An excellent survey of Shakespeare's language and its development, handicapped by its shortness, enhanced by its precision.
Renowned scholar Kermode (Not Entitled, 1995) explores the evolution of Shakespeare's language in a friendly, accessible, and choppy romp through the Bard's oeuvre.
From Hamlet to A Winter's Tale, from Julius Caesar to The Tempest, Kermode traces the development of Shakespeare's language from a simple expressiveness to an ornate complexity; in sum, he argues that Shakespeare grew increasingly fascinated by the force of words and his artistic power over them. Kermode begins with a comparison between the verbosity of Titus Andronicus and the taciturnity of Coriolanus; from this vantage point, he discerns Shakespeare's increasing disinterest in rhetorical explicitness and his move to a more reticent display of language. The resulting silences create challenging obscurities and interpretative conundrums that have long bedeviled both audiences and critics; as Kermode writes, `Increasing complexity in the verse of the plays matches increasing subtlety in their construction.` Shakespeare thus appears to be an author as challenging to his contemporaneous Elizabethan audience as to much of his audience today. Although primarily interested in Shakespeare's verse, Kermode also considers the question of the playwright's prose and the ways in which the two forms are mutually implicated; Shakespeare's narrative poems also receive due attention for the ways in which they contribute to his dramatic voice. This book directs its argument to the intelligent lay reader, not the Shakespearean scholar, but the attention to detail in Kermode's reading of Shakespeare's verse should be extended to a scholarly audience as well. Unfortunately, the brevity of his chapters (30 pages for Hamlet, but only 8 for Cymbeline) forecloses the development of his observations into a truly unified whole. We receive insights from a great Shakespearean reader and teacher, but in this case, the reader would be well served with more rather than less.
An excellent survey of Shakespeare's language and its development, handicapped by its shortness, enhanced by its precision.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-22636-9
Page Count: 231
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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