The former Irish rugby coach, Mick Doyle, once responded to press derision by remarking that no country had yet been found to raise a statue to a critic: but in Britain they knight one or two in each generation. Sir Frank Kermode now occupies a position once held by Sir William Empson as the acutest interpreter of linguistic complications in the great scenes of Shakespeare.
His latest book presupposes a certain knowledge, such as might be possessed by a good school student: but it is aimed at the common reader. He lightly - too lightly, I think - dismisses recent cultural analyses of Shakespeare's politics by arguing that, if you accept such arguments, you must also view great critics like Dr Johnson and Coleridge as "victims of imperialist brainwashing". It is, of course, possible to be a great artist or thinker and a conscious imperialist, but Kermode prefers to leave that possibility unexplored.
Instead, he complains that "the fact that Shakespeare was a poet has dropped out of consideration". He contends (quite convincingly) that the plays were for audiences "who listened" to long speeches and complex sentences. These audiences had strong memories of earlier phrases which might resonate with later ones in a text, or even from play to play: after all, they were people well used to church sermons lasting up to two hours.
Kermode believes that, in the years 1599-1600, which probably saw the writing of Hamlet and the move to the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's language was transformed. In earlier work, the poet was following the rules of rhetoric as a prentice craftsman, using devices such as anaphora (the repetition of a key-word at the beginning of a sequence of sentences). The young Shakespeare sought recognition as a poet and may have seen the writing of plays much as a young novelist now would regard the publication of reviews - as a way of gaining some money and some profile.
As a consequence, the language of the earlier plays is somewhat paradoxical: artificial but very clear. Kermode skims over it in hurried opening chapters which are far less exciting than those that follow. He does, however, pause to note elements of the later style in development: a character such as Richard the Second has a distinctive way of talking and, like all performers in a verbal opera, can be identified by the very sound that he makes. A prentice play such as Romeo and Juliet, by its focus on families in contemporary Verona rather than on ancient monarchs, helped bring tragedy much closer to ordinary life.
The main aim here is to celebrate the post-1599 masterpieces. Where earlier works were characterised by repetition and extended figures of speech, the later ones are filled with strange, eloquent silences, like that of Gloucester, marooned onstage in King Lear through an entire battle.
Kermode tellingly argues that the soliloquies of Hamlet - speeches in silence - are the fulcrum between the florid language of the first plays and the powerful, energetic reticence of a Cordelia or a Hermione. The joy of later work is the range of its musical keys and the sheer pleasure in the transition from one key to another. Hamlet isn't mentioned in his play until line 170 - appropriately, in a drama about delay - and the action proceeds by stops and furious restarts in a work which is "literature's greatest bazaar: everything available, all warranted and trademarked".
The play-by-play analyses provided here are similar in method and motivation to those of Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. The method is deliberately humble, as is the critic's chastened, self-effacing prose, which makes no futile attempt to compete with Shakespeare's gorgeous acoustic. The chronological approach can seem dull in phases (and then . . . and then . . .), but ultimately it yields some wonderful, new insights. Imagining Shakespeare's dilemma from within, Kermode shrewdly speculates that he endured a crisis after the self-confident art of Hamlet. Where to go next?
The "problem plays", conventionally treated as posing difficult, even insoluble ethical questions, are now seen as posing immense poetic problems too. Kermode writes with astuteness on them all, finding in Troilus and Cressida a strong case made to the effect that fame and honour are mere names for anger and craftiness. Now here, surely, is a moment when his own criticism might have been usefully connected with the more politicised contemporary analyses of Stephen Greenblatt (a major, if implied, antagonist of both Kermode and Bloom).
Some years back, Kermode praised Greenblatt's Shakespearian Negotiations for confronting the paradox of a self-assured, expansionist Elizabethan culture harbouring on its edges a deeply subversive theatre. It's a pity that so sharp a mind as Kermode's will not reopen that debate here, instead confining his disagreement with the radicals to one or two glancing references and a few footnotes.
He is, nonetheless, astringent - and certainly no bardolator. Measure for Measure becomes in its second half "a muddle", as "the contrivances of the poet resemble too much those of the Duke". And he makes great sport of a stage direction in Titus and Andronicus : "Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand".
ABOVE all though, he explores the idea of sound as sense. While modernist poets like Ezra Pound liked to think that they broke up iambic pentameter ("that was the first heave", said the rather naive Pound), he shows Shakespeare at it in Othello. The orotund prose of Othello himself may be either innocent pomposity or odious self-regard - a judgement that will evoke a start of recognition from many who have heard C. J. Haughey identify himself with the Moor.
Although Kermode skilfully traces the debate about "manliness" in Macbeth, he confines his treatment to matters of language. A younger cultural critic might widen the angle of analysis, building on what is so well achieved here. After all, 1600 might also be seen as the moment in which Shakespeare's interest shifted from the manly women of the comedies to the womanly men of the tragedies. That androgyny which was an enhancement to women became a tragic liability to men like Hamlet ("pass ion's slave"), Lear (abjuring all power with bad results) or Macbeth (reluctant to do the bloody deed demanded by his wife).
But Kermode belongs to a different school. As it is, he has written a beautiful and valuable book in the great tradition of Coleridge and Empson, capturing the sense of "awed dismay" (a lovely phrase) with which he recognises that power to disconcert as well as to console which inheres in poetry. In the end, with Edgar in King Lear, Kermode takes a bleak comfort in the thought that "the worst is not/So long as we can say, `This is the worst' ". Man is a speaking animal and to frame an awful experience with good words is to assert some power over it. That is the ultimate human grace celebrated in this austere and dignified study.
Declan Kiberd is Head of the Combined Departments of English at UCD