ABSTRACT
The general reader of William Shakespeare must be a kind of Holy Grail of publishing. That there is an almost infinite hunger for words about Shakespeare, in addition to his own words, is plain from the ink and keystrokes lavished on him every year on every floor of the publishing industry, popular and arcane, casual and obsessive, top and bottom and sea to shining sea. Age by age and stage by stage, Bevington unknits Shakespeare to reknit a weave of human life made up of scenes, stories and characters, identifying what might be called psychological or anthropological motifs that connect plays and, through their own collective rhythm, compose a picture of Shakespeare's changing preoccupations. The other senior figure to have offered a summation of his thinking about Shakespeare's strength and value is Frank Kermode, whose Shakespeare's Language limits its discussion to a particular and, he argues, neglected, aspect of Shakespeare's work.
