years ago that English Catholicism was healthy and robust until the Tudors took their hammers to it.

If you napped through your high school English lit classes, this book also serves as a remedial tonic. Kermode summarizes Shakespeare's plays and places them in their social and cultural context. After an evening or two with this book, you'll be better equipped to tackle "Hamlet," "Romeo & Juliet," and the rest of the Bard's canon.

I've found the Modern Library Chronicles books to be somewhat of a mixed bag, as another reviewer aptly put it. Hans Kung's "The Catholic Church: A Short History" and Stephen Kotkin's "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment," which I've recently also reviewed, were very good, and full of information for people of all backgrounds. Frank Kermode's "Age of Shakespeare," however, I found to be written for an audience who has little to no knowledge of late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century English culture and politics. It may be the case that the varying quality can be attributed to the word limits imposed on the authors (all hover around 200 pages excluding ancillary notes or bibliographies). Many good introductory sources require a book anywhere between two and three times this long, especially when times were as complicated as Shakespeare's were. This could have been a better book had it been on just the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England itself, but as I want to share below, Kermode chose to make much of the book about Shakespeare's life and work instead, and I think the book suffers for it.

None of this is to say that Kermode doesn't manage to distill some really good information in a very small number of pages. The early chapters do a superb job of emphasizing the various changes from Catholicism to Anglicanism (under Henry VIII), back to Catholicism (under Mary I), and then back to Protestantism (under Elizabeth I), and particularly how those changes manifested themselves in many plays of the time, most of which never seemed far-removed from inherently political concerns.

Kermode is honest, admitting that most of what we know of Shakespeare's early life is purely from speculation. Did he come to London seeking the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? Did the Jesuit (and later, martyr) Edmund Campion discreetly pass Catholic literature on to William and his father John when William was young? The possibilities are interesting to think about, but again are ultimately conjecture. He also traces the incredible rise in the place of the playwright as a subtopic in several of the book's chapters, from the liminality of the unsavory vagabond during Elizabeth's reign to the reverence and honor many had gained by the time of the early part of James I's reign. Some of the best information is the background provided about the Rose, Globe, and Blackfriars theatres - their construction, the various people that were responsible for writing and producing the plays, the kinds of audiences that frequented each theatre, et cetera.

The chapters that suffer the most are the longest, which happen to be the ones which cover Shakespeare's plays. It seems like Kermode is racing as fast as he possibly can to write at least half a page or so on every play, which he manages to do; he spends a few pages on a couple of them. However, as I mentioned above, none of what he says sticks with the reader. Instead, we get randomly introduced tidbits, interesting though they are. He tells us that in "Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare carefully interrelates the ideas of humor and social taboo; that the influence of Terence and Plautus is easily discerned in "The Comedy of Errors"; and that Bottom echoes, if not directly copies Saint Paul's "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (I Corinthians 2:9) in Midsummer Night's Dream (IV.i.204-214). There is no rhyme or reason as to why he includes what he does. Many books need not be as long as they are. This one should have been much longer.

The first half of the book is worth the introduction to the England of the time, but I would say the second half can easily be skipped. There are simply too many other good supplements to Shakespeare's plays out including Mark Van Doren's "Shakespeare," Auden's lectures, Northrop Frye, or if you're feeling particularly reactionary, Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human."

The Modern Library Chronicles series has found a perfect fit with Frank Kermode and Shakespeare in their newest addition, The Age of Shakespeare. In a very short volume, the author manages to touch on many relevant and interesting points of Shakespeare's life, all of his plays, the history of theatre in his time, and, briefly, even politics and religion in Elizabethean and Jacobean England. It is a delightfully written and entertaining volume that does what all the best volumes in this series manage to do. It makes the reader what to learn more, both about Shakespeare and his plays. The author's insights into the language and styles of the various plays is illuminating, particularly as he gives a historical and literary context for his ideas. This is a quick, bright, marvelous read.