Shakespeare's Language

Resumen del libro

At a time when most modern critics seem more concerned with theories of politics and psychology than with poetry, eminent scholar Frank Kermode takes us back to the essence of Shakespeare his words. Shakespeare's revolutionary use of language is where the true power of his plays lies. Yet how could he be so wildly experimental with the English language and still remain a popular dramatist? If we sometimes find his plays hard to understand today, was it necessarily much easier for an Elizabethan theatregoer? How and why did Shakespeare's dramatic verse undergo such an extraordinary change around 1600? And why did he develop an obsessive passion for particular words? This landmark study distils a lifetime's thinking to unlock the secrets of Shakespeare's wild and whirling words'.
Although a large proportion of Shakespeare's verse was spoken in the theatre, a fact that accounts for much that affected its extraordinary development, I am not, or not primarily, interested in purely theatrical matters, though I must occasionally have something to say about them. I am aware that I am writing against the current, since for many years now we have been urged to think of Shakespeare as above all a professional man of the theatre who was required to be a poet because in his time plays were mostly written in verse. In the early years of the twentieth century there was a sensible reaction against an old idea that Shakespeare was somehow too big to be thought of as submitting to theatrical limitations, that King Lear was 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 great master of dramatic forms intimately related to the playhouses of his time are facts that cannot be contested. He was not only a playwright but an actor, not only an actor but probably what we now call a director, and certainly a shareholder in his company. He must have spent a large proportion of his adult life in the Globe and other theatres, and it is therefore a scholarly imperative as well as a matter of general interest that we should have some idea of how things were done there, by promoters, actors, and directors (whoever they were), all of them constantly motivated by their obligation to please the audiences of the day. Generations of scholars have answered the challenge, and a lot is now known about the companies and audiences, about prompt books and parts, about acting styles and conventions, about contemporary fashions and contemporary censorship, even about which actors played what roles. The physical structure of theatres is better understood than it was fifty years ago. There is a Shakespearian archaeology. Not surprisingly, modern Globe theatres have been erected, and not only in Southwark. There is a perfectly decent one in Tokyo.

As a consequence of all this knowledge it has become a commonplace that only 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 distinguished English director Richard Eyre, should always be in the present tense. This is true, and the work of a modern director must always be to fuse the horizons of past and present; to read well and faithfully is always to read anew, but without introducing distortion. Eyre adds, The life of the plays is in the language, not alongside it, or underneath it. Feelings and thoughts are released at the moment of speech. An Elizabethan audience would have responded to the pulse, the rhythms, the shapes, sounds, and above all meanings, within the consistent ten-syllable, five stress lines of blank verse. They were an audience who listened. 1

The life of the plays is in the language. Yet the language can admittedly be difficult, even baffling. This is obviously so for audiences coming in four hundred years after the event, but it most often have been true also of the original audiences, less because the language itself was unfamiliar (though much more so to us) than because of the strange and original uses an individual writer might put it to. It is true that the audience, many of them oral rather than literate, were trained, as we are not to, to listen to long, structured discourses, and must have been rather good at it, with better memories and more patience than we can boast. If you could follow a sermon by John Donne, which might mean standing in St. Paul's Churchyard and concentrating intensely for at least a couple of hours, you might not consider even Coriolanus impossibly strenuous. And although Donne wasn't talking down to them, much of his language was familiar to his congregation. We also need to remember how quickly the language of quite ordinary people grows strange, recedes into the past, along with other social practices and assumptions taken for granted in one age yet hard for a later age to understand. If you read or watch a Jacobean city comedy, say, for instance, Middleton's masterly play A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, you soon discover that for 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 or two, the allusions and jokes in the dialogue of modern soap operas will baffle the student and have to be looked up in commentary. But the first audience could presumably follow most of it with ease and pleasure and without the effort it imposes on us. It is true that now and again Shakespeare uses a word neither the original nor the modern audience had ever heard before, which yet remains intelligible to both, as when Goneril (King Lear I.iv.249) advises her father A little to disquantity his train. The dictionary records no earlier use of this word, and it did not catch on, but to the modern ear it has a disturbingly bureaucratic ring, rather like the euphemisms produced by government departments, and it must have surely struck the first audience also as a cold and official-sounding word for a daughter to use in conversation with her father.

