Bardisms (2 page)

All the Bard in this book is taken from
The Norton Shakespeare
, Stephen Greenblatt, editor, which I regard as the best single-volume edition of the plays and poems now in print. Citations give the speaker’s name, the play’s name, and the relevant act, scene, and line numbers in the format
act.scene.line
. (For example, “Messenger,
Much Ado About Nothing
, 1.1.40” means the quoted text appears at Act 1, Scene 1, line 40 of
Much Ado
, and is spoken by the Messenger.)
The Norton Shakespeare
is based in large part on
The Oxford Shakespeare
, a cutting-edge and quite controversial 1986 edition of the
Complete Works
. Despite its overall excellence, the
Oxford
is marred by a sometimes unbridled revisionist spirit, and it makes some idiosyncratic choices—changes in characters’ names, changes in titles of plays, omissions of cherished passages—all buttressed by careful and sound scholarship, but all regarded as wildly iconoclastic in the very conservative world of Shakespeare studies. The
Norton
editors took note of the backlash against the
Oxford
’s aggressive idiosyncrasies and retreated from the most excessive examples. But
The Norton Shakespeare
still retains some readings that would disorient the non-specialist public, and so when I’ve quoted a Bardism that the
Norton
renders in some unfamiliar way, I’ve taken the liberty of silently reverting to a less alienating form.

One of the things about Bardisms that make them so much fun to quote is that they can sometimes seem to turn Shakespeare into an expert on things that weren’t even invented during his lifetime. That is, because a Bardism lifts Shakespeare’s lines out of their proper surroundings in the rest of Shakespeare’s plays or poetry, a Bardism can make Shakespeare say things he never said. An example: I determined when my daughter was born that she’d start hearing Shakespeare from the moment she got home from the hospital.
*
In her first weeks, a lot of my bonding time with her came at the changing table, so I started looking for a Bardism on the subject. I discovered that the word
diaper
appears exactly once in Shakespeare, in the rarely performed prologue to
The Taming of the Shrew
. There, the word is used in its Elizabethan sense, as a synonym for “napkin” (some servants discuss what they’ll provide for their lord when he sits down to dinner, and they note that he’ll need a basin in which to wash his hands, and a diaper with which to dry them). I knew I wouldn’t find
Pampers
in the canon, so I did some lateral thinking and searched for Bardisms on the general subject of
change
. At last I found this line, spoken by Iago in Act 1, Scene 3 of
Othello
: “She must have change, she must!”

In its native dramatic context, this line has nothing to do with diapers, of course. It is Iago’s slimy
She’s Gotta Have It
insinuation that Othello’s wife, Desdemona, cannot help but betray her husband by sleeping with Cassio, then Roderigo, then every other man in town. After all, Iago argues, Desdemona’s from Venice, a city known for the expertise of its prostitutes and the near-nymphomaniacal lusts of its young women. So she must have new sexual partners. She
must
.

Standing over my sweet, innocent babe at 3:00
A.M.
, elbow deep in diaper ointment and wipes, was I somehow insulting her virtue by quoting the nefarious Iago? Obviously not. One of the ways Shakespeare manages to speak to all occasions is by virtue of having survived long enough to address them. In every new generation and every new cultural circumstance, he slips the surly bonds of dramatic context and morphs into new shapes he never could have imagined. And as we’ll see many times in this book, these transformations can be a lot of fun. In this sense, while the original context of a speech from Shakespeare is always interesting, that speech’s applicability to the present circumstances is what truly counts. It’s what turns a Shakespearean quotation into a Bardism.

During the few months’ stint of serial Shakespeare citation I described at the beginning of this introduction, I discovered something new about this writer I’d by then come to regard as an old friend. I already knew the extent to which he had enriched my life; my work on his plays as an artist and teacher has shown me around the United States, much of Europe, and parts of Asia, and the places he’s taken me in my imagination have been even more extraordinary. And I already knew his work’s unique way of revealing new details, nearly infinite resonances, each time I went away from it and then came back. But what I learned about the Bard’s knack for saying just the right thing on all occasions is that all occasions are enhanced by his words. What’s special about his poetry is that as it forges new links between experience as it’s lived and experience as it’s described, it somehow manages to
deepen
lived experience by describing it as vividly as it does.

I’m not the first person to make this claim of old Will, which is fortunate, because it means there’s someone I can turn to for corroboration. As I write this introduction, the great Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart is starring on Broadway in a new production of
Macbeth
. In an interview about it with the
New York Times
, he offered a lovely anecdote about how Shakespeare’s touch on all occasions makes those occasions sweeter, richer, and more memorable:

Mr. Stewart described an experience he had recently, as he walked alone before dusk near his rural village in Oxford-shire. “Suddenly I had this urge to speak the role, and there’s nobody about,” he said. “So I started at the top of the play, with ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ and I said the whole role through aloud, just to refresh my memory. It was a long walk.

“But it hit me before I said the lines ‘Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’—That’s exactly how it was,” he continued. “And I thought: This is wonderful. Every night in New York when I come to that part, I’ll remember where I was, on this lonely road with bare fields on either side, and there’s a mist hanging over the field, and indeed there are crows.”

