Too, too solid flesh
Frank Kermode’s washing machine has broken down. This interrupts our discussion of Shakespeare – the subject of his new book, the fruits of a lifetime’s love and labour – but it seems entirely appropriate. Sir Frank is the most down-to-earth of men, the least donnish of dons: he can happily accommodate Lear and laundry in the course of an afternoon.
Kermode, who is 80, is fit (he still plays squash), relaxed, to the point. He lives in Cambridge, where he was professor of English literature, in a sunny, uncluttered flat. He has lived with Shakespeare for most of his life and edited many of the plays. Now in Shakespeare’s Language, which is published next week, he has attempted to reclaim Shakespeare the poet and to write a book that can be understood outside the academy.
Publication coincides with Shakespeare Day on Sunday, but Kermode is wary of such commemorations. He wants as much to save Shakespeare from the idolators as from the deadening hand of academia, to emphasise his fallibility in order to see clearly the scope of his achievement, his true greatness.
“I didn’t want to do what the specialists were doing, but I didn’t want to do what the heritage merchants were doing either,” he says. “The idea was to treat Shakespeare as you would any other writer, and to say that some of the writing goes wrong. I want to keep him human-sized, human poet-sized, and to save him from being destroyed either by the PhDs or by the heritage industry.
“If you go to Stratford now it’s a very depressing experience – it’s like a tawdry fairground. All this triviality and rubbish has been caked around Shakespeare. There’s always been a tendency for idolators to spoil Shakespeare, ever since the first Stratford gathering in the 1740s, which Boswell attended. Happily all the proceedings were washed out when the Avon flooded.”
Kermode’s book concentrates on the language of the plays and argues that Shakespeare became a different writer after 1600 – more audacious, inventing a different “dialect” for each new play. “This works wonderfully in all the tragedies from Hamlet to Coriolanus, with the exception of Timon of Athens,” says Kermode. “But after that there is an over-the-top quality about some of the language; there’s a self-worshipping complexity that can be very irritating. Then in plays that he partly wrote, like The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, you get passages that are tyrannous – the strength is there but it is devoted to tying itself up in knots.
“His tendency to play games is apparent very early. All’s Well That Ends Well contains passages that no one has ever been able to explain. You have the sense that the people on stage don’t have a clue what the other characters are talking about. Dr Johnson used to struggle with passages and then give up, saying he was leaving it to those with more time to work it out. Shakespeare’s failings should be pointed out, because it humanises him. We don’t need an imperial poet at the moment – we haven’t got an empire – so let’s have a human one.”
Kermode is suspicious of reading the work through what little we know of Shakespeare, or of trying to see the man behind the writing. He thinks the deepening of the plays after 1600 may have been linked to the death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet (note the name), in 1596, but he is unwilling to base grand theories on biographical guesswork. He assumes Shakespeare had some sort of amorous relationship in London and that the sonnets are in part a response to that, but says “it really seems none of my business”, and he dismisses the fashionable theory that Shakespeare spent his early 20s with the Catholic De Hoghton family in Lancashire. He also sees Shakespeare as a poet first, a man of the theatre second.
“I think he went to London not as an actor at all but as a poet who was seeking patronage, a poet who, like Marlowe, wrote bits of plays to pay the bills. Then when the theatres closed he wrote poems. But patronage was a tricky business and when the theatres reopened he went back and wrote plays again. Gradually, and partly because of Marlowe’s death, he became the principal playwright.”
After 1600 the poet began to take over from the theatrical hack, and Shakespeare fused dramatic form and linguistic variety. “There is an emphasis on particular words – act in Hamlet, time in Macbeth, world in Antony and Cleopatra,” says Kermode. “It was as if a new subject stimulated a new part of his linguistic brain. In Lear there is a babble of voices and a huge linguistic range; no other play in English has that kind of range. Each new play he produced was different. They are like the works of a great musician: there is a family resemblance but a strong quality that distinguishes one from another.”
Kermode has devoted his life to what the critic Lionel Trilling called “keeping the road open” – the road linking the academic world with a wider readership. “Academic critics now talk in terms that only they understand,” he says, “and there is a great need to get some kind of literary criticism back that, without being patronising or simple-minded, can be understood by a broad audience.” For Kermode, the groundlings matter too.
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