Bardisms (15 page)

LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

Shakespeare’s only mention of Valentine’s Day is in a bawdy song sung by the mad Ophelia in
Hamlet
, and it’s not for a family-oriented book. Fortunately, another Shakespearean Valentine’s Day tie-in has filled the breach. Back in the bad old days of the late 1990s, that time of stained blue dresses and disquisitions on what the meaning of the word
is
is, independent counsel Kenneth Starr submitted to Congress his report on his investigations into President Clinton’s alleged wrong-doings with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The nation learned to its surprise that Shakespeare was near the heart of the story. To mark Valentine’s Day 1998, Monica placed a personal ad in the
Washington Post
. It read as follows:

 

Handsome,

With love’s light wings did I o’er perch these walls:

For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt.

Romeo and Juliet
2:2.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

M.

 

Monica had been transferred from her White House job to a post at the Pentagon, far from the Oval Office. She complained bitterly that her access to the president was being unfairly restricted, and she vowed that she’d find some way to see him, no matter what it took. The lines she placed in her
Post
ad are Romeo’s passionate protestation that whatever barriers the Capulet family might place in his way, he’d manage somehow to see his beloved Juliet. Perhaps today Monica recognizes in hindsight that this may not have been the best Bardism to choose—after all,
Romeo and Juliet
doesn’t exactly end well. But then again, neither did
The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Clinton and Lewinsky
.

HALLOWEEN

Shakespeare for the Occasion of Trick-or-Treaters at the Door:

We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites.

—D
ROMIO OF
S
YRACUSE
,
The Comedy of Errors
, 2.2.190

THANKSGIVING

We’ll see some Shakespearean expressions of gratitude in Chapter Five. Here, a Bardistic prayer of thanksgiving, suitable for offering after you’ve made it over the river and through the woods, but before you tuck into that nicely carved bird.

O Lord, that lends me life,

Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!

For thou hast given me…

A world of earthly blessings to my soul.

—K
ING
H
ENRY
,
Henry VI, Part II
, 1.1.19–22

Oh, and if, when that bird is carved, it looks like fiberboard, all desiccated and inedible, here’s a Bardism that will allow you to scoot out gracefully and make your way to the neighborhood pizza joint:

I cannot stay thanksgiving.

—B
EROWNE
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, 2.1.192

CHRISTMAS

The magic of Christmas is explained in beguiling terms near the beginning of
Hamlet
. This lyrical vision of peace and universal serenity would soften the stony heart of Ebeneezer Scrooge himself.

Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes

Wherein our savior’s birth is celebrated

The bird of dawning singeth all night long;

And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad,

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, 5

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

—M
ARCELLUS
,
Hamlet
, 1.1.139–45

In other words:

Some people say that every Christmastime, the morning cock crows all night long. What’s more, they say that at that time, no ghosts walk around. Nighttime is holy and safe. Negative cosmic forces hold no sway. Fairies don’t bewitch, and witches lose their power to cast spells. That’s how much that time of year is sanctified and blessed by God’s grace.

How to use it:

I once recommended this passage to an artist friend who was seeking something unique for a Christmas card. She painted a gorgeous watercolor of a “hallowed and gracious” winter night that rendered Shakespeare’s imagery in visual terms as enchanting as his verbal ones. There was a little rooster in the corner, crowing to the moon, across whose face Santa and his reindeer flew, like E.T. in his bicycle basket. By all means take a leaf from her book and, whether or not you create your own artistic analogue of them, share with your friends and loved ones this splendid vision of why the end of December is always so sweet and blissful a time.

