The Caw of the Upstart Crow

Readers of Shakespeare often mistakenly regard the body of works as some kind of monolith, timeless and eternal; that, in his plays, Shakespeare showed, once and forever, that he understood us and all of human nature. But one of the important arguments that Frank Kermode makes in “Shakespeare’s Language” is that there’s a strain of combativeness in Shakespeare himself; with each successive play, he raises the bar not only on his accomplishment as an artist but also on his expectations for the audience. According to Kermode, he was simultaneously cultivating and challenging an audience with language that was attacked and admired from the beginning.

In 1592, an envious rival called Shakespeare an “an upstart crow . . . [who] supposes he is well able to bombast out a blank verse” with the best of his contemporaries. Tit for that well-known tat by the envious playwright Robert Greene are the many compliments stressing Shakespeare’s “sweetness”--presumably alluding to what Francis Meres named the “mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.” Admiration for the plays’ theatrical language also begins early: One eyewitness account of a performance describes Macbeth reacting to Banquo’s Ghost with “a great passion of fear & fury”--both acting and speaking.

For the first Shakespeare folio of 1623, Ben Jonson, who had earlier been rather nasty about Shakespeare’s verbal fecundity, made amends with a magnificent dedicatory poem, famously calling Shakespeare the “Sweet Swan of Avon” who “was not of an age, but for all time.” Of Shakespeare’s language, Jonson says: “like Apollo, he came forth to warm / Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm . . . In his well-turned, and true-filed lines. . . .” In the second collected edition, in 1632, John Milton adds his admiration for Shakespearean fluency: “to the shame of slow-endeavoring Art / Thy easy numbers flow. . . .”

In 1642, when Charles I was at war with many of his subjects, the anti-royalist Parliament closed the theaters, and no legal public professional performances existed until the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Charles II and his court brought back French-inflected expectations from their exile; one consequence was an increasingly neoclassical practice among playwrights which cultivated a neoclassical taste among the now-elite audience. The greatest dramatists from before 1642, Shakespeare and Jonson, were more respected than performed; Shakespeare’s plays quickly became material for adaptation to the new tastes because their language and plotting were regarded as rough, uncouth, old-fashioned.

John Dryden, Restoration poet laureate, dramatist and “father” of English criticism, admired Jonson and Shakespeare, but he also recognized that changes in audience, language and elite behavior had occurred: “the language, wit, and conversation of our age are improved and refined above the last.” His criteria worked to Shakespeare’s disadvantage, writing as he did for a much more diverse audience than Dryden’s and writing at times an English now considered “improper.” The playwrights from the Elizabethan age most preferred in the Restoration were the team of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Dryden is clear why: “Their plots were generally more regular [more according to neoclassical rules) than Shakespeare’s . . . and they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better. . . .”

In 1765, Samuel Johnson could still praise some of Shakespeare’s language as “smooth and clear,” while he found it had a “ruggedness or difficulty,” and Shakespearean wordplay, “the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it,” had worn out its critical welcome. More than 100 years later, during the 20th century, there was a surge of distinguished writing about Shakespeare’s language, specifically its aesthetic, less often its theatrical, qualities. The poets, prose- and verse-dramatists, critics and directors who contributed include in no special order: Harley Granville-Barker, John Masefield, T. S. Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, William Empson, Caroline Spurgeon, Lionel Knights, Wolfgang Clemen, Cleanth Brooks, W. H. Auden, Hilda Hulme, M. M. Mahood, Stanley Cavell, Stephen Booth and Vivian Salmon. (And that’s not to mention distinguished contributions by Shakespeare’s modern editors, who have a duty if not to admire then at least to explicate the plays’ language under stringent line-to-line and speech-to-speech and act-to-act conditions.)

To this group, Kermode arrives with a book beguilingly titled “Shakespeare’s Language,” a simple title for a complex, rewarding and sometimes puzzling and frustrating work. Kermode is widely known as the author of “The Sense of an Ending,” “The Genesis of Secrecy,” “Forms of Attention” and “The Uses of Error.” For Shakespeareans, his first substantial publication was (in Shakespeare’s language) an awful (what my students would call awesome) one, the Arden edition of “The Tempest,” an accomplished effort that continues to evoke wonder and envy, the abiding fate of any academic success.

Kermode begins bluntly: “This book is addressed to a nonprofessional audience with an interest in Shakespeare that has not, I believe, been well served by modern critics, who on the whole seem to have little time for his language; they tend to talk past it in technicalities or down to it in arcanely expressed platitudes.” This dismissal is a trifle unkind, as the abbreviated list just recited suggests, though it is true that some of the best writing on Shakespeare’s language in the last decades has been phonological and linguistic, not aesthetic. What has interested many modern critics of Shakespeare’s language is precisely what Kermode says he is “not, or not primarily, interested in . . . purely theatrical matters.”

Happily, the theater audience does concern him, especially how much it understands or may understand, mostly through ear and not eye: “Once in Stratford I asked a well-known actor how he would deliver some lines in ‘The Tempest’ that still baffled commentators. . . . He said he would try to speak them as if he understood them perfectly. The idea was to prevent the audience from worrying about the meaning.”

