The Age of Shakespeare » (Reprint)

FRANK KERMODE is Britain’s most distinguished scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. He has written and edited numerous works, including Shakespeare’s Language, Forms of Attention, Not Entitled, The Genesis of Secrecy, and The Sense of an Ending. He has taught at many universities, including University College, London, and Cambridge University, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and several other American colleges. He lives in Cambridge, England.

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.

The New York Times

Kermode clears the way with an overview of Tudor politics and the growth of English Protestantism, a rich background for his discussion of what is known about Shakespeare's early life, including the recent debate over his possible Catholicism. The heart of the book is its account of the swift evolution of English drama from its late-medieval forms to its professional heights not long after Elizabeth's death in 1603, and the many threads, political, financial and social, that connected the theater to the worlds of court and city. Kermode's portrayal of the crush of the London playhouse and its place in a bustling world of commerce and competition is vibrant and full of learning. Shakespeare's rivalry with poets like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson develops in the context of other contests, in which adult actors vie with boys' troupes and court factions plot for power. — Joy Connolly