Bardisms (10 page)

A few years have passed and the infant has grown up a bit. His mewling has modulated into less cacophonous but still hardly agreeable whining. His face is now puke-free, freshly scrubbed at the start of each day, and so clean that it shines. No longer in his nurse’s arms—and you can bet she’s relieved and catching her breath—he’s on his own for at least that part of the day it takes him to walk to his destination. It’s his daily project to see just how protracted he can make the journey, because what awaits him when he arrives is a bastion of heinousness as forbidding as any torture chamber ever devised in the annals of depravity and tyranny:
school
!

We can all remember taking that long, unwilling walk in the morning, and that’s why Jaques’ Second Age of Man always summons a smile of recognition. Yet every time I read these lines, even as memories cascade of my own slow, satchel-laden 8:00 a.m. stroll down Hopper Avenue toward Roosevelt Elementary, I’m fascinated that this is the image Shakespeare would choose as the defining emblem of childhood. What about all the fun of those years, the horsing around with friends and siblings, the play and laughter with parents, the thrill of discovery of countless new sights, sounds, sensations, and concepts? Shakespeare overlooks all that—call it the
Highlights
magazine stuff—and focuses instead on an image of complaint, misery, and reluctance. The Second Age of Man is the Age of Goofus, not Gallant.

And so a pattern begins to emerge. The baby pukes and screams, the boy whines and creeps. Next, the lover will write idiotic poetry and sigh himself into hyperventilation, then the soldier intemperately will risk life and limb for something as ephemeral as honor, and the Justice will bore everyone silly with his pontifications and pronunciamentos, and on, and on. Life for Jaques, it seems, hasn’t much to do with fun or discovery or even growth or progress. No, life for Jaques—for Shakespeare, for this moment in his writing, anyway—is a series of misadventures, pomposities, and follies. Each misstep is a station on a one-way trip to oblivion, toothlessness, blandness, and blindness.

But Shakespeare isn’t Schopenhauer. The Bard isn’t Beckett. Shakespeare—well, Jaques; well, both—finds a way to discuss despair with a rather beguiling humor. Jaques’ images are unmistakably sharp-edged, but they’re presented with a twinkle in the eye, coated in candy. That’s the familiar Shakespearean manner. Confront terrible truths, say the hard things, but dip them in sprinkles to make it all go down smoother. The legendary impresario Joseph Papp once described Shakespeare to me as very like an Irish coffee. It’s dark, bitter, strong, and spiked with a splash of spirit that gives it a kick, but before you get to any of that, you must first drink your way through a layer of sweet cream. The cream in Shakespeare’s Irish coffee is his magical way with words, his transformation via language of something that unsettles into something that entices, charms, and wins. I love Papp’s simile because it reminds me that even at his bleakest, Shakespeare remembers beauty, and even at his most scathing, he remembers to laugh.

The whining schoolboy is a perfect illustration of Shakespeare’s habit of mixing light and dark. The magnetic force that repels boys from school appears elsewhere in the canon, as when Romeo recalls, “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks,” or when Lord Hastings, having dismissed the soldiers he’d planned to deploy in battle against King Henry IV, observes the speed with which they flee the field in all directions and says that, “like a school broke up, / Each hurries toward his home.” While these are vivid images delivered by two gifted speakers, neither evinces the detailed texture and rhetorical dazzle of the just-washed schoolboy of Jaques’ fancy. Note, for example, how the chipper phrase
schoolboy with his satchel
introduces alliterative
s
sounds that continue into
face
,
snail
, and
school
. Listen to the slight condescension jingling beneath the
shining morning face
, and notice how much information it compresses into three words: They conjure an entire scene of a little boy squirming under washcloth, Ivory soap, and Brylcreem when he’d rather stay in his bedroom fortress playing with his toys and frogs and imaginary pals.