But this coincidence of response must be thought unusual, and we have more often to deal with dramatic language that was almost certainly difficult even to the audiences for whose pleasure it was originally written. So we need to ask what following entails. It is simply inconceivable that anybody at the Globe, even those described by Shakespeare's contemporary, the critic Gabriel Harvey, as the wiser sort, could have followed every sentence of Coriolanus. Members of an audience cannot stop the actors and puzzle over some difficult expression, as they can when reading the play. The acting sweeps you past the crux, which is at once forgotten because you need to keep up with what is being said, not lose the plot by meditating on what has passed. 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 language of the period, cannot quite do that, as almost any Shakespeare edition shows. There are passages, especially in some of the later plays, which continue to defeat learned ingenuity. Dr. Johnson, who liked Shakespeare best when he was writing simply, would struggle awhile with such passages and then give up trying, as he alleged Shakespeare to have done. ( It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it for a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it. 2)

This is well expressed, but we, in our time, are unwilling to cut the knot so roughly. We are far from sharing Johnson's distaste for Shakespeare's more rugged and complicated passages; we have lived through a long period when much of the most favoured contemporary poetry has been defiantly obscure; so we are stimulated rather than put off by this. We tend not to discard what seems obscure but to find out something about it; we want to know not what is just going on in a general way but what the words mean, to understand 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.ii76-77)

and contemporary testimony exists to the effect that an onlooker, out of earshot, could still get the drift of a play, just by watching the gestures of the performers. But this kind of acting, which in any case had probably undergone severe modification before Coriolanus was first performed early in the reign of James I, was more demonstrative than we would care for; it would simply make us giggle. Anyway, it does not help at all with the more complicated 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, 3 meant something grander than mere playing or even acting; it related to a fuller representation of characters, sometimes of characters whose thoughts can plausibly be represented as rugged, involved, even obscure. Perhaps Volumnia was referring to oratory, closer to the old-fashioned playing that was aimed at large popular audience. But in Shakespeare's plays, especially after about 1600, the life of the piece, of the whole business of personation, is in large part not the gesture but 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 an opera in Czech.

The increasing obscurity of Shakespeare's language may be shown by the simple operation of contrasting the first of his tragedies, Titus Andronicus, with what is probably the last, Coriolanus. Titus immediately strikes as one as much more literary than Coriolanus, which is as good an example as any of a work calling for intellectual virtuosity in hearers and even in readers. Here is a speech from Titus; it may be compared with the speech of Aufidius in Coriolanus (IV.vii), quoted below. Marcus comes upon his niece Lavinia, who has 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 up to 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 a modern director the scene is something of an embarrassment: Marcus, instead of doing something about Lavinia, who, as his account of the matter confirms, is in real danger of bleeding to death, makes a speech lasting a good three minutes. Confronted with an obvious need to act, at first he wishes he could be planet-struck into sleep (as it happens, Shakespeare used a similar figure in Coriolanus, but with an entirely different force 4). There is a neat play on the antithesis gentle-ungentle. Marcus compares Lavinia to a lopped tree, and the blood pouring from her mouth to a crimson river. Since it pours also from her hands, she is likened to a garden ornament, a conduit with three spouts. Her breath, despite all the blood, is still described as honey , as if this were an immutable Homeric epithet. Her cheeks are compared to the setting sun.

Marcus, a well-educated Roman in the hands of a well-educated English poet, aptly adduces a Senecan tag or proverb about unspoken grief stopping the heart. He is quick to see as apposite the story of rape of Philomel by Tereus, 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 of sewing. The new rapist has taken notice of this and outdone him by cutting off his victim's hands as well. Marcus remembers Lavinia's voice and the sight of her hands playing on a lute, not omitting a reference to the music with which Orpheus charmed Cerberus in the underworld. We are not to think it absurd that he expresses a wish he could ease his mind by giving the culprit a good scolding. He leaves us in no doubt that he commands the means to explain why he finds the whole scene very upsetting, and even thinks 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 Corialanus, and the task of the poet very differently conceived. We must not look here for plausible action, not even for plausible inaction or silent horror. In Peter Brook's memorable production of 1955, the speech was entirely cut; Marcus wasn't even on stage when Lavinia (Vivien Leigh) entered with red ribbons streaming from her wrists and mouth. That was a way of preserving the horror without the language that in the time of the early Shakespeare seemed 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, leaving us with neither one thing nor the other, but one really needs to choose, all or nothing; Deborah Warner, in her 1988 version, restored the whole speech.

The latest Arden editor, from whom I borrow the stage history above, is a keen advocate of the merits of Titus Andronicus, and he defends Marcus's speech by claiming to find in it an acceptable modern psychology. Marcus has to learn to confront suffering. The working through of bad dream into clear sight is formalized in Marcus' elaborate verbal patterns; only after writing out 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 appropriately inappropriate language has been found that the sheer contrast between its beauty and Lavinia's degradation begins to express what she has undergone and lost. 5 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 a preparation, something a poet at thirty might think right, given the sort of 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 most learned play, and poets needed to be learned. But playwrights needed another kind of erudition than that appropriate to non-dramatic poetry. There was obviously an overlap of skills, but theirs was a different craft. It soon became apparent that the trade of the dramatic poet was different and increasingly remote from the conventional, bookish rhetorical display. Not that rhetoric was abjured, merely that it was powerfully adapted to a different task and greatly changed in the process. Of course prentice work in a more formal rhetoric could be thought as a useful, perhaps at the time an essential, preparation.