Mists, crows, thick light, and rooky woods—Shakespeare talks about them all, just as he talks about birthdays, funerals, and every other human event in between. He’s graced the occasions of my life in so many beautiful ways, and it’s my joy to commend him to yours.

SEVEN STEPS TO SHIPSHAPE SHAKESPEARE

These keys to unlocking the Bard’s secrets are distilled from the basic principles of Shakespearean acting taught to actors daily in the country’s leading drama schools. (And I should know: I teach them there!) They can help lift the veil of obscurity off Shakespeare’s alien-seeming language and reveal the familiar and comprehensible English hidden underneath.

Apply some of the following techniques to the excerpts of Shakespeare in this book, or to any others you fancy, and you’ll find his language starting to feel as comfortable in your mouth and sound as familiar in your ears as the words you speak and hear in regular conversation. You may also find that your appreciation for all poetry, and not just Shakespeare’s, gets an unexpected and altogether happy boost.

Here, then, the Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare.

STEP 1:
Know What You’re Saying

It’s extremely easy to regard the strange vocabulary and alien syntax in Shakespeare as either insuperable obstacles or generalities to be approximated rather than understood. After all, the language is four hundred years old, and English in Shakespeare’s day resembled German—the tongue from which it most recently derived—much more than it does today, and shared many byzantine grammatical structures with that still highly complex language. But a great way to get specific with the text, to bring it into your mouth and brain sounding fresh and new four centuries after it was written, is to ensure that you know exactly what you’re saying. A great way to do that is to translate Shakespeare into modern, accessible, colloquial English that makes it effortlessly clear in your own mind. Write a paraphrase. Actors preparing a Shakespearean role sit with dictionaries and scholarly editions and work through their lines word by word to make certain they know what everything means. To save you that time-consuming, brain-boiling work, I have included paraphrases with almost every excerpt of Shakespeare in this book, the exceptions being those passages whose language is simple and clear enough that they’re self-explanatory. You’ll note that my paraphrases have a very colloquial style, a loosey-goosey aspect that lends them a certain energy and flow. This is deliberate. Paraphrases help most when they’re simplest. They needn’t be pedantically precise, such as “To exist, or to negate existence: this is the central inquiry” (Hamlet’s “To be or not to be, that is the question”), nor need they restate the obvious, as in “The day after today, and the day after today, and the day after today” (Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”). Instead, they should express each of the basic thoughts in Shakespeare’s text in terms that are immediately comprehensible to a modern ear. To achieve this, they might need to spell out certain concepts that Shakespeare leaves veiled, or even to rearrange things ever so slightly. Thus, for Hamlet: “What I’m wondering is whether I should go on living or not”; for Macbeth: “Time moves along relentlessly, inexorably, slowly.” Sometimes they’ll sound a little goofy, like “Watch out for March fifteenth!” (that’s “Beware the ides of March” from
Julius Caesar
), and often they’ll render soaring poetry in terms that are eye-rollingly flat, as does “The glory of the divine presence can be seen even in things as ordinary as a dying bird” (that’s Hamlet’s “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” and it really loses something in translation). A good paraphrase will clarify abstruse terms, burn away the fog that can obscure simple thoughts, and reveal arguments in language that’s maximally easy to wrap one’s head around.

STEP 2:
Antithesis: The Juxtaposition of Opposites Everywhere in Shakespeare

Americans well know these famous phrases:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Anyone speaking the first passage aloud will naturally emphasize the words that oppose each other, as JFK did at his inauguration, because those words convey the very meaning of the thought. Stressing any other words would result in nonsense: “Ask not WHAT your country CAN do FOR you, ask what you can DO for YOUR country.” Ridiculous. The very idea being expressed depends upon—is built upon—the contrast between two opposites: What
your country
can do for
you
versus what
you
can do for
your country
. Similarly, no English speaker in his right mind would quote Lincoln talking about the difference between “WHAT we say HERE” and “what THEY did HERE.” Preposterous. The only way to make this extraordinary sentence comprehensible is to stress the contrasts between the ideas
not remember
and
never forget
, and between
what we say
and
what they did
. At Gettysburg, opposition communicates meaning.

Rhetoricians call the juxtaposition of strongly contrasting ideas within a balanced grammatical structure
antithesis
. Shakespeare is addicted to it:

To be
or
not to be
, that is the question.

Two loves I have, of
comfort
and
despair.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in
our stars,

But in
ourselves,
that we are underlings.

Now is the
winter
of our discontent

Made glorious
summer
by this son of York.

That which hath made
them
drunk
hath made
me
bold.

I come
to bury
Caesar, not
to praise
him.

The
evil
that men do
lives after them,

The
good
is oft
interrèd with their bones.

In
peace,
there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest
stillness and humility,

But when the blast of
war
blows in our ears,

Then imitate the
action of the tiger.
*

Antithesis is so widespread in Shakespeare that you can flip open your
Complete Works
to any page, point your finger to any line, and find within three or four lines of it something that sounds a lot like the excerpts above. Every antithesis requires its speaker to emphasize the juxtaposed ideas. Stress any words other than those directly opposed to each other, and you’ll make a hash of what’s being said.

