Bardisms (30 page)

SHAKESPEARE ON WITTY PEOPLE AND BORES

When shall we laugh? Say, when?

—B
ASSANIO
,
The Merchant of Venice
, 1.1.66

More of your conversation would infect my brain,

—M
ENENIUS
,
Coriolanus
, 2.1.83–84

“I am not only witty in myself,” Sir John Falstaff announces in
Henry IV, Part II
, “but the cause that wit is in other men.” This outsized self-regard is typical of the Fat Knight, and given how hilarious he is, it’s well earned, too. But it’s also, in my experience at least, not at all typical of the truly wittiest people I know. My friends with the best funny bones tend also to be expert and thoroughly disarming self-deprecators, and not Falstaffan show-offs. In fact, Sir John excepted, most of the people I’ve met who are given to incessant pronouncements of their own hilarity prove in the end to be notable only in terms of how tiresome they are. On those occasions when a person of one or the other extreme enters your life—seated next to you at a dinner party or in an airplane, giving the keynote at a board meeting or business conference, maybe even on a date—these two Bardisms will prove themselves worth knowing.

THAT’S ONE FUNNY DUDE

The word
wit
is in contemporary English almost always linked with humor, and a
witty
person is one whose silver tongue can fire off jokes and light banter with dazzling speed and prolific abandon. In Renaissance English, however,
wit
described not merely comedic gifts but also—indeed primarily—intellectual prowess overall. One’s wit was one’s brainpower, one’s powers of observation, one’s insight, and one’s capacity for taking the quickest possible measure of a person or situation. For Shakespeare, wit has yet one more important connotation: it refers not just to the acuity of a person’s perceptiveness but also to his capacity for expressing his thoughts about what he perceives in trenchant, keen, and memorable terms. Shakespeare talks about wit in many places in the canon, and he certainly deploys it in large doses. But in one speech in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, he provides a pretty good working definition for the concept.

A merrier man,

Within the limit of becoming mirth,

I never spent an hour’s talk withal.

His eye begets occasion for his wit,

For every object that the one doth catch 5

The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,

Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor,

Delivers in such apt and gracious words

That agèd ears play truant at his tales,

And younger hearings are quite ravishèd, 10

So sweet and voluble is his discourse.

—R
OSALINE
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, 2.1.66–76

In other words:

I’ve never spoken with a cheerier guy (as cheery as good manners allow, anyway). His eyes light on things that activate his sense of humor. And everything his eyes see, his humor converts to some hilarious notion, which his facility with language—the public address system for his humor—pronounces. The things he says are so truthful and captivating that mature people neglect their responsibilities just to listen to him. Young people are absolutely swept off their feet by the liveliness and perfection of his rap.

How to use it:

Quote this Bardism in tribute to, or by way of introduction to, any wag, wordsmith, or comedian you know.

Some gentle rewrites—of the male pronouns to female, or of the third person to the second—will expand the number of occasions on which this piece of Shakespeare applies. An e-mail thanking someone for a great night out? Mention that it was fun because “So sweet and voluble is your discourse.” Setting someone up with your hoot of a best girlfriend? “A merrier gal, / Within the limit of becoming mirth, / I never spent an hour’s talk withal.”

Rely on the passage’s antitheses to help you through it:
eye
versus
wit
;
the one
versus
the other
;
object
versus
jest
;
catch
versus
turns
;
agèd ears
versus
younger hearings
;
play truant
versus
are ravishèd
.

Some details:

Love’s Labour’s Lost
, a play that contributes a handful of Bardisms to this book, is one of Shakespeare’s least-produced comedies, which is a shame because it’s an absolute delight. Its scarcity on the American stage is understandable, however: almost all of it is written in the vein of Rosaline’s speech here. Everyone in the play speaks this kind of rhetorically elevated and formally exquisite language, and the play’s many poetic meters, elaborate rhymes, and highly wrought structures ricochet about like the “paper bullets of the brain” Benedick discusses in
Much Ado About Nothing
. As if all this weren’t complex enough, the characters add to the mix ceaseless wordplay, an endless series of literary allusions, and a vocabulary that’s as baroque as can be, including the longest single word in Shakespeare:
honorificabilitudinitatibus
.
*
This wild stuff comes together to make a kind of word music that’s unique in Shakespeare—and devilishly hard for contemporary actors to pull off.

It was also, surely, heavy lifting for Shakespeare’s own actors. They had an advantage over their twenty-first-century counterparts, though, because they’d had some experience with this kind of language. John Lyly, an author and playwright almost completely forgotten today, skyrocketed to fame in the 1580s and early 1590s thanks to a series of plays that sound conspicuously like
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. His popular book
Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit
lent Lyly’s overly decorative and archly self-conscious style its name: euphuism. Around the time Shakespeare first arrived in London, a whole school of Lyly imitators—the so-called euphuists—had taken London’s literary scene by storm, and it’s no exaggeration to say that had they not so powerfully expanded what was possible for authors to do with the English language, Shakespeare as we know him would not have existed. Most critics read
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, therefore, as the Bard’s deliberate and warmhearted homage to Lyly, and an acknowledgment of the debt the young playwright owed his trailblazing forebear.

THAT’S ONE BORING DUDE

Rosaline’s eloquent description of a witty man hasn’t much of a counterpart on the boredom end of the spectrum. One good reason why not: you don’t need the playwrighting acumen of the Bard of Avon to know that boring characters don’t really belong on a stage. The heroes of the classical dramatic canon are princes, kings, soldiers, and lovers, not CPAs and dentists. Yet Shakespeare knows that boredom and bores have their dramatic uses. Boredom is a way of building anticipation in advance of a great event (cf. the French generals bored off their rockers in the great scene that takes place on the night before the climactic battle in
Henry V
); bores are wonderful foils for short-tempered men of action who’d sooner die than spend a moment in the company of some droning fool. One such action hero is Hotspur, the aptly named hothead whose rebellion is chronicled in
Henry IV, Part I.
Here he complains about the obnoxious verbosity of Owen Glendower, the Welsh warlord, magician, and windbag whom the exigencies of politics have forced him to befriend.

O, he is as tedious

As a tired horse, a railing wife,

Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live

With cheese and garlic, in a windmill, far,

Than feed on cates and have him talk to me 5

In any summer house in Christendom.

—H
OTSPUR
,
Henry IV, Part I
, 3.1.155–60

In other words:

Oh, he’s as boring as a knackered nag, a nagging wife. He’s harder to take than a room full of smoke. I’d rather subsist on the Stinky Food Diet and live in a noisy factory in the middle of nowhere than eat delicacies and live in any Hamptons house in the universe if I’m forced to listen to
him
.

How to say it:

Use this Bardism to explain to the friends who set you up on a blind date precisely why you won’t go out with the guy a second time. Use it to tell your spouse why you don’t want to go to dinner with her best friend and her mind-numbing husband. Or change the gender of the pronouns and use it to tell your shrink why Marian the librarian just isn’t the girl of your dreams. (Should you rewrite the speech so that
she
is as tedious as a tired horse, then you might also want to compare her unfavorably to a
snoring husband
rather than a
railing wife
.)