Fourteen years separate Shakespeare’s first tragedy, the fiercely explicit Titus Andronicus (1594), from his last, the fiercely difficult Coriolanus (1608), and in that interval something astonishing happened to the playwright and his audiences. The poet’s powers grew, as did the audiences’ capacity to absorb and appreciate his words. Shakespeare taught them to hear more acutely—quite simply, to hear more—and the instrument of that aural and intellectual expansion was his language. In this remarkably absorbing book, Kermode, an 81year- old English scholar and critic, brings a lifetime of judicious reflection to tracing the course of the Shakespearean transformation.

Shakespeare’s language was of course English, and he possessed it as utterly as anyone ever has, as utterly, in fact, as it possessed him. And Shakespeare the dramatist used the language as a poet uses language. Those observations would once have been too self-evident to bear mention, but not any more, argues Kermode. He fears that we’ve lost sight of the poetry in the spate of critical studies focusing on Shakespeare’s religion or sexual preference or business acumen. Whatever their incidental fascination, such topics are subordinate to the texts as dramatic poetry.

Kermode’s approach is as straightforward and foursquare as his title. He considers roughly the first half of the Shakespearean corpus—the histories, tragedies, and comedies of the 1590s—in a single section of some 50 pages. He’s eager to get to the years when the playwright’s craft attained a higher level. The pivotal work for Kermode is Hamlet (1600), that great "bazaar" of a play—"everything available, all warranted and trademarked"—in which, he believes, the playwright offers the fullest exhibition of his powers. "In Shakespeare’s plays, especially after 1600, say from Hamlet on," Kermode writes, "the life of the piece . . . is in the detail, and we need to understand as much of that as we can."

So Kermode attends to the poetic detail of 16 individual plays. He takes key passages from each—in particular, knotty and involved passages—settles their literal meaning, and suggests how they served Shakespeare’s larger dramatic purpose, which was to make language present the complexity of character and motivation as it never had done before. Shakespeare’s characters weigh "confused possibilities and dubious motives." They propose theories or explanations only to abandon or qualify them almost immediately. Their thoughts are rugged, intricate, even obscure, and only a new kind of poetry can do them justice. Kermode believes that much of the language was difficult even for the audiences who first heard it, but the playwright educated them to his genius even as he went on imagining and testing new possibilities.

Kermode is not afraid to admit that some passages still leave him baffled, and to argue that the poet sometimes loses his way. No one who wrote so much, he says, and for commercial purposes, could hit the mark every time. So anyone who has ever puzzled over an intractable bit of Shakespeare can take heart: The playwright may not have known exactly what he meant either, and what he meant, in any case, may not be worth the effort of excavating the sense from its muffling expression.

This would be a wonderful book at any time. It’s all the more welcome now, when so much of what passes for literary criticism has the weight, the appeal, and (thank goodness) the staying power of carelessly emitted gas. Kermode honors his subject and returns us to the plays newly alert to their pleasures.

—James Morris