Shakespeare's Language - Softcover

Kermode, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374527741 ISBN 13: 9780374527747

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The Bard

The true biography of Shakespeare--and the only one we need to care about--is in his plays. Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, has been thinking about Shakespeare's plays all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime of thinking.The finest tragedies written in English were all composed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and it is generally accepted that the best ones were Shakespeare's. Their language is often difficult, and it must have been hard even for contemporaries to understand. How did this language develop? How did it happen that Shakespeare's audience could appreciate Hamlet at the beginning of the decade and Coriolanus near the end of it?

In this long-awaited work, Kermode argues that something extraordinary started to happen to Shakespeare's language at a date close to 1600, and he sets out to explore the nature and consequences of the dynamic transformation that followed. For it is in the magnificent, suggestive power of the poetic language itself that audiences have always found meaning and value. The originality of Kermode's argument, the elegance and humor of his prose, and the intelligence of his discussion make this a landmark in Shakespearean studies.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Kermode (1919-2010) is the author of many books, including Shakespeare's Language (FSG, 2000), Not Entitled (FSG, 1995), Forms of Attention, and The Sense of an Ending. He taught extensively in the United States, and lived in Cambridge, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Shakespeare's Language

By Frank Kermode

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 2001 Frank Kermode
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374527747

Introduction

Although a large proportion of Shakespeare's verse was spoken in thetheatre, a fact that accounts for much that affected its extraordinarydevelopment, I am not, or not primarily, interested in purely theatricalmatters, though I must occasionally have something to say aboutthem. I am aware that I am writing against the current, since for many yearsnow we have been urged to think of Shakespeare as above all a professionalman of the theatre who was required to be a poet because in his time playswere mostly written in verse. In the early years of the twentieth century therewas a sensible reaction against an old idea that Shakespeare was somehowtoo big to be thought of as submitting to theatrical limitations, that King Learwas too great for the stage, and so on. The reaction was necessary and beneficial.That he was essentially a man of the theatre and that he became a greatmaster of dramatic forms intimately related to the playhouses of his time arefacts that cannot be contested. He was not only a playwright but an actor, notonly an actor but probably what we now call a director, and certainly a shareholderin his company. He must have spent a large proportion of his adult lifein the Globe and other theatres, and it is therefore a scholarly imperative aswell as a matter of general interest that we should have some idea of howthings were done there, by promoters, actors, and directors (whoever theywere), all of them constantly motivated by their obligation to please the audiencesof the day. Generations of scholars have answered the challenge, and alot is now known about the companies and audiences, about prompt booksand parts, about acting styles and conventions, about contemporary fashionsand contemporary censorship, even about which actors played what roles.The physical structure of theatres is better understood than it was fifty yearsago. There is a Shakespearian archaeology. Not surprisingly, modern Globetheatres have been erected, and not only in Southwark. There is a perfectlydecent one in Tokyo.

    As a consequence of all this knowledge it has become a commonplace thatonly in performance can the sense of Shakespeare's plays be fully apprehended.It is also maintained on high authority that every production must"mine" something new from the text: "The life of a theatre," says the distinguishedEnglish director Richard Eyre, "should always be in the presenttense." This is true, and the work of a modern director must always be to fusethe horizons of past and present; to read well and faithfully is always to readanew, but without introducing distortion. Eyre adds, "The life of the plays is inthe language, not alongside it, or underneath it. Feelings and thoughts arereleased at the moment of speech. An Elizabethan audience would haveresponded to the pulse, the rhythms, the shapes, sounds, and above all meanings,within the consistent ten-syllable, five-stress lines of blank verse. Theywere an audience who listened."

    "The life of the plays is in the language." Yet the language can admittedlybe difficult, even baffling. This is obviously so for audiences coming in fourhundred years after the event, but it must often have been true also of theoriginal audiences, less because the language itself was unfamiliar (thoughmuch more so to us) than because of the strange and original uses an individualwriter might put it to. It is true that the audience, many of them oralrather than literate, were trained, as we are not, to listen to long, structureddiscourses, and must have been rather good at it, with better memories andmore patience than we can boast. If you could follow a sermon by JohnDonne, which might mean standing in St. Paul's Churchyard and concentratingintensely for at least a couple of hours, you might not consider evenCoriolanus impossibly strenuous. And although Donne wasn't talking downto them, much of his language was familiar to his congregation.

