SOURCE: Kermode, Frank. “Explorations in Shakespeare's Language.” Raritan 18, no. 1 (summer 1998): 73-86.

In the following essay, Kermode examines the ways in which various critics have interpreted Shakespeare's language, including his use of sexual innuendo and bawdy.

In his recent book, The Genius of Shakespeare, Professor Jonathan Bate explains that William Empson's concept of ambiguity was a decidedly Cambridge invention; by getting rid of the either/or mentality that had been prevalent in literary analysis, he was bringing to literary criticism a way of thinking inaugurated by Einstein but familiar in the university of Paul Dirac; the young and prodigious Empson, says Bate, was “the first man to see the literature of the past through quantum theory's altered notion of reality.” He is “modernism's Einstein.”

I do not think we need to speak of quantum theory, or indeed of modernism, in the anthropomorphic style the possessives here suggest, but I...