The Age of Shakespeare
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—including, of course, its theater. Then Kermode focuses on Shakespeare himself and his career, all in the context of the time in which he lived. Kermode reads each play against the backdrop of its probable year of composition, providing new historical insights into Shakspeare’s characters, themes, and sources. The result is an important, lasting, and concise companion guide to the works of Shakespeare by one of our most eminent literary scholars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While the age of Shakespeare overlapped with the both the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Kermode's compact, erudite appreciation of the Bard is less about Shakespeare's private life and turbulent times than his theatrical milieu and the worlds he created for the stage. Quick summaries of the pressing political issues of the Protestant Reformation and the successor Queen Elizabeth are followed by up-to-date surveys of the debates over Shakespeare's possible crypto-Catholicism and his "missing" years. But Kermode hits his stride with the plays. His breakdown of Shakespeare's artistic development and mature achievement by the various acting companies and theaters he was associated with from the Lord Chamberlain's Company to the renamed King's Men, from the Theatre and the Rose to the Globe and Blackfriars proves a satisfying structure to match the swift pace. Inevitably, the brevity of the Chronicles format can't provide equal time to all of Shakespeare's million-plus words of dramatic poetry, and Kermode prefers the tragedies and romances over the histories and comedies (to say nothing of the sonnets). Occasionally shifting to lectern manner, he also revisits some of his favorite tropes, which he explored in Shakespeare's Language, such as rhetorical doubling and pairing in Hamlet and the theme of equivocation in Macbeth. While Ben Jonson declared, " was not for an age, but for all time!" Kermode pleasurably shows how he and his works were of their age and also transcended it.