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

It is safe to say that at the time he wrote Titus Andronicus he simply lacked the means to do, or even to envisage, what he achieved later, and his treatment of silences is an illustration of this. Impossible on the printed page (in the sense that a blank space can stand in no relation to the absence of speech in a context of talk), silence can be a feature of oral rhetoric, and was proverbially valuable. In a plentiful speech there is always something to be censured, says a proverb. Loquacity was deplored, but held to be quite different from eloquence, which was praised, though perhaps not in women, where it could be a sign of unchastity.6 And silence itself could be eloquent. When nothing is said, runs another proverb, silence speaks. That silence could make a contribution to eloquence, that in the theatre you didn't have to lay everything out with the utmost explicitness and could treat silence itself as requiring many words (as in that speech of Marcus), was evidently a discovery Shakespeare made in the course of time.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References:
1. Utopia and Other Places (1993), p.176.
2. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. A.Sherbo (1968), p.73.
3. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 3rd ed. (1992), pp. 99-100. The Oxford English Dictionary cites John Florio (1598) and John Marston (1602) as the earliest usage, and other citations suggest that the derivative forms of the word originated at about the same time.
4. II.ii.113: And with a sudden reinforcement struck / Corioles like a planet. And compare The Winter's Tale (I.ii.201-4): It is a bawdy planet, that will strike / Where tis predominant; and tis powerful think it - / From east, west, north, south. Be it concluded, / No barricado for a belly. Here the planet is a compressed metaphor for female unchastity.
5. Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (Arden edition, 1995), pp. 62-63.
6. A remark of the female humanist Isotta Nogarolas, reported in A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (1986), pp. 37-40.

What inspired you to write Shakespeare's Language?

I was appalled by the neglect into which the language had fallen, at a time when about 4000 items are published annually on Shakespeare.

Many of us find Shakespeare's language difficult to understand today, but you suggest that his contemporaries would have had similar problems, especially when watching a complex play like Coriolanus. At the same time, we're told that he was a popular playwright. Can you explain this?

A hard one. I suggested people were better trained to be listeners, the society then being more oral than ours. And of course by the time of Coriolanus Shakespeare had been educating his audiences for almost two decades. Then again it is generally possible to follow without anything like total understanding.

Do you have a favourite Shakespeare play? Or could you pick out one play which especially inspires you?

Various choices at different times: currently I think The Winter's Tale, but Hamlet is always in one's head.

You have been a scholar and literary critic for over 50 years, how do you see the role of the critic?

Too vast to answer. One part of the job is to help make available the great works to non-specialists. Of course there are also scholarly duties.

Many people say they are put off Shakespeare at school, do you think he should be taught in school? Are there particular plays which are more suitable than others?

I'd be happy if he dropped out of the earlier exams but I think school productions are a good thing and intensive sixth form study, not of plays that look easy, but hard ones.

What are you currently writing?

Some talks I have to give in California.

What are you currently reading for pleasure?

Ave Atque Vale by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Matthew Kneale.

Another book about Shakespeare? Here, Frank Kermode one of Britain's most respected academics, explains why there's space for one more

There are thousands of books about Shakespeare, the great majority more or less forgotten, not because none of them was any good but because the purpose and the audience they served was of its particular time, and that time is not ours. In due course, probably quite soon, practically everything that is being written about Shakespeare at this moment will also be forgotten. This is something for critics to remember if tempted to sound over-confident.

For oblivion is the fate that all but a very few commentators on the classics must expect. Yet nothing is here for tears. Commentary is the medium in which the classics survive, if we stopped writing and talking about them they would grow old and die. That is the principal use of criticism. The classics need to be kept modern, and criticism, even at the level of unstrenuous chatter, helps to do this. The chatter and the criticism must always be changing because what can be taken as modern, indeed the very idea of modernity, is always changing. It is as if commentaries must die to keep the classics alive.

I'm sometimes asked why at the late stage of my life, I troubled myself to write a book on Shakespeare, especially as I hold the views expressed above. For about half a century I had contributed enough to this output of criticism and chatter to feel that the job of carrying it on should now be left to a younger generation. There was evidently no shortage of willing hands. One annual bibliography of Shakespeare studies includes 4780 items for 1997, about nineteen per working day. Some of these items were about minute textual points or local problems of interpretation, and some were simply trivial. Others were long, ambitious, and serious; but even these confirmed my feeling that much of this criticism was not what was really needed in our time, or perhaps in anybody's time. The feeling is reinforced by my conviction that the classics, whether in literature, music or painting, belong to all educated people and not just to an élite whose members take pride or comfort in talking the specialist language of a clique. Something else seemed to be needed. If in trying to supply it I had to put up with being called old-fashioned, I decided I didn't care.

