Never At A Loss For Words. - Review - book review

Shakespeare's
Language
Frank Kermode
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30, 324 pp.

The theater critic Kenneth Tynan once famously described John Gielgud as "the finest actor on earth, from the neck up." This remark was meant as a put-down, but I never took it that way. At least with some playwrights, what a director needs is just this kind of "neck-up" actor, and never more so than with Shakespeare.

The distinguished literary critic Frank Kermode has just written a book for those who like their Shakespeare "from the neck up." For those who are looking for that happy medium, in either performance or in criticism, that foregrounds not the actor nor the critic but the playwright's language, this book will come as a relief. So effectively has the author established his case that his book might even present a turning point in how Shakespeare will be performed in the next century, much the way A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy influenced so many directors in the first half of the past century, or Jan Kott's Shakespeare, Our Contemporary influenced later directors Peter Brook and Joseph Papp in the second half.

Seen in retrospect, and especially with Kermode's book in hand, it does seem odd that, both on stage and in the professor's scriptorium, concentration falls on every dimension of Shakespeare's achievement except his poetry. "Every other aspect of Shakespeare is studied almost to death," Kermode says, "but the fact that he was a poet has somehow dropped out of consideration." That Shakespeare's plots are absorbing, his characters often more memorable than one's next-door neighbors, his settings wondrously exotic: all this comes across with delightful vitality in the best productions. But that Shakespeare wrote intoxicating verse? No one would dare to deny that obvious fact, but who bothers to notice it anymore?

I remember once leaving the theater after a production of All's Well That Ends Well with a friend who asked me, with a kind of stunned awe, "How does he do it?" His question was rhetorical, meant only to express his wonder, not just at the unusual story, but more at the cataract of language on display that evening. But Kermode does not take such a question as rhetorical at all. For him, the "how" question can be answered, and precisely because Shakespeare not only had talent or "wit" (ingenium) but also technique (ars). He learned a craft, and did so in the only way a craft can be learned, by constant practice and through trial and error.

The reader will thus find no tiresome panegyric in this book to the "genius" of Shakespeare in the manner of the Romantics. English idiom has an odd expression for inexplicable productivity; we say an artist (Mozart, say, or Dickens) has masterworks "coming out of his ears." But another proverbial definition says that genius means knowing how to take infinite pains; or in Thomas Edison's famous line, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

This must have been particularly true of the Elizabethan stage, where the pressures--epidemiological, financial, religious, and political--were intense. Kermode mentions a number of hints that indicate Shakespeare had actually set out to become a poet "of the page and not of the theater," but apparently the diffidence of his patron (or patrons) in the peerage forced him back to the stage. This ambivalence in Shakespeare's professional intentions ("to double business bound," to borrow his own phrase) must have affected his dramaturgy, and not always for the better, at least if the reader agrees with Kermode here, who bluntly says: "It is simply inconceivable that anybody at the Globe, even...'the wiser sort,' would have followed every sentence of Coriolanus." Now Coriolanus is one of the later plays, a fact that is central to Kermode's argument. For the main thesis of Shakespeare's Language is that the playwright moved his dramatic poetry to an entirely new level of complexity around 1600 with the composition of Hamlet, Kermode argues that it is really the works written after that date that establish Shakespeare as the most important playwright of the human race, "as necessary to our culture as [is] an understanding, however partial, of the greatness of Mozart or of Cezanne"--even if at times he got beyond his audience.

So what is his technique, the key to the "how" question? One term that kept going through my mind while reading Kermode's analyses was "mixed metaphor." Of course, as all schoolchildren learn, such a mixture of images and comparisons short-circuits the main point of the sentence in which it occurs, like listening to two different radio stations at the same time. But as the New Republic's James Woods points out, what we usually mean by that term is the collision of cliches, a mixture of dead metaphors, as when a Colorado politician recently said on Denver television, to the amusement of the local populace, that a realtor with property near a nuclear dump site had "bought a pig in a poke that was a horse of a different color."

The better term for Shakespeare's verbal art should really be called his use of cascading images. Sometimes the juxtaposition of conflicting images works, and sometimes it doesn't, with the preponderance of clumsiness occurring in plays written before 1600. (Another reason that Kermode resists the term "genius" for Shakespeare, at least as an all-explanatory cover to account for his every syllable of recorded verse, is that as a technician he sometimes fails in his craft!). For example, in Henry VI, Richard of York compares a rout of soldiers to a swan who "With bootless labor swims against the tide." As Kermode points out, "to a modern ear this seems, as a report on a military defeat, to be on the lazy and languid side, the swan particularly" (additionally, the swan faces opposition from the wind in front, but Richard's troops are being routed from behind).

But when Othello, just after he has discovered Iago's perfidy, compares his own heart to a "cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in," the image works because it has been preceded by other images that, while distinct, are appropriate to Othello's appalled desperation ("Had they steeped me in poverty to the very lips,/ Given in captivity me and my utmost hopes," and so forth).

Although he does not cite this particular passage, the author fills his book with similar examples for his scintillating exegesis. Shakespeare's Language is so bracing because, finally, we have a book on Shakespeare from a critic who listens. He firmly puts in their place both those a priori critics who want to take Shakespeare down a peg by attributing his reputation to an eighteenth-century imperialist plot of the British Admiralty, and those idolizing critics who make Shakespeare usurp God's role of "inventing the human" (idolatry indeed). One does not have to read far in either of these two schools of criticism to get the feeling that their authors are one-note Johnnies who start out with an implausible thesis and then just argue it into the ground by repeating their monomaniacal theme in endless variations. I call Kermode the Gielgud of critics because he, like Gielgud, knows that language is primary to any poet--a dramatic poet most especially--and that an actor or a critic serves the poet best who speaks his lines most melodiously.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. His translation of Josef Pieper's The Concept of Sin has just appeared from Saint Augustine's Press (South Bend).

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