Literary CriticismSomewhere out there, a lot of people must want to read about Shakespeare. Or, at least, so publishers seem to believe from the number of non-specialist books on the great playwright they commission. There is Jonathan Bate's overview of The Genius of Shakespeare; there is Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, as fat and Falstaffian as its author's favourite Shakespearean character. And now we have Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare.
Such books are sold on the already established reputation of their writers. "Frank Kermode", we are told on the book's cover, "is Britain's most distinguished and best-loved literary critic". Yet it hardly needs the erudition and intellectual reach of a Sir Frank, author of Romantic Image and the Sense of an Ending, to write this modest little guide to Shakespeare without tears.
Kermode's expertise is certainly not wasted on the book. Everywhere through it we are reminded of his special sensitivity to literary style, displayed in his excellent earlier study, Shakespeare's Language. He draws to good effect on his acute awareness of the Bible, picking out, for example, in the words of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a daring parody of a text from 1 Corinthians. Kermode can bring together with lucid ease the full range of current Shakespearean scholarship. But the author, now in his mid-80s, feels no need to voice a new "line" on Shakespeare, delivering instead a clear, concise and intelligent survey of the 36 plays and the context of their production.
The key features of the historical context he highlights are the Reformation and the succession problem. The theatricality that had been part of the daily life of the English under Catholicism, in the ritual of the Mass, in the seasonal rhythms of saints' days and festivals, was diverted into a secularised, professional entertainment industry. Doctrines figured in the image were replaced by doctrines of the word, manifested in the exponential growth in book production. Thoughout this time of profound social and religious change, the uncertainty of succession to the throne added another dimension to the sense of instability in England. The reigns of the three children of Henry VIII - the Calvinist Edward VI, the devoutly Catholic Mary, and Elizabeth with her compromising Anglicanism - made for a bewildering switchback of regimes. And Elizabeth's refusal to marry and produce an heir, the threat of her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, the increasingly urgent question of who would eventually succeed her as the long reign came to an end, all compounded the anxieties of the time.
Though Kermode sketches this in as the backdrop to Shakespeare's career in the theatre, he is sceptical about theories of the playwright's crypto-Catholicism, and believes the political significance of his plays has been exaggerated. He throws cold water on the thesis that Shakespeare's "lost years", between the last record of him as a very young man in Stratford and his re-surfacing in the London theatre, were spent as a private tutor in a Catholic household in Lancashire. Although Kermode duly notes the famous incident when a special performance of Richard II was commissioned by the Essex conspirators as preparatory propaganda ahead of their attempted coup d'état, he suggests that "the connection between plays and contemporary politics was less close and important than is sometimes alleged". At least Shakespeare seems to have had a talent for staying out of political trouble, unlike his more pugnacious fellow dramatists, Marlowe and Jonson.
In general, this is a cautiously conservative book, resistant to fashionable theories, unwilling to press the scanty evidence of Shakespeare's life and work beyond what it will bear.
Individual chapters on the Globe, the big public playhouse where Shakespeare's company operated from 1599, and the smaller, indoor Blackfriars, where it played as well from 1608, are used to divide up the canon and remind us of the theatrical circumstances of the Shakespearean career: the early plays, written before the Globe was built; the great tragedies staged there in the early years of the 17th century; the late romances with special scenic effects that the Blackfriars theatre made possible.
Kermode is not especially interested in the early plays - "The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a slight work, but it has many pretty verses" - but he does the best he can for them in the page or two devoted to each one. The Ovidian verse periods of Titus Andronicus, that horror play so many Shakespeareans wish Shakespeare had not written (and Kermode accepts was co-authored by George Peele), are used to illustrate a non-dramatic poetry that "can make no provision for silence". The Taming of the Shrew, we are warned, "needs to be read or watched without reference to modern feminism", a difficult demand for modern feminists.
It is with the extraordinary works of Shakespeare's middle period that Kermode is most assured. He comments on the pattern of linguistic and thematic doubling in Hamlet; he brings out the way Macbeth turns upon the word "equivocation" with its topical reference to the Gunpowder Plot trials. He is equally at home explicating the oblique and demanding verse of the late plays. There is a characteristically dry Kermodian irony in his comment on the scene in Pericles where the fiercely chaste Marina confronts Boult the bawd: "Marina's advice - that he should give up brothel work and find a cleaner job as a garbageman or assistant hangman - shows a lack of sympathy proper to her caste".
This book represents Sir Frank Kermode operating well within his comfort zone. Still, if you want a brief account of the life and work of Shakespeare, unpatronising, relaxed and readable, wearing its considerable learning lightly, this is the book for you.
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent book is Shakespeare's Serial History Plays, published by Cambridge University Press in 2002
The Age of Shakespeare By Frank Kermode Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 194pp. £12.95