"Sure, by modern standards it is a bit verbose," said Kendall of a passage he quotes from Hamlet. Shax indeed sometimes may appear so. But just as often, it is the intense concentration of his concepts which make his work, tho sometimes a little obscure, so uniquely satisfying.

Take, e.g., the passage from Henry V: "Now all the youth of England are on fire, And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies". Try to paraphrase the last 6 words, and analyse their precise meaning. The best I can come up with is something on the lines of "The sort of luxurious clothes appropriate to flirtation and idle high living have been abandoned in the wardrobe, and this is symbolic of the abandonment during the national emergency of the kind of lifestyle to which they were appropriate". Can anyone find a briefer paraphrase which will comprehend the whole, concentrated, significance of the line?

It is this sort of concentrated metonymic ellipsis that makes Will's images so often so expressive and laden with meaning.

~Michael~