    We also need to remember how quickly the language of quite ordinarypeople grows strange, recedes into the past, along with other social practicesand assumptions taken for granted in one age yet hard for a later age tounderstand. If you read or watch a Jacobean city comedy, say, for instance,Middleton's masterly play A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, you soon discover thatfor all the manifest life of the dialogue and the characters you are an outsider,missing jokes and implications—as perhaps, in the course of a generation ortwo, the allusions and jokes in the dialogue of modern soap operas will bafflethe student and have to be looked up in a commentary. But the first audiencecould presumably follow most of it with ease and pleasure and without theeffort it imposes on us. It is true that now and again Shakespeare uses a wordneither the original nor the modern audience had ever heard before, whichyet remains intelligible to both, as when Goneril (King Lear, I.iv.249) advisesher father "A little to disquantity" his train. The dictionary records no earlieruse of this word, and it did not catch on, but to the modern ear it has a disturbinglybureaucratic ring, rather like the euphemisms produced by governmentdepartments, and it must have surely struck the first audience alsoas a cold and official-sounding word for a daughter to use in conversationwith her father.

    But this coincidence of response must be thought unusual, and we havemore often to deal with dramatic language that was almost certainly difficulteven to the audiences for whose pleasure it was originally written. So weneed to ask what "following" entails. It is simply inconceivable that anybodyat the Globe, even those described by Shakespeare's contemporary, the criticGabriel Harvey, as "the wiser sort," could have followed every sentence ofCoriolanus. Members of an audience cannot stop the actors and puzzle oversome difficult expression, as they can when reading the play. The actionsweeps you past the crux, which is at once forgotten because you need to keepup with what is being said, not lose the plot by meditating on what haspassed. Following the story, understanding the tensions between characters,is not quite the same thing as following all or even most of the meanings.Even modern editors, surrounded by dictionaries and practised in the languageof the period, cannot quite do that, as almost any Shakespeare editionshows. There are passages, especially in some of the later plays, which continueto defeat learned ingenuity. Dr. Johnson, who liked Shakespeare bestwhen he was writing simply, would struggle awhile with such passages andthen give up trying, as he alleged Shakespeare to have done. ("It is incident tohim to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which hecannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it for a while, and ifit continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to bedisentangled by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.")

    This is well expressed, but we, in our time, are unwilling to cut the knotso roughly. We are far from sharing Johnson's distaste for Shakespeare'smore rugged and complicated passages; we have lived through a long periodwhen much of the most favoured contemporary poetry has been defiantlyobscure; so we are stimulated rather than put off by this. We tend not to discardwhat seems obscure but to find out something about it; we want to knownot what is just going on in a general way but what the words mean, tounderstand the life of them.

    As for the original audiences, Volumnia in Coriolanus remarks that

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th' ignorant More learned than the ears ... (III.ii.76-77)

and contemporary testimony exists to the effect that an onlooker, out ofearshot, could still get the drift of a play, just by watching the gestures of theperformers. But this kind of acting, which in any case had probably undergonesevere modification before Coriolanus was first performed early in thereign of James I, was more demonstrative than we would care for; it mayhave helped the original audiences to keep up with what was going on, but itwould simply make us giggle. Anyway, it does not help at all with the morecomplicated bits, which are beyond the reach of the most refined code of gesture,though it is vital to what came, around 1600, to be called "personation"rather than playing.

    Personation, as Andrew Gurr explains, meant something grander thanmere playing or even acting; it related to a fuller representation of characters,sometimes of characters whose thoughts can plausibly be represented asrugged, involved, even obscure. Perhaps Volumnia was referring to oratory,closer to the old-fashioned playing that was aimed at a large popular audience.But in Shakespeare's plays, especially after about 1600, the life of thepiece, of the whole business of personation, is in large part not in the gesturebut in the linguistic detail; we want to understand as much of this as we can.We don't want just to hang on to the general sense as if we were watching anopera in Czech.