It is perfectly possible to envisage a future in which Shakespeare will be regarded as no more than an historical figure of very little importance. He might still be studied only as the recondite interest of an informed, enthusiastic minority, rather as minor medieval poets are today. And there are plenty of people around who think this a perfectly desirable outcome. And there are also plenty of people who, while knowing very little about Shakespeare, would profess to be horrified at the thought of his suffering such a fate. On the one side we have the knowing ones, the ones who know enough to have seen through the canonical pretensions of the Bard; and on the other we have the idolaters, the heritage freaks, the quoters of The Seven Ages of Man and five or six familiar lines, the dangerous Shakespeare lovers who love him as they love morris dancing and Elizabethan dinners.

These are the extremes - scholarly self-regard and ill-informed heritage worship, which anybody who wants to maintain a just and sensible attitude to Shakespeare must avoid. Shakespearan idolatry has been around for a long time. It flowered extravagantly in the eighteenth century and still thrives in the unattractive forms I've hinted at. If you want to see what's going on at the Royal Shakespeare Company you may be obliged to visit Stratford, but to get to the theatres you have to get through the town: the shabbiness, the tawdry exploitation of the tourist, the whole dreary business. It can be a depressing experience. You might argue that in their way these activities at least pay lip service to an ideal, but what is one to think of an ideal that deserves nothing better than this kind of recognition?

With a little more diffidence one might ask whether making Shakespeare a compulsory school subject isn't just another form of lip-service. His presence in our schools is required by law, but law cannot do the teaching. The set plays may be taught with intelligence and enterprise; but they may also be reduced to a slow explicatory slog, as if written in a dead language. In either case, even when the job is well done, Shakespeare is there primarily as an item or icon of the national culture, a quasi-religious requirement or duty.

This piety may have evil consequences; it can breed distaste and disillusion, and put students off for life. They have been compelled to make obeisance to a cultural idol, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps without much consideration; and even if the outcome is good there is something wrong with the compulsion, whether it produces boredom or uncritical adulation, idolatry. His critical friend, the poet Ben Jonson, said he loved Shakespeare 'this side idolatry'. He admired him enough to declare him 'not for an age but for all time', but that did not mean he could escape censure when he was careless and hasty. Dr Johnson, who also knew how to temper admiration with a just severity, thought Shakespeare a wonderfully gifted, but not always a very good, writer. And the most eminent of twentieth-century critics, A.C. Bradley, called him 'a great but negligent artist'.

Indeed the best qualified critics are never idolaters, and that is not surprising, since idolatry is always ignorant; worse still, it constitutes an invitation to those who want to cut Shakespeare down to their size, to suggest that the notion of there being anything exceptional about him is a delusion or a cheat. Curiously enough, these iconoclastic critics are often academics who would hesitate to admit ignorance, and might, a little naively, be expected to have a professional interest in attending to the qualities that really do give Shakespeare his continuing importance as a writer.

Over recent years academic literary criticism has rapidly grown more and more arcane, less and less concerned to interest the intelligent non-professional reader, more and more prone to depend on smart but unexamined assumptions. Thus it can be claimed that the prestige of Shakespeare was a product of an imperialist effort that began in the eighteenth century, when it appeared that an increasingly large empire needed a correspondingly large imperial poet, whose fame should now be allowed to fade as the empire has faded. The superiority of Shakespeare over his contemporaries, to say nothing of all the other claimants, is mere hallucination, the result of assiduous brainwashing, and only now has it become possible for the gifted critic to see through the hoax.

This claim is sometimes accompanied by another, even more radical, which, in essence, denies that any one piece of writing can properly be thought more valuable than any other - denies, indeed, that there is any such thing as literary value, which is regarded as part of an aesthetic myth now at last identified as such. Of course these claims contradict each other, but both proceed from a determination to discredit what used to be thought of as literature - not just Shakespeare, but all of literature, a word often now regarded as no more than a monument to a dead idea.

Biografía del autor

(Isla de Man, 1919 x{0026} x02013; Cambridge, Reino Unido, 2010) fue profesor de literatura de las Universidades de Cambridge, Columbia y Londres, y una de las figuras más relevantes dentro de la crítica literaria angloamericana. Junto con Northrop Frye, impulsó la revisión del canon interpretativo e introdujo una nueva noción de la lectura. Gedisa ha publicado sus obras x{0026}lt;i D. H. Lawrencex{0026}lt;/i y x{0026}lt;i Formas de atenciónx{0026}lt;/i .