Shakespeare's Language [Paperback]

"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")

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.