Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank Kermode has written and edited many works, among them Forms of Attention and a memoir, Not Entitled. He lived in Cambridge, England, and frequently taught in the United States.

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Shakespeare's Language

Farrar Straus Giroux

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...