The image is as euphonious as it is artful: it turns the noun
morning
into an adjective modifying
face
, whose
-ing
resonates nicely alongside the participial adjective
shining
even as it carries that suffix forward from the earlier
puking
and
mewling
into the later
creeping
and
unwillingly
. Look at how the placement of
unwillingly
at the beginning of a new verse line gives special prominence to the adverb, by kicking off the line with the unexpectedly accented syllable
un
, and then by throttling back the boy’s walk to sub-snail speed: he’s not only creeping, he’s creeping
unwillingly
. And marvel at how effective
school
is when it appears at the very end of these lines, as opposed to its earlier placement in Romeo’s and Hastings’ iterations of the image. As the word thuds out, the stabbing
sk
sound that starts it scotches any lingering hope we might have had that the shine on the boy’s face was one of happiness. We understand that his arrival at homeroom, long in coming, will be but the beginning of a drudgingly long day of ruler-on-the-knuckles misery and repetitive times-table tedium.

But even though to Jaques, the only way to get an education is to endure the awfulness of Miss Baxter’s corporal punishment and droning lectures on verb conjugation, Shakespeare acknowledges elsewhere in the canon that there are other pedagogical methods. He knows that snail-slow walks to school are one kind of childhood fresh-air activity, but he’s happy to explore and dramatize many others. One speech in
As You Like It
may record the Second Age of Man as a time of misery, but plenty of passages in the remaining three dozen Shakespeare plays show childhood’s manifold brighter aspects.

Below, then, Bardisms on all the Occasions of the Schoolboy’s Life: fun and dull, for kids willing and not, to creep and also to race toward.

SHAKESPEARE ON CHILDREN

’Tis not good that children should know any wickedness.

—M
ISTRESS
Q
UICKLY
,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, 2.2.115

Children appear onstage in many Shakespeare plays. In the comedies, their dramatic function is usually to serve as earnest foils for some pompous windbag who needs to be taken down a notch. Falstaff’s page is the prime example. In the tragedies and histories, they are used as symbols of virtuous innocence whose ruination by some tyrannical megalomaniac is the turning point in that character’s fortunes. The many murders committed by Macbeth and Richard III, for instance, don’t seem truly inexcusable until children are their victims; the former’s massacre of the Macduff brood and the latter’s execution of the two little princes at the tower are the events that carry each man across the Rubicon from criminal into evil despot. In the late plays, children are seen as icons of redemption, salvation, and the possibility that the future might just find a way to avoid the mistakes of the past. Perdita in
The Winter’s Tale
and the baby Elizabeth born at the end of
Henry VIII
are examples of this dramatic function.

Whatever its dramaturgical purpose, Shakespeare composed material for and about children that displays all the insight, sensitivity, and eloquence we are accustomed to seeing from him on every subject under the sun.

THAT’S A WELL-BEHAVED KID

Falstaff’s relationship with his wiseacre boy companion is one of endless sniping—W. C. Fields’ “Get away from me kid, ya bother me!” routine is widely thought to be patterned after the fat knight, a role Fields longed to essay but, alas, never did. Yet despite his rancor, we know that deep down Sir John loves the kid. He’s not Shakespeare’s only old man to have in his heart a soft spot for a tyke. In the opening scene of
The Winter’s Tale
, a sage courtier speaks sweetly of Prince Mamillius, King Leontes’ little boy.

It is a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh. They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man.

—C
AMILLO
,
The Winter’s Tale
, 1.1.32–35

In other words:

He’s an outstanding boy. He’s like good medicine for all the citizens of the country. He makes old people feel young. Folks who were at death’s door before he was born hope to live a bit longer just so that they can see what he’ll be like when he grows up.

How to use it:

This is a perfect bit of Shakespeare for a speech from Uncle Joe on confirmation day or Grandpa Moe on Bar Mitzvah morning. It could also serve as general compliment from anyone for any fine young man of whom they’re proud.

Simply substituting the female gender in the second sentence—
she
and
woman
instead of
he
and
man
—will suit this comment to any wonderful young lady of your acquaintance.

Emphasizing two antitheses will help clarify this excerpt when it’s spoken aloud:
old
versus
fresh
; and
ere he was born
versus
see him a man
.

The verbs
is
,
physics
, and
makes
in the first sentence do much to communicate the rather complex sense of the thought.