Some details:

Scholars report that no source has ever been found for the soldier Marcellus’ assertion that cocks crow all night at Christmas, and that there’s not much evidence of Elizabethan lore supporting his view that Christmas Eve was a night off for witches, fairies, and evil spirits. No matter. The only evidence Marcellus requires is what he’s seen with his own eyes. Just moments prior to this speech, the ghost of old King Hamlet “faded on the crowing of the cock,” that is, disappeared when a cock crowed. That’s enough to convince Marcellus that benevolent Yuletide energies must be at work. Even Horatio, the German-educated rationalist of the play, dials down his skepticism of the supernatural, conceding to Marcellus at the end of this speech, “So have I heard, and do in part believe it.”

It’s hard to make much headway with Shakespeare without embracing Horatio’s concession. The supernatural is everywhere in the plays. Ghosts, fairies, otherworldly visions, mysterious sounds that emanate unexplained from belowground—the plays overflow with them. For all his precocious grasp of the pragmatic forces that drive human events, Shakespeare still lived in a pre-Enlightenment world in which superstition, folklore, and faith provided more answers than science, ideology, and reason. In my experience, this aspect of his works is the hardest for contemporary artists and audiences to grasp, because it requires a near-complete surrender of the modern world’s armature of logic, rationality, and analysis. But in Shakespeare, the boundary between the real world and the spirit world is porous, and the impossible dwells cheek by jowl with the quotidian. If, like Horatio, an actor, director, or audience member can believe it—in part, even—then Shakespeare is a portal to a richer universe in which faith and reason coexist, and in which possibility is limited only by one’s powers of language to describe it. Absent an imaginative leap that allows for meaning in the ineffable and substance in the incorporeal, Shakespeare is just melodrama with fancier words.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Hamlet to his still-doubting friend. That’s Shakespeare speaking, directly to us.

BIRTHDAYS

One of the very first times I raided my
Complete Works of Shakespeare
for the purposes of public speaking was in preparation to give a toast on the occasion of a theater colleague’s fiftieth birthday, many years ago. (He wouldn’t want his age revealed, so let’s preserve his anonymity and call him “Bob.”) I related my search process to the crowd assembled at Bob’s surprise party, and I here reprint an excerpt of my remarks as an example of how to deploy Bardisms for a birthday:

When Bob’s wife asked me to make a toast today, I figured that since Bob and I both work in the classical theater, some appropriate Shakespearean tribute would just pop right into my head.

No such luck. Although Shakespeare is full of eloquent encomia to great men, almost all of them are made after the great man has died. Now, fifty may be getting up there, but we’re not exactly about to call the undertaker. So I started digging around.

The word
birth
appears about one hundred times in Shakespeare (102 to be exact).
Day
, about oxtNoIndent> ne thousand.
Birthday
, though, shows up only twice (thrice if you count
Pericles
, but since Shakespeare didn’t write all of that play, I’m going to overlook it). Here they are:

Cleopatra says in Act 3 of her play, “It is my birthday.”

Cassius in Act 5 of
Julius Caesar
says: “This is my birthday, as this very day / Was Cassius born.”

Not much to write home about there. So I changed direction.
Surprise
shows up about thirty times. There’s “We may surprise and take him at our pleasure” (that’s Warwick in
Henry VI, Part III
) and “You’ll be surprised. Muster your wits” (that’s Boyet in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
). Had we gone to Italy to celebrate Bob’s fiftieth, I could have used this: “I with a troop of Florentines will suddenly surprise him” (that’s the second Lord Dumaine in
All’s Well That Ends Well
; don’t even ask what the first Lord Dumaine has to say).

Striking out with
birthday
and
surprise
, I turned to
fifty
. Lots to choose from. Falstaff says this in
Henry IV, Part I
: “As I think, his age some fifty, or by’r lady, inclining to three score.” But I know Bob’s having enough trouble with two and a half score, so I don’t want to push him to three prematurely. Charmian in
Antony and Cleopatra
says, “Let me have a child at fifty,” but with Bob’s kids finally off to college, I’m not sure this one’s so apt.

Finally, I decided to shift gears, leave the plays behind, and turn to those poetical repositories of wit and wisdom, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Here’s the opening of number 104, and with it, I raise my glass to Bob, with love and warmest birthday wishes.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,

For as you were when first your eye I eyed,

Such seems your beauty still.

