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Hello, William Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time, according to Ben Johnson, that was in the 17th century and declined as often been repeated since.

But is it really true today?

Is what we see in the theatre, and increasingly at the cinema, the work of a player who's work lives on, or are we merely watching historical reconstructions, even museum pieces, with any contemporary meaning obscured by the reverence we pay to the author?

And if Shakespeare's for all time, what is it about him that makes him so eternally special?

With me to discuss Shakespeare in our time is Professor Frank Komode, recently described by John Sutherland as Britain's most distinguished living critic.

He just brought out a masterly book, Shakespeare's language, which I thought was riveting.

Also with us is the theatre director Michael Bogdana, who's to give a lecture called Shakespeare is dead at the Royal Festival Hall next week, and German Greer, Professor of English and Comparative Studies at Warwick University.

Frank Komode, one of the things you say in your book, which I enjoyed enormously, was around 1600.

Shakespeare as a poet changed because of the theatre. Shakespeare's language as a poet changed because of theatre.

Could we start by you in developing that a little?

Yes, I think the idea, not entirely new, is that in the earlier plays, there is a kind of rhetorical quality which really belongs to the printed page rather than to the stage, and that as time went by, particularly as he saw possibilities of showing people in the act of thought, painful, anxious thought.

You got a new kind of language, far more resonant, far less explicit, and sometimes very much more difficult, so that the audience itself had had to be prepared for this development, this change in the quality of what people said.

No longer were they just laying out an idea or scheme and embellishing it, but they're actually like people who have got something terribly serious to think about and are thinking about it there and then on the stage.

You start off with Titus in your book, you start off with the Titus, the man speaking to her for three minutes while she's got no hands and her tongue's been cut out and she's been raped and him sort of describing what we see in front of us for three minutes.

But also these repetitions, is it called anaphora that you discovered?

Yes, well there are all sorts of rhetorical tricks, and the passage is where the girl's uncle actually comes upon her with a hands cut off, a tongue pulled out, and has about 45 lines comparing her to a locked tree, a fountain and all the rest of it, so that clearly nobody thought

perhaps she should go and try and help her, just having for her, because everybody was perfectly happy with this, called a pretty set of verses saying, but of course she can't speak so she can't tell, obviously she can't tell me what's wrong with her because she can't say anything.

The sheer implausibility of it is not relevant in the context of drama at that time because it's much more like a poem than like a play.

So actually by responding to needs of drama at that time she's so, so it, that response is one of the things that intensified and made more dense Shakespeare's poetry.

That's right, I think so, yes, so that the reason for picking 1600 as the turning point is not to say that the plays before 1600 are all inferior because that's not so, but because this new kind of intensity really came in with Hamlet

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