How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (30 page)

for a good man’s love
,

Notice the addition of the word
fasting
. It implies that Phebe should be so grateful for a good man’s love—the love offered her by the shepherd Silvius—that she should be thanking heaven as fervently as a monk who fasts for religious reasons. Shakespeare implies all of that with a single word, and it is just the sort of choice that makes him such a remarkable poet. He implies a world of meaning with this single word—and at the same time the word defines Rosalind’s character: It tells us that she has a wry, incisive, yet good-natured sense of humor.

For I must tell you friendly in your ear
,

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets
.

Friendly in your ear
is beautiful as well, isn’t it? Now put those last four lines together:

But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees

And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love
,

For I must tell you friendly in your ear
,

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets
.

Rosalind’s Wit

Like Falstaff, Rosalind is tremendously witty. She and Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
really begin the entire line of glamorous, witty females whom we admire so much over the next four centuries of plays and movies. (Viola in
Twelfth Night
is equally entrancing, but not in the same sassy way. She is more heartfelt and vulnerable. Helena in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is a precursor to Rosalind and Beatrice, though this is rarely recognized.) As we did with Falstaff, we want to get your children used to hearing what Rosalind sounds like. Here is another one of her characteristic speeches, fully as witty as the one we just memorized. It occurs toward the end of the play, after Orlando expresses surprise that his formerly evil brother Oliver has fallen in love with Celia. Rosalind (still dressed as the boy Ganymede) explains to Orlando:

[Y]our brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy;…They are in the very wrath of love, and they will together. Clubs cannot part them
.

Is it any wonder that Orlando falls so desperately in love with Rosalind? Anyone who speaks with that much wit is worth a world of sacrifices. See if your children can learn the last two lines on the spot. It’s worth every second of the two minutes it will take them:

They are in the very wrath of love, and they will together. Clubs cannot part them
.

The Boy Actors

As your children may know already—and this is one of those popular facts that happens to be true—there were no women actors in the English theater of Shakespeare’s day. Women were not allowed to act onstage in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and this situation did not change until 1660, well after Shakespeare’s lifetime. Thus, when Shakespeare created Rosalind and Celia—and Juliet and Viola and Ophelia and Desdemona—they were all portrayed by boy actors, probably in the age range of twelve to seventeen. We don’t know their ages for certain, but they had to be young enough that their voices hadn’t changed yet.

The boy actors in companies like the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were apprentices to older actors, and there were usually two to four of them in a company of about twenty-six men at any one time. Usually Shakespeare’s plays contain no more than eight important speaking parts, reflecting the number of sharers (owners) in the company. The rest of the men and boys were hired by the company, swelling the company’s ranks to about twenty-six. Most plays were performed by fifteen or so actors per play, many of them doubling roles.

While we know the names of a few of the boy actors, we don’t know for certain which roles each one played and whether one or another was
the
great boy actor who originated any of the most famous female leads. (Evidence suggests that one of the greatest boy actors was a young man named John Rice, who probably originated the roles of Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra.) It seems clear, however, that the very existence of the boy actors prompted Shakespeare to create so many girl-dressed-as-boy plots. Viola, Rosalind, Portia, and Imogen would have been very convincing as boys because they
were
boys.

In
As You Like It
, this cross-dressing gets an extra twist: The boy actor portrays the girl Rosalind—who in turn dresses up as the boy Ganymede—who in turn pretends to be the girl Rosalind so that Orlando can practice wooing her. A Polish literary critic, Jan Kott, wrote a groundbreaking book entitled
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
in 1965, in which he comments on the sexual ambiguity that Shakespeare created in his cross-dressing comedies, especially in
As You Like It
, where the boy actor

disguised as a girl plays a girl disguised as a boy. Everything is real and unreal, false and genuine at the same time. And we cannot tell on which side of the looking glass we have found ourselves. As if everything were mere reflection.… The love scenes in the Forest of Arden have the logic of dreams.… Disguise is a dangerous game [and the] most dangerous disguise of all is the one where sex is changed.

One speculates that Shakespeare’s older female roles, like the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
, were played by mature actors, since the deeper voice and the physical look would have been more in keeping. But it is probable that even the middle-years roles, like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, were played by boy actors. If so, these young men must have been very well trained and immensely skilled.

Exercise

If your son is game, it will be fun for him to work up one of Rosalind’s passages and act it out as though he were one of Shakespeare’s boy actors preparing a convincing stage performance as a young woman. This is done in acting schools all the time, and if you have a son who is genuinely interested in acting, it would be a wonderful way for him to begin honing
his profession. Viola’s Willow Cabin Speech from
Twelfth Night
would be a good place to start.