—S
ONNET
104, 1–3

Bob loved it. Everyone wants to know that their good looks remain intact as the years march forward, and despite the absence of any specific mention of birthdays—or, for that matter, surprises, or the birthday boy or girl’s age—these three lines fit the bill. Use them with my blessing, and with Bob’s, too.

The third of Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man describes that momentous time when love first blooms, signaling the end of childhood and the imminent start of adult life. Jaques renders the previous two ages, infant and schoolboy, in images of near-photographic realism, and describes the subsequent four, virility through senility, in terms as pitying as they are precise. Only in Age Three, the Lover, does he allow himself—does Shakespeare allow him—a slightly different, somewhat more cavalier tone. Perhaps this is because apparently Jaques was once quite the Casanova: “Thou thyself hast been a libertine,” Duke Senior tells him a few moments before Jaques launches into his famous seven-part speech. This revelation always comes as a surprise in the theater. We can well imagine the acerbic, contrarian, and dark-as-Turkish-coffee soul we see before us as a squalling infant, and his diffident and difficult personality suggests that his school days weren’t exactly a lark. But a lover? It’s an intriguing prospect, and it makes us wonder just who were the women (or men, or both) who once came under his spell, and from whom, if the duke is to be believed, Jaques contracted enough venereal diseases to leave him with plentiful “émbossed sores and headed evils.” In the third age of his own life, in other words, Jaques was no swooning swain, but was instead a syphilitic cicisbeo.

Given this squalid past, Jaques’ flip fillip here is quite delicious. He depicts the typical lover not as a lothario like himself, but instead as an over-the-top hothouse flower issuing amatory sighs of Bessemer intensity. Pining away, the lover waxes poetical not about his beloved’s winning personality, her heartwarming smile, or that magical week they once spent snorkeling in Cabo, but instead about those majestic twin arches of short hair that so beguilingly line the ridges on his inamorata’s brow. It’s quite mad.

With this outlandish construction, Jaques squeezes into sixteen short words an entire literary tradition of overcooked love poetry. He knows—Shakespeare knows—that something about love encourages poets to turn up the heat. After all, does anyone but a love poet
really
wish, for instance, to die with Wendy on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss, or actually believe that, say, a full moon shining bright strikes the retina in the shape of a big pizza pie? There’s a craziness to such images, an excessiveness that neatly manages to capture and express the wild hormonal rush that is first love. The magnificent insanity of a love poem written about an eyebrow lends to the Third Age of Man a certain loony aspect and makes this affectionate, if nonetheless scornful, image the most captivating one in a speech chockablock with stunners.

Consider how Shakespeare—how Jaques—puts the image together. First, note the extraordinarily melodic word music of its second line, and in particular its orotund vowels. The complaining long
i
in
sighing
; the extended, all-consuming
ur
in
furnace
, the woebegone long
o
in
woeful
, and the muffed shriek of
ballad
’s short
a—aahhhhyyyeee
,
ohhhhhhh
,
urrrrrrrrr
,
aaaaaaaaaaa
—together these keening notes make a tone poem of lovelorn agony with more minor-key modulations than a Schoenberg chorale. Next, note where the line ends: After
ballad
but before
made
, or, put another way, smack in the middle of the single idea
ballad made
. This, you will recall from “Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare,” is called a run-on line ending, and it creates that important springboard to thought that gives to Shakespearean verse its special feeling of spontaneity and naturalism. The lover writes a ballad…
to what?
To his lover’s beauty? To his own besotted bliss? To the exquisite mystery of love itself? No. Something much more unexpected. He writes a ballad…
to what?…wait for it…okay, get this!…ready?…
to his mistress’ eyebrow! The line ending after
ballad
gives Jaques an opportunity to find this bizarre and deflating image, to coin it in the moment, to click on the Google in his brain and send it searching for the perfect, most arresting, most memorable image of the silly lengths to which love pushes us.