To help you identify the words you need to lean upon in order to get the most out of Shakespeare’s antitheses, I will list them in my comments where necessary.

STEP 3:
The Changing Height of Language: Shakespeare’s Language Swings Back and Forth from Highly Poetical to Very Simple

The best way to understand what a shift from heightened to simple language does is to observe one in action. Consider the first line of Act 1, Scene 4 of
Hamlet
, spoken by the play’s title character. It’s late on a winter night, and he’s out on the castle ramparts with his friend Horatio and the soldier Marcellus, awaiting the reappearance of his father’s ghost. He says:

The air bites shrewdly. It is very cold.

The second of these two sentences requires no paraphrase.
It is very cold
is not heightened or elevated, nor for that matter “Shakespearean,” in any way at all. It’s just a simple declarative statement, something any of us might say on any February evening. The first sentence is something else entirely. It imagines the air as a living being of some sort, complete with a mouth and teeth. This biting air is tactical, strategic: it bites in a shrewd manner, that is, cannily, subtly, with an ulterior motive. The adverb
shrewdly
acquires its meaning from the shrew, a tiny rodent with a long snout that allows it to insinuate itself into even tightly closed places. A literal translation of Hamlet’s first sentence, then, might read, “The air is a shrew biting my skin.” This vividly metaphorical expression of coldness could be rendered in an even simpler paraphrase: “It’s very cold.” Put that paraphrase next to the second sentence, and you’ll find that Hamlet is saying, essentially, “It’s very cold. It’s very cold.”

Why does Hamlet say “It’s cold” twice? The answer is about the changing height of his language. Hamlet, educated at Germany’s Wittenberg University, is comfortable with heightened language and complex thought. Perhaps he says the first sentence to Horatio, also a distinguished WU alumnus (“
Knock
wurst,
Brat
wurst, go, Vit,
go
!”), but says the second, simpler half to the lumpen soldier Marcellus. Perhaps he says the first sentence to Marcellus, who doesn’t get it, forcing Hamlet to clarify with the second sentence. Perhaps Hamlet says the first sentence aloud to everyone, and then turns aside and says the second sentence to himself. Or vice versa.

We can’t know what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote these words. All we can do is interpret them and use our best efforts to bring them to life in a truthful way. In this sense, there’s never any correct or incorrect way to say the lines. None of the four interpretations I posited above is right, nor is any wrong. They’re just ideas for actor and director to try in rehearsal. The key point about all of them is that they arise from a close reading of the text that reveals that one half of the line is heightened, and the other is not. Anyone trying to communicate its underlying ideas must first recognize the change that happens halfway through it, think about
why
that change is there, and then say the line in a manner that uses its change of height to make both parts of it sharp, lifelike, and clear.

STEP 4:
Verbs: Special Heightening Agents

Verbs are specially charged by definition, because they are words whose syntactical job—to cause action—requires of them a greater energy than that called for from the other parts of speech. Hamlet says that the reason the fear of death is so powerful is that it “
puzzles
the will” and “
makes
us rather
bear
those ills we
have
/ Than
fly
to others that we
know not
of.” The italics are mine, of course, and they indicate the verbs (or verb phrases), which happen to be the words that any speaker of English will naturally stress as they try to make Hamlet’s ideas clear. Try to say these phrases sans emphasis on the verbs, and all you’ll have is mush.

One of the most effective ways to bring Shakespeare alive in your mouth or in your mind is to underline the verbs as you work through the text. Their communicative vigor is so copious, potent, and expressive that they will actually haul you right through a speech’s thoughts from start to finish…if you let them. Always, always hit the verbs. And use them in whatever form they appear: participial or gerundial verbs used as adjectives or other parts of speech (“the pangs of
disprized
love”; “there’s nothing either good or bad but
thinking
makes it so”) carry great energy and are indispensable.

I will flag useful verbs, verb forms, and verb phrases throughout this book.

STEP 5:
Scansion and Meter: The Time Signature Behind the Lines

The majority of Shakespeare’s work, and the majority of the excerpts quoted in this book, is written in
verse
. As distinct from its antithesis,
prose
(of which there’s plenty in Shakespeare, some of which we’ll see as well), verse is language that’s composed in individual lines that conform to a given rhythm. That rhythm is created by the individual syllables in the words of the line, some of which receive stress and some of which don’t. The art and science of counting the stressed and unstressed syllables in a line and then affixing to them a label that helps readers navigate the poem is called
scansion
, and it serves to identify the poem’s
meter
, or time signature.

The most important meter for anyone working on Shakespeare is the famous
iambic pentameter
. That’s a fancy label for a verse line whose count (
meter
) is five (
penta
, as in
pentagon
) so-called
feet
, or sets of syllables, which are
iambs
. An iamb is a foot comprising two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second stressed. It sounds like this:
dee-DUM
. New York is iambic:
new YORK
. So are Detroit (
de-TROIT
) and hello (
hel-LO
) and goodbye (
good-BYE
) and shalom (
sha-LOM
). Standard scansion notation marks the first syllable with a caret and the second with an accent mark:
ň ń
.