Reviewing

One of the things you’ll want your children to do, in addition to simply memorizing the passages one after the other, is finding a way to retain the passages, keeping them freshly at their fingertips for years to come. In our family, we found success in this area by doing three things.

First, we found that retention was directly related to how well we memorized each passage in the first place. The passages where our kids finished up still hesitating somewhere along the way never really stuck. But the passages that they could rattle off by rote, at high speeds without hesitations, stayed with them for years and years. “Speed runs” (which we use in the theater all the time, rattling off entire plays before opening night) are highly recommended. Do them often, and make them fun.

Second, simple reviews every now and then are a great help. After you’ve finished memorizing Passage 17 above, go back to Passage 9 or 10 and recite it aloud together. Start doing this at the end of every session. Especially now that you’re over halfway through this book, start reviewing passages randomly and regularly. Most aspects of learning are a product of repetition, none more so than memorization.

Finally, in our house we’ve tried to find funny ways to trigger passages when the kids were least expecting it. You’ve seen some examples throughout the book. “How fast can you run upstairs and clean up your vile and horrific-looking room before I murder you?”
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow
. Or if we’re watching the news on TV and we see something about a love story: “Do you remember what Caesario would do if he loved Olivia in his master’s flame?”
Make me a willow cabin at her gate
. “What does the Royal Wedding remind you of (in addition to owning Buckingham Palace)?” Theseus and Hippolyta. “And what did Theseus say to Hippolyta, which also happened to open the whole play?”
Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace
. Great praise always followed a right answer, as well it should have. By learning Shakespeare, your kids are going the extra mile, and they deserve to be admired for it.

Passage 18
This Wide and Universal Theatre

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy
.

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play in
.

(
As You Like It
, Act II, Scene 7, lines 142–45)

W
e are about to make a quantum leap into the heart of Shakespeare. The passage printed at the beginning of the next chapter has become a classic over the past four hundred years, and as we dig into it, we’ll learn that it deserves its status as much as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling; they are all classics because of the quality of their artistry. The passage printed above is the introduction to the longer passage, and it is equally worth memorizing.

To understand the power of the great Ages of Man Speech, your children must understand its setting. Certainly the lines are remarkable as a stand-alone reverie on the passage of time, but their significance is enhanced by their context in the play’s narrative.

As your children know from the last chapter, Orlando has fled to the Forest of Arden to escape the murderous intentions of his brother. With him has come a servant, old Adam, who has served the family since Orlando was a boy. The two men are suffering for want of food, and Adam
is on the brink of starvation. (Reminder: Recite all these lines aloud with your children, even when the lines are not part of the passage that they’re memorizing.)
ADAM

Dear master, I can go no further. O, I die for food. Here lie I down and measure out my grave. Farewell, kind master
.

Orlando replies with words that reveal the goodness of his heart. He has an innate humanity that reminds me of Theseus in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
ORLANDO

For my sake be comfortable. Hold death awhile at the arm’s end. I will here be with thee presently
[soon],
and if I bring thee not something to eat, I will give thee leave
[allow you]
to die. But if thou diest before I come, thou art a mocker of my labor
.

Orlando runs off to find food for Adam, and as the scene changes to the encampment of Duke Senior (Rosalind’s father), we find the Duke speaking to his followers. As we have learned earlier in the play, Duke Senior has

many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world
.

Duke Senior and his followers are waiting for one of their number to arrive, a man named Jaques (with the English pronunciation “JAY-kwees”). He is one of the pantheon of great Shakespeare characters whom your children must get to know. Jaques’s primary characteristic is a kind of world-weary melancholy that affects every word he utters. As he says of himself:

I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs
.

When Jaques enters, he is bursting with excitement (which for Jaques is unusual) because he has met Touchstone in the forest and finds the jester amusing in the extreme. Jaques cries:

A fool, a fool, I met a fool i’ th’ forest
,

A motley fool. A miserable world!

[
Motley
is the diamond-pattern cloth worn by jesters.]

He is amused that this fool is
so deep-contemplative
. He discovered this when he saw Touchstone pulling a sundial from his pocket:

And looking on it with lack-luster eye
,

Says very wisely…

“ ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine
,

And after one hour more ’twill be eleven
.

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe
,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot
,

And thereby hangs a tale.”

As You Like It
is full of brilliant talkers, and Jaques and Touchstone are two of them.

At this point in the story, as the Duke and his friends are about to eat their rustic supper, Orlando rushes in, brandishing his sword: