Infinite riches in a little room

Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar, ‘as if the important thing was to make everyone sound very Roman, like senators preparing to sit for statues of themselves’; and an analysis of the phrase ‘simple shells’ in Pericles which he sees as ‘an early warning to those who find the last plays simple; not even the word “simple” is simple’. Such acute close readings are smoothly integrated into a larger narrative which contextualises Shakespeare within his age. Making affably generous use of the work of many living scholars, such as Eamon Duffy and Andrew Gurr, Kermode tells the story of the English Reformation, social and economic changes, the evolution of playing companies and purpose-built playhouses, and the writing of some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Clarity of exposition and common sense mark every page. Room is found, for instance, for currently fashionable Catholic-‘Lancastrian’ versions of Shakespeare’s early life; but as Kermode sensibly remarks, ‘these speculations grow more and more far-fetched’. However, he does not point out that it was never Shakespeare’s 18th year that was notoriously ‘lost’, but the years from 1586-92. For a well-documented reason some of his 18th year, allegedly spent in a Catholic household in Lancashire, must have been spent in Stratford and its environs, where he made Anne Hathaway pregnant.

On more literary matters Kermode is unfailingly perceptive — ‘English writers wrote tragicomedy without consulting elaborate Italian theories about that genre’; ‘when [Hamlet] is ranting … he is very conscious that he is doing so.’