Many of Shakespeare’s observations on love share with Jaques the view that this emotion is one of extremes, and that it drives lovers to sighing, ballad singing, and other, even more outré behaviors. “We that are true lovers run into strange capers,” says Touchstone, in the same play as Jaques. The detail in which Shakespeare particularizes these capers in all their lunatic strangeness is what makes his Bardisms on love some of his most poetically efficacious writing. Of course, the excerpts below, which look at love in so many of its manifestations and configurations, which unfold so broad a range of its joys and stings, represent only a tiny fraction of everything Shakespeare wrote on the subject. Still, they present a rather astonishing demonstration of the powers of a poet who, like Jaques, can conjure the affect he describes even while he’s busy describing it. Shakespeare on love, alongside perhaps only Shakespeare on death, is Shakespeare distilled to his very essence. It is Shakespeare expressing emotion at its purest, rendering life at its most recognizable, and composing language at its most fluent, telling, and revelatory.

SHAKESPEARE ON LOVE

Love is a spirit all compact of fire.

—
Venus and Adonis
, 149

“It’s made entirely out of fire,” Venus says of love in Shakespeare’s narrative poem
Venus and Adonis
, and she should know: she’s the goddess of love, after all. It’s an interesting choice of imagery. Love isn’t made of sugar or fields of lavender or the colors of the rainbow, but of something hot and dangerous. Fire is a substance with definite mass and presence, yet it’s neither solid nor liquid. It’s something in between, something harder to define, ephemeral, impossible to contain. It also happens to be lighter than air. Venus says this line while describing herself as so love-struck by the gorgeous Adonis that she will, “Like a nymph, with long, disheveled hair, / Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.” That is, she’ll be magical, a dancer whose feet never touch the ground. There’s an extravagance to this image, a sense of almost drunken abandon. That’s why Venus says love is a
spirit
made of fire: she means it’s a spirit in the same way that whiskey or gin is one—it’s a liquor that intoxicates.

The notion that love is a mind-altering substance underpins
Venus and Adonis
. One of Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems, it was his first work to reach print. The twelve-hundred-line poem is based on a story in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
in which Venus decides to sleep with a mortal and chooses the preternaturally handsome Adonis as the best candidate. The majority of the poem relates the increasingly erotic things Venus says as she tries to bed the young man. Though never explicit, some of her more suggestive passages are hot enough to make even Larry Flynt blush. (No doubt this accounted for the poem’s runaway success in the buttoned-down 1590s.) The poem introduces some ideas Shakespeare will return to repeatedly in his ensuing two decades of writing. The misery of unrequited love is one. The imprecision of gender stereotypes is another (in this poem it’s the woman who’s the aggressor and the man who is the coy and demure object of desire). The intense sexual attractiveness of beautiful young men is a third, and a fourth, related to the third, is the fluidity of human sexuality and its resistance to categorization and restraint.

But the most important contribution of
Venus and Adonis
to the rest of Shakespeare’s output is the poem’s conception of love itself. Like the burning spirit it’s compact of, Shakespeare’s love is impossible to pin down, ever-changing, and can veer in an instant from being a source of comfort to one of destruction. The love of Venus for Adonis is simultaneously comic and tragic, exalted and silly, pathetic and transcendent. It’s fiery love, Shakespeare-style.

LOVE IS THE GREATEST THING EVER

Venus may be the goddess of love, but not even the considerable expressive gifts she displays in her attempted seduction of Adonis can encapsulate in language everything that makes love so powerful a force in human affairs. For this, we must turn to another character from an early Shakespeare work: Berowne, the anti-romantic romantic hero of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.

In the play’s first scene, he, the young King Ferdinand of Navarre, and their friends Longaville and Dumaine sign a contract binding themselves to three years of cloistered, full-time study. The four swear to fast one day each week, to sleep only three hours per night, and to have no contact with girls. That last codicil turns out to be the deal breaker. No sooner has the ink on the ascetic contract dried than someone remembers that the beautiful princess of France and three of her ladies are about to arrive in town. So much for the library. The rest of the play is about the ways the young men wriggle out of their commitment to books and into the arms of the gals. By Act 4, everyone realizes they’ve broken their oaths, and Berowne offers an analysis of what it’s all meant. He discourses on how wrong the friends were to forswear women in the first place, and how love itself, not books, is the best education a young man can get. Book knowledge, he argues, resides only in a person’s head,

But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,

But with the motion of all elements

Courses as swift as thought in every power,

And gives to every power a double power 5

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye—

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.

A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

When the suspicious head of theft is stopped. 10

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.

For valor, is not Love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? 15

Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair;

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write 20

Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs;

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

—B
EROWNE
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, 4.3.301–23

In other words:

Love, discovered by gazing into the eyes of a woman, is not sealed up tight in the brain. Instead, it moves like storms and wind, as quickly as thought itself, into every human faculty. In fact, it enhances the faculties, giving each one powers well beyond its normal functions.

Love makes the eyes see things in special ways. A lover’s eyesight is so acute that an eagle, renowned for its excellent vision, would seem blind in comparison. A lover’s ears can hear sounds quieter than even thieves can hear, and thieves must be capable of hearing the slightest noise. A lover’s touch is more sensitive than the extremely sensitive horns of snails. Compared to love’s, the famously discerning palate of Bacchus, god of wine, is clumsy.

When it comes to bravery, isn’t love like Hercules, picking golden apples in the last of his twelve labors? Love’s as intellectually sophisticated as the Sphinx, with her insoluble riddle. It’s as lively as the lute of Apollo, god of music, which was strung with his own hair. And when love talks, the voices of the gods themselves join in, and together they sing a sweet lullaby to the heavens. No poet dares pick up a pen unless his ink is mixed with love’s sighs. If it is, then his poetry will soothe wild beasts and infuse tyrants with gentleness and patience.

How to say it:

This speech is great for any occasion on which love is the prime mover: an engagement party, a wedding, a landmark anniversary. It’s especially useful in the case of a love that has triumphed against long odds or formidable obstacles. Also, I know of at least one instance when someone sent these lines to a lover to tell her that her love had made him a better person. All you need is a little intro in which you say that you’re going to talk about the powerful force that brought everyone together today, or that changed your life: love.

Like any long speech, this one becomes a bit easier to handle once it’s broken up into smaller chunks. Work through the speech in four short, self-contained sections, divided as follows:

• Lines 1 through 6 set up the central conceit that love endows the human senses with special powers (and feel free to cut
  but
  in line 1 so you can start with a forceful and direct declaration).
  
• Lines 7 through 13 discuss some of these senses and present examples of how love improves them. Think of them as a list: (a) lover’s
  eye
  (precious seeing / gaze eagle blind); (b) lover’s
  ear
  (softest sound / thief can’t hear); (c) love’s
  feeling
  (more sensitive than a snail); (d) lover’s
  tongue
  (more refined than Bacchus’).
  
• Lines 14 through 19 talk about love’s effect on more abstract human qualities. Again, Berowne makes a list: (a) bravery (like Hercules and the Hesperides [pronounced
  hess-PERR-i-deez
  ]); (b) sophistication (like the Sphinx); (c) musical ability (like Apollo’s); (d) voice (gods join in / lull heavens to sleep).
  
• Lines 20 through 24 explain love’s importance to poetry and suggest its ability to becalm rage and turn evil to good.
  

Berowne uses some great verbs, and you should exploit their power. Here are some I think are most useful:
Lives
;
Courses
;
gives
;
adds
;
gaze
;
hear
;
proves
;
Make
;
touch
;
write
;
ravish
;
plant
.
*