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Kermode begins by contrasting two speeches from “Titus Andronicus” and “Coriolanus,” respectively the first and last tragedies in his view. Relative clarity, plain logical and metaphorical development, use of classical allusion and other features make the early speech from “Titus” appropriate for “a nondramatic poem” and “insofar as it belongs in a theatre, that theatre is very different from the theatre of ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Macbeth’. . . .” This contrast is meant to justify the book’s organization: about 60 pages on all the plays through “As You Like It” (roughly half the canon), followed by about four times as many pages devoted to a chronological play-by-play study of the plays Shakespeare wrote after his company moved into the new Globe theatre in 1599. If critic Steve Sohmer is right, the first Shakespearean play for the new house was “Julius Caesar,” and Kermode gives it a few pages before turning to “ ‘Hamlet,’ literature’s greatest bazaar: everything available, all warranted and trademarked . . . a quantum leap in the development of English poetry and drama. . . .”

With the “Hamlet” chapter, Kermode introduces two arguments that will conclude the book, though always with local adjustments to suit individual plays. One argument is explicit: Each play (or at least the ones Kermode rewards with the most careful study and respect) has, as he says of “Lear,” “its own dialect,” a language specific to the play. The other argument begins: “To take him [Hamlet] as the herald of a new age is neither idolatrous nor hyperbolical. In this new age we need not expect matters to be made easy for us. 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.”

These arguments are not unrelated, partly because Kermode makes the first capacious so that it includes as “dialect” in the plays such different things as the rhetorical figure hendiadys--two nouns joined by “and,” which add strangeness to the expression of a noun and its qualifier (“youth and observation,” for example, rather than the simpler “youthful observation”)--and “doubleness of all kinds” (“Hamlet”), “the play’s obsession with worth and value” (“Troilus and Cressida”), honesty and foul, sexual disgust (“Othello”). “Othello,” he finds, begins with hendiadys but “becomes less fond of semantic collision and contraction” as “the play discovers and develops its own dialect,” its own subset of Shakespeare’s entire expressive language.

Kermode frequently employs personification, such as when he gives “Othello” the capacity to discover and develop when we know a play has no such capacities, except rhetorically. This is not an idle observation because it grows from Kermode’s sense that the language is running the show. Another way to put the question is to ask “Whose language is ‘Shakespeare’s language’?” Of Iago’s soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 1, Kermode writes: It “is unconvincing, almost an admission of confusion in the author as well as the character, a muddle of implausible motives where none was needed other than the established foulness of the man’s imagination.” Kermode may be right, but I doubt that an audience would, or could, think so in the theater, accustomed as they are to imagining the characters as individuals with distinct ways of speaking.

This personifying trick means that the plays sometimes become near-characters with their own ways of speaking and even that those ways of speaking become characters too. Internal echoes in “Macbeth”--”lost and won” or the rhyme “Macbeth / death” for instance--Kermode finely describes as “moments of ingrown self-allusion”: language talking to or of itself, “that mature Shakespearean verse that sometimes makes so much trouble for itself.”

That “trouble” is at the heart of Kermode’s second argument, a thrilling and difficult one he does not always make quite clear. This time the agents are both Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s language, and it is we who are troubled. The pattern of “allowing a word or set of words to occur almost obsessively” (the first argument) grows, according to Kermode, in the chapter on “Lear” into “an awful deliberation” in which the play’s “own unsparing cruelty . . . can sometimes seem to be an almost sadistic attitude to the spectator . . . forced to deal with a pain that does not hinder the poet from playing his terrible games.” The stylistic features that accompany this evolving attitude toward the spectator are identified in “Coriolanus”: “stubborn repetition, free association, violent ellipses; in short, a prevailing ruggedness of tone.” Of a difficult speech in “The Tempest”--with “flurries of metaphors . . . complex grammar . . . refusal of end-stopped lines . . . shifting figures”--Kermode concludes that the effects are achieved “at some cost to the auditor.” Moments later, he suggests that “the trouble such writing gives . . . is not well spent, and the puzzle hardly seems worth solving.” Speaking of “unnecessarily involved expressions” and “twists” in the language of “Macbeth,” Kermode “again senses a surplus of intellect or of rhetorical resource, as if the motor idled too fast.”

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Why did Shakespeare write in such an unfriendly manner, choosing words that would make it difficult for the listener to understand? Why, according to Kermode, does this intensify later in Shakespeare’s career? The answer comes with the book’s concluding questions. In his final play, “Two Noble Kinsmen,” Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher, “the soft explicit Fletcher, admirably skillful with his dying falls and his willingness to spell everything out.” By contrast with Fletcher’s style, “Shakespeare sounds as if the work of transformation was not done, that the testing of the audience (and himself) must go on. Did he overestimate their endurance, and ours; did he perhaps even exaggerate his own?”

There is in late Shakespeare a surplus--of both language and incident--and a sense of things done the hard way for the hell of it as in “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” Kermode renders an exceptional account of that verbal surplus and offers some fascinating, highly speculative suggestions on why it should exist.