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The Age of Shakespeare by Frank Kermode:

[Since being elected Man of the Millennium, Shakespeare has been more feted in print than ever, in the mainstream as well as in the overflowing and sometimes murky underground river of academic publications. "Enough!" we may well cry (as we sometimes cry at the unending proliferation of productions of the plays). Not, however, in the case of Sir Frank Kermode, whose profoundly conceived and elegantly executed Shakespeare's Language (2000) was a complex but luminous contribution to the understanding of the greatest single body of dramatic work in any language, one of the most refreshing in recent times; any new commentary from him on the subject is eagerly awaited. Despite a brief flirtation with structuralism, he is no grand theorist. Instead, he is that rather old-fashioned phenomenon: a connoisseur, pragmatically and shrewdly applying his sensibility to a writer who is, uniquely in English literature, at once sublime poet and master dramatist (Jonson, the only other possible contender for the same double accolade, is both a great poet and a great dramatist, but not simultaneously).]

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