Infinite riches in a little room
From our UK edition
Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare is an astonishing achievement. In fewer than 200 small-format pages he discusses each of Shakespeare’s works. No comments are less than telling; most are highly original. Examples of the latter include a discussion of familial and rhetorical ‘doubles’ in Hamlet; an account of the unvaried verse of Julius Caesar, ‘as if the important thing was to make everyone sound very Roman, like senators preparing to sit for statues of themselves’; and an analysis of the phrase ‘simple shells’ in Pericles which he sees as ‘an early warning to those who find the last plays simple; not even the word “simple” is simple’.