The Age of Shakespeare Book

I've found the Modern Library Chronicles books to be somewhat of a mixed bag, as another reviewer aptly put it. Hans Kung's "The Catholic Church: A Short History" and Stephen Kotkin's "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment," which I've recently also reviewed, were very good, and full of information for people of all backgrounds. Frank Kermode's "Age of Shakespeare," however, I found to be written for an audience who has little to no knowledge of late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century English culture and politics. It may be the case that the varying quality can be attributed to the word limits imposed on the authors (all hover around 200 pages excluding ancillary notes or bibliographies). Many good introductory sources require a book anywhere between two and three times this long, especially when times were as complicated as Shakespeare's were. This could have been a better book had it been on just the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England itself, but as I want to share below, Kermode chose to make much of the book about Shakespeare's life and work instead, and I think the book suffers for it.

None of this is to say that Kermode doesn't manage to distill some really good information in a very small number of pages. The early chapters do a superb job of emphasizing the various changes from Catholicism to Anglicanism (under Henry VIII), back to Catholicism (under Mary I), and then back to Protestantism (under Elizabeth I), and particularly how those changes manifested themselves in many plays of the time, most of which never seemed far-removed from inherently political concerns.

Kermode is honest, admitting that most of what we know of Shakespeare's early life is purely from speculation. Did he come to London seeking the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? Did the Jesuit (and later, martyr) Edmund Campion discreetly pass Catholic literature on to William and his father John when William was young? The possibilities are interesting to think about, but again are ultimately conjecture. He also traces the incredible rise in the place of the playwright as a subtopic in several of the book's chapters, from the liminality of the unsavory vagabond during Elizabeth's reign to the reverence and honor many had gained by the time of the early part of James I's reign. Some of the best information is the background provided about the Rose, Globe, and Blackfriars theatres - their construction, the various people that were responsible for writing and producing the plays, the kinds of audiences that frequented each theatre, et cetera.

The chapters that suffer the most are the longest, which happen to be the ones which cover Shakespeare's plays. It seems like Kermode is racing as fast as he possibly can to write at least half a page or so on every play, which he manages to do; he spends a few pages on a couple of them. However, as I mentioned above, none of what he says sticks with the reader. Instead, we get randomly introduced tidbits, interesting though they are. He tells us that in "Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare carefully interrelates the ideas of humor and social taboo; that the influence of Terence and Plautus is easily discerned in "The Comedy of Errors"; and that Bottom echoes, if not directly copies Saint Paul's "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (I Corinthians 2:9) in Midsummer Night's Dream (IV.i.204-214). There is no rhyme or reason as to why he includes what he does. Many books need not be as long as they are. This one should have been much longer.

The first half of the book is worth the introduction to the England of the time, but I would say the second half can easily be skipped. There are simply too many other good supplements to Shakespeare's plays out including Mark Van Doren's "Shakespeare," Auden's lectures, Northrop Frye, or if you're feeling particularly reactionary, Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human."