    The increasing obscurity of Shakespeare's language may be shown by thesimple operation of contrasting the first of his tragedies, Titus Andronicus,with what is probably the last, Coriolanus. Titus immediately strikes one asmuch more "literary" than Coriolanus, which is as good an example as any ofa work calling for intellectual virtuosity in hearers and even in readers. Hereis a speech from Titus; it may be compared with the speech of Aufidius inCoriolanus (IV.vii), quoted below. Marcus comes upon his niece Lavinia, whohas been raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out:

Who is this? my niece, that flies away so fast?
Cousin, a word; where is your husband?
If I do dream, would all my wealth would wake me!
If I do wake, some planet strike me down,
That I may slumber an eternal sleep!
Speak, gentle niece: what stern ungentle hands
Hath lopp'd and hew'd, and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As half thy love? Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But sure some Tereus hath deflow'red thee,
And lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue.
Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!
And notwithstanding all this loss of blood,
As from a conduit with three issuing spouts,
Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encount'red with a cloud.
Shall I speak for thee? shall I say 'tis so?
O that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast,
That I might rail at him to ease my mind!
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.
Fair Philomela, why, she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sew'd her mind;
But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee.
A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met,
And he hath cut those pretty fingers off
That could have better sew'd than Philomel.
O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute,
And made the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touch'd them for his life!
Or had he heard the heavenly harmony
Which that sweet tongue hath made,
He would have dropp'd his knife, and fell asleep,
As Cerberus at the Thracian poet's feet.
Come let us go, and make thy father blind,
For such a sight will blind a father's eye.
One hour's storm will drown the fragrant meads,
What will whole months of tears thy father's eyes?
Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee.
O, could our mourning ease thy misery! (II.iv.11-57)

    The first audience would have had a very good idea of what Marcus is upto here. He is making poetry about the extraordinary appearance of Lavinia,and making it exactly as he would if he were in a non-dramatic poem. To amodern director the scene is something of an embarrassment: Marcus,instead of doing something about Lavinia, who, as his account of the matterconfirms, is in real danger of bleeding to death, makes a speech lasting a goodthree minutes. Confronted with an obvious need to act, at first he wishes hecould be planet-struck into sleep (as it happens, Shakespeare used a similarfigure in Coriolanus, but with an entirely different force). There is a neatplay on the antithesis gentle-ungentle. Marcus compares Lavinia to a loppedtree, and the blood pouring from her mouth to a crimson river. Since it poursalso from her hands, she is likened to a garden ornament, a conduit withthree spouts. Her breath, despite all the blood, is still described as "honey," asif this were an immutable Homeric epithet. Her cheeks are compared to thesetting sun.

    Marcus, a well-educated Roman in the hands of a well-educated Englishpoet, aptly adduces a Senecan tag or proverb about unspoken grief stoppingthe heart. He is quick to see as apposite the story of the rape of Philomel byTereus, which happens to be the myth on which the plot of the play is based(as the text often reminds us). But Tereus only tore out Philomel's tongue,leaving her the option of revealing her assailant's identity in a piece ofsewing. The new rapist has taken notice of this and outdone him by cuttingoff his victim's hands as well. Marcus remembers Lavinia's voice and thesight of her hands playing on a lute, not omitting a reference to the musicwith which Orpheus charmed Cerberus in the underworld. We are not tothink it absurd that he expresses a wish he could ease his mind by giving theculprit a good scolding. He leaves us in no doubt that he commands themeans to explain why he finds the whole scene very upsetting, and eventhinks of blinding Lavinia's father to spare him the same sight.

    We should find this verse ridiculous, but insofar as it belongs in a theatre,that theatre is very different from the theatre of Hamlet or Macbeth or Coriolanus,and the task of the poet very differently conceived. We must not lookhere for plausible action, not even for plausible inaction or silent horror. InPeter Brook's memorable production of 1955, the speech was entirely cut;Marcus wasn't even on stage when Lavinia (Vivien Leigh) entered with redribbons streaming from her wrists and mouth. That was a way of preservingthe horror without the language that in the time of the early Shakespeareseemed a good way of representing it, a poet's way, but now embarrassing.Trevor Nunn, in 1972, cut twenty-nine lines from Marcus's speech, leavingus with neither one thing nor the other, but one really needs to choose, all ornothing; Deborah Warner, in her 1988 version, restored the whole speech.

