Shakespeare's Language
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Shakespeare's Language for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Sir Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language is a deeply significant publication, the result of a lifetime of writing and thinking on the Bard by one of our greatest critics, and it certainly lives up to its expectations. Kermode's numerous critical studies, such as The Sense of an Ending, have become classics and his recent memoir Not Entitled vividly captured a life of letters, characterised by a passionate commitment to the value of literature.
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 "Shakespeare became, between 1594 and 1608, a different kind of poet". For Kermode, Shakespeare "moved up to a new level of achievement and difficulty", associated with the rich complexities of Hamlet and the enigmatic poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Kermode defines that shift as "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 leads Kermode to break his book into two parts. The first deals with the plays up to 1600, including some controversial dismissals of plays, including As You Like It, whilst the second part offers 15 detailed chapters on the tragedies, problem plays and romances. Each chapter is full of detailed and illuminating interpretations of the difficulties, but also pleasures of Shakespeare's language. This is classic Shakespeare criticism, written in the mould of Johnson and Coleridge.--Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600. The originality of Kermodes's writing, and the intelligence of his discussion, make this book a landmark.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
How to do justice to this book? It is addressed to a non-professional audience with an interest in Shakespeare and its insight is utterly profound. Fascinating, scintillating, provoking, superlative.
Kermode outlines the ways in which Shakespeare graduated towards a "toughening of the language" by "rougher handling of the pentameter", something Kermode elsewhere calls "progression", although far from steady and uninterrupted. But also, another, more subtle change from the simpler expression of the earlier plays to a more dramatically complex, more life-like and much greater psychologically penetrating language.
Early in the book Kermode gets rid of the idolatrous perception that Shakespeare never collaborated in his work. With something like half of all the plays put on in the public theatres during his writing life playwrights collaborated to bring a play to production. If he never, or rarely, collaborated he would have been almost alone among his peers. That's not to say, as Kermode points out, that he did not write the vast majority of the work ascribed to him.
Above all, Shakespeare's language changed in the service of characterisation (a huge leap towards modernity), towards prose that might be characterised as that with the cadence and feeling of poetry, and away from formal schemata, though he used poetry proper throughout his writing life in all of his plays. The early play, The Merry Wives of Windsor has 87 percent prose, Twelfth Night 61 percent, whereas the first tragedy Titus Andronicus has only 1 percent prose. Hamlet has 27 percent and Corliolanus 22 percent. There is no overall pattern to this, perhaps showing the confoundedness of trying to reach conclusions about Shakespeare's language, at least in technical detail.
My particular favourite among the essays about the plays is the discussion of Hamlet. Despite seeing this on the stage (a semi-professional, but very good production) and on film (oh dear, Mel Gibson), I cannot get enough exposition and explanation to make me feel I understand the play in its entirety. I fail, and am mocked (see closing quote), but at least I'm in good company. Kermode's discussion of Hamlet in this book seems to me to be masterly. Kermode outlines the importance of various tropes and thematics - doubling, shadowing, mirroring; the importance of the theme of incest; plots and errors, woes and wonders. The language of Hamlet is both entrancingly beautiful and full of violent, shockingly angry passion, especially in his diatribe against his mother.
Kermode closes this chapter with a superb summation: "Hamlet is literature's greatest bazaar: everything available, all warranted and trademarked... the whole idea of dramatic character is changed forever by this play... The new mastery is a mastery of the ambiguous, the unexpected, of conflicting evidence and semantic audacity. We are challenged to make sense, even mocked if we fail."
Kermode outlines the ways in which Shakespeare graduated towards a "toughening of the language" by "rougher handling of the pentameter", something Kermode elsewhere calls "progression", although far from steady and uninterrupted. But also, another, more subtle change from the simpler expression of the earlier plays to a more dramatically complex, more life-like and much greater psychologically penetrating language.
Early in the book Kermode gets rid of the idolatrous perception that Shakespeare never collaborated in his work. With something like half of all the plays put on in the public theatres during his writing life playwrights collaborated to bring a play to production. If he never, or rarely, collaborated he would have been almost alone among his peers. That's not to say, as Kermode points out, that he did not write the vast majority of the work ascribed to him.
Above all, Shakespeare's language changed in the service of characterisation (a huge leap towards modernity), towards prose that might be characterised as that with the cadence and feeling of poetry, and away from formal schemata, though he used poetry proper throughout his writing life in all of his plays. The early play, The Merry Wives of Windsor has 87 percent prose, Twelfth Night 61 percent, whereas the first tragedy Titus Andronicus has only 1 percent prose. Hamlet has 27 percent and Corliolanus 22 percent. There is no overall pattern to this, perhaps showing the confoundedness of trying to reach conclusions about Shakespeare's language, at least in technical detail.
My particular favourite among the essays about the plays is the discussion of Hamlet. Despite seeing this on the stage (a semi-professional, but very good production) and on film (oh dear, Mel Gibson), I cannot get enough exposition and explanation to make me feel I understand the play in its entirety. I fail, and am mocked (see closing quote), but at least I'm in good company. Kermode's discussion of Hamlet in this book seems to me to be masterly. Kermode outlines the importance of various tropes and thematics - doubling, shadowing, mirroring; the importance of the theme of incest; plots and errors, woes and wonders. The language of Hamlet is both entrancingly beautiful and full of violent, shockingly angry passion, especially in his diatribe against his mother.
Kermode closes this chapter with a superb summation: "Hamlet is literature's greatest bazaar: everything available, all warranted and trademarked... the whole idea of dramatic character is changed forever by this play... The new mastery is a mastery of the ambiguous, the unexpected, of conflicting evidence and semantic audacity. We are challenged to make sense, even mocked if we fail."
59 of 63 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you never thought that Shakespeare criticism could be compulsive reading, then think again. Frank Kermode's book is a masterpiece that lives up to the justified reputation of his other works. In the wake of Harold Bloom's atrocious rubbish, it is bracing to read a study that is enriching, sensible and rooted in the reality of Shakespeare's words, rather than abstract musings and supposition. Kermode's book really does enhance appreciation and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays, by reminding us of what it is that makes them peerless - their language and the unparalleled mastery that Shakespeare demonstrates in his technique.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is easily the finest, most intelligent, most helpful, most gripping book about Shakespeare's plays that I have ever read. Everyone who sees or reads any of Shakespeare's later and greater dramas should read the relevant chapter of this book either immediately before or afterwards: their enjoyment and appreciation of these plays can only be massively increased. Packed with insights and beautifully written. Trenchant, scholarly and deeply intelligent yet entirely accessible. A masterpiece.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Shakespeare is the Language
As we know so little about the man, the plays' stories were not his, his stage was so spartan and he uses stage-directions so infrequently, as I never tired of telling my students,... Read more
Published 6 months ago by RR Waller
Shakespeare's Language
An excellent resource. Informative and accessible. An absolute must for teaching Shakespeare. It certainly helped me to prepare for my classes. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Mr. Philip Shaw
All description, no analysis
I was looking forward to reading this book after the glowing reviews here but am sadly disappointed. Read more
Published on 30 Dec 2008 by Roman Clodia
A wonderful book that I hope to read many times
I think that the true mark of an expert is one who can get his point across to a non professional audience - and Frank Kermode is an expert. Read more
Published on 14 April 2001
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
