For that very specific and historically brief situation within the theater, Shakespeare invented a language that is somehow closer to the vital, expressive life of English, still, than anything set down since. The harder one looks at it the odder this seems. The inner complexity and precision of, for instance, the King’s speech in All’s Well That Ends Well, which reproduces in itself the stresses and tensile structure of the whole play, like that of a great flying machine, as if it were a sort of fractal of the whole play, seems also, somehow, homemade, improvised. It has a ramshackle air, like a prodigiously virtuoso pidgin. This is simply characteristic of his mature style. The proverbial durability, that immovable, engraved monumentality of his phrasing is countersunk in syllables that are full of imps and goblins. His images have the sacred quality of icons, but are also juju dolls. His masterful formulations smoke with chaos.