    The latest Arden editor, from whom I borrow the stage history above, is akeen advocate of the merits of Titus Andronicus, and he defends Marcus'sspeech by claiming to find in it an acceptable modern psychology. Marcus hasto learn to confront suffering. "The working through of bad dream into clearsight is formalized in Marcus' elaborate verbal patterns; only after writingout the process in this way could Shakespeare repeat and vary it in the simple,direct, unbearable language of the end of Lear: `Look there, look there!' ...And a lyrical speech is needed because it is only when an appropriatelyinappropriate language has been found that the sheer contrast between itsbeauty and Lavinia's degradation begins to express what she has undergoneand lost." But this interpretation is surely as misguided as it is honourable.It may be true that the kind of thing we find in Titus was apreparation, something a poet at thirty might think right, given the sortof piece he was writing—a drama affected by the example of Seneca and,even more so, by the example of Ovid, who was the source of the Philomel/Lavinia plot, as of much else in Shakespeare. Titus is probably his mostlearned play, and poets needed to be learned. But playwrights neededanother kind of erudition than that appropriate to non-dramatic poetry.There was obviously an overlap of skills, but theirs was a different craft. Itsoon became apparent that the trade of the dramatic poet was different andincreasingly remote from the conventional, bookish rhetorical display. Notthat rhetoric was abjured, merely that it was powerfully adapted to a differenttask and greatly changed in the process. Of course prentice work in amore formal rhetoric could be thought as a useful, perhaps at the time anessential, preparation.

    Throughout this scene Lavinia is perforce silent, and the only way ofdealing with her silence was to give Marcus a very long speech. "Shall I speakfor thee?" he asks. And he does. There was (as yet) no alternative. Shakespearelater found other ways of dealing with silence, not least in the charactersof Virgilia in Coriolanus and Hermione in The Winter's Tale. Indeed, anincreasing interest in silence might be thought to mark a general developmentaway from rhetorical explicitness and towards a language that does nottry to give everything away.

    It is safe to say that at the time he wrote Titus Andronicus he simply lackedthe means to do, or even to envisage, what he achieved later, and his treatmentof silences is an illustration of this. Impossible on the printed page (inthe sense that a blank space can stand in no relation to the absence of speechin a context of talk), silence can be a feature of oral rhetoric, and was proverbiallyvaluable. "In plentiful speech there is always something to be censured,"says a proverb. Loquacity was deplored, but held to be quite differentfrom eloquence, which was praised, though perhaps not in women, where itcould be a sign of unchastity. And silence itself could be eloquent. Whennothing is said, runs another proverb, silence speaks. That silence could make acontribution to eloquence, that in the theatre you didn't have to lay everythingout with the utmost explicitness and could treat silence itself as requiringmany words (as in that speech of Marcus), was evidently a discovery Shakespearemade in the course of time.

    The point is most powerfully illustrated in King Lear V.ii, when Edgargoes off to fight, leaving his father, Gloucester, on the empty stage while thebattle proceeds in the distance. Gloucester says nothing at all. How long thissilence continues depends on the director's skill or nerve. I first understoodhow amazingly bold this little scene was when I saw Peter Brook's 1962 production;Gloucester, horribly blinded, sat sniffing the air for an intolerablylong time, in a silence only emphasized by the distant noise of battle. Thesilence ends when Edgar returns, defeated, and takes his father away: "Menmust endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all.Come on" (V.ii.9-11). Eleven lines, and a silence probably much longer thanthe speeches—a silence at the very heart of Shakespeare and not available tothe author of Titus Andronicus. Lavinia, like Philomel, lost her tongue, buther silence must be volubly represented by the words of Marcus.

    Coriolanus has Virgilia, described by her husband as "My gracioussilence" (II.i.175); she speaks when she must, but is still silent by comparisonwith the sheer noise of the play, the military din of her husband and the languageof the virago Volumnia; their kinds of eloquence are related to violentaction as Virgilia's is to peace. Coriolanus himself professes to prefer deeds,which speak without voice, to words; what finally drives him into exile is hisinability to tolerate the voices of the plebs, "The multitudinous tongue"(III.i.156), and what brings on his death is a wounding word: "Boy!"(V.vi.100-16). It forces him to scold (105) like his mother.

Continues...

Excerpted from Shakespeare's Languageby Frank Kermode Copyright © 2001 by Frank Kermode. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374527741
• ISBN 13: 9780374527747
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 342