How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (16 page)

Twelfth Night
at the Westport Country Playhouse, with David Adkins as Malvolio cross-gartered
(photo credit 16.2)

I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!

Comedy is balanced by tragedy, and life is balanced by death. To use one of Shakespeare’s favorite images, the wheel of fortune is always turning.

Passage 9
Carpe Diem

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter
.

Present mirth hath present laughter
.

What’s to come is still unsure
.

In delay there lies no plenty
,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure
.

(
Twelfth Night
, Act II, Scene 3, lines 48–53)

E
arlier we examined the opening speech of
Twelfth Night
(
If music be the food of love, play on…
) and discovered that most of the play’s major themes are referred to in those first eight lines: love, appetite, surfeiting, dying. One additional theme is suggested by the opening speech, and it is arguably the most interesting of all:

Enough; no more
.

’Tis not so sweet now as it was before
.

This theme might be described as “enjoy things while you’re young and able to enjoy them, because they won’t last forever.” “Carpe diem,” as the Latin poet Horace put it around 20 B.C. “Seize the day.” Shakespeare will emphasize this theme again and again in
Twelfth Night
, most clearly in a song sung by Feste, the wise fool.

In Act II, Scene 3, a moment before Malvolio bursts into the room in his nightshirt (
My masters, are you mad?
), Sir Toby and Sir Andrew ask Feste for a love song, and Feste sings

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter
.

Present mirth hath present laughter
.

What’s to come is still
[always]
unsure
.

In delay there lies no plenty
,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure
.

Could Shakespeare have made his theme more explicit?
What’s to come is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty,…Youth’s a stuff will not endure
. This wistful theme will pervade the play and lend the otherwise riotous proceedings an air of ruefulness and weight.

With its strong four-beat rhythm and easy rhymes, your children should try learning this passage a whole line at a time.

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter
.

Present mirth hath present laughter
.

What’s to come is still unsure
.

Still
in Shakespeare means “always.” So the line means “What’s to come is always unsure.”

What’s to come is still unsure
.

In delay there lies no plenty
,

Plenty
in this context means “reward.” So the line means “There’s no reward for delaying things.”

Twelfth Night
at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, with Janie Dee as Olivia and Clive Rowe as Feste
(photo credit 17.1)

In delay there lies no plenty
,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
.

Here
sweet and twenty
is a metaphor for a sweet young woman. It’s as if he’s saying: Then come kiss me, sweet young woman.

One of Shakespeare’s most beautiful verbal ingenuities is to turn adjectives into nouns.
Sweet
and
twenty
are adjectives describing a woman, but Shakespeare turns them into nouns identifying her. (The technical term for a metaphor where something closely associated with a subject is substituted for it is
metonymy
.)

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty
.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure
.

Meaning “Youth is something that won’t last.” This line contains two abbreviations that allow the line to scan—that is, to be read with the proper
number of rhythmical beats (in this case four). First, he shortens
is
to ’s. Second, he leaves out the word
that
. If he said,

Youth is a stuff that will not endure,

then the line, in addition to being ungainly, wouldn’t be in four beats like the rest of the lyric. Shakespeare turns it into a thing of beauty with a contraction and an omission.

∧ ∧ ∧ ∧

YOUTH’S a STUFF will NOT enDURE
.

Every writer in the world would give his right arm to write a line like that, indeed, to write any of the lines in this lyric. It’s the kind of simple, straightforward, philosophical, and calmly beautiful passage that your children will want to hold on to forever.

Passage 10
Sisters and Brothers

VIOLA / CESARIO

My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
,

I should your Lordship
.

ORSINO

And what’s her history?

VIOLA / CESARIO

A blank, my lord. She never told her love
,

But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud
,

Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought
,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument
,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?…

ORSINO

But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

VIOLA / CESARIO

I am all the daughters of my father’s house
,

And all the brothers, too—and yet I know not
.

(
Twelfth Night
, Act II, Scene 4, lines 118ff.)

T
he melancholy tone of the lyric your children memorized in the last chapter is reflected throughout much of
Twelfth Night
, nowhere more touchingly than in a short exchange between Cesario and Orsino in Act II, Scene 4. This is one of the earliest passages that I taught my children, and it has become a family favorite.

The setup is simple: Orsino and Cesario are discussing whether women can ever be as faithful and true as men when it comes to love. Cesario insists that they can and tells the following story to illustrate the point.

My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
,

I should your lordship
.

Remember, we in the audience know that Cesario is really Viola and that Viola has fallen in love with Orsino, so when she refers to her “father’s daughter,” we know that she means herself. Point out to your children the beautiful placement of the word
perhaps
, which gives the actor such a strong hint about how to play the scene:

My father had a daughter loved a man

As it might be
,

perhaps
,

were I a woman
,

I should your lordship
.

And what’s her history?

A blank, my lord. She never told her love
,

But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud
,

Feed on her damask
[rosy]
cheek
.

Her sister’s history is a blank because Viola is feeling that her own history is a blank. She has lost a brother, and she is in love with a man who doesn’t know it. And like her “sister,” she can’t tell her beloved what she feels.

A blank, my lord. She never told her love
,

But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud
,

Feed on her damask cheek
.

She pined in thought
,

And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat like Patience on a monument
,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Obviously this passage is filled with ambiguities. Why is her melancholy green and yellow? What exactly is Patience on a monument? I find these lines to be hauntingly beautiful, and I think it’s because they’re so ambiguous.

But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

I am all the daughters of my father’s house
,

And all the brothers, too—and yet I know not
.

Notice how Viola refers to
brothers
at the end of the passage. If she is
all the brothers
of her father’s house, then she must believe that her brother died in the shipwreck. But then she adds
and yet I know not
. With that twist of the sentence, she seems to be holding out some hope that perhaps her brother is still alive—and that hope, for me, makes the passage all the more moving. Her brother is still at the forefront of her mind, and as we’ll be discussing as we tackle our next passage together, their brother-sister relationship is the very backbone of the play.