Bardisms (26 page)

Some details:

Hamlet here appropriates a proverb familiar in Shakespeare’s day: “Every dog has his day.” Many of the phrases we think of as being Shakespearean coinages were in fact extant proverbs that he merely imported into his dialogue. This practice is one of the ways that Shakespeare makes his lines sound like natural speech; we all spice our conversation with liberal sprinklings of well-known catchphrases, clichés, famous lines from movies, and proverbial wisdom from various sources (even Shakespeare!). Sometimes in the plays, a character who speaks a familiar aphorism will identify it as such and put it in quotation marks, as when the Duke of Gloucester sums up his unceremonious dismissal from King Henry VI’s court with “The ancient proverb will be well effected: / ‘A staff is quickly found to beat a dog.’” Countless other times, a character will simply say something that he or she assumes the other characters, and the audience, surely recognize as a time-tested truism. Today, four hundred years later, when many of those once-standard maxims are lost to history and linguistic change, we can’t as readily identify them as familiar turns of phrase, so we cavalierly attribute them to Shakespeare, in whose plays they seem to appear first.

However, there is one extraordinary scholarly resource, very much in the vein of the Furness
Variorum
I praised in “Shakespeare on Relationship Troubles” above, that helps disentangle the proverbial from the Shakespearean. That is Morris Tilley’s 1950
Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
, an exhaustive nine-hundred-page compilation. Every bit as monomaniacal as Furness
père et fils
(monomania is a common affliction among professional Shakespeare scholars), Tilley devoted thirty years to his scrupulously detailed and mind-bogglingly comprehensive magnum opus, and, like the first runner at Marathon, he died the moment he crossed the finish line, leaving a protégé to see the completed manuscript through to publication.

Tilley’s intention was to do a service to Shakespeare by codifying his mastery of apothegmatic lore, and he succeeded. In honor of his memory, I state for the record that “Every dog has his day” is citation number D464 in the professor’s
Dictionary
.

I’M GONNA MESS YOU UP!

Shakespearean insults are pretty easy to find all over the Web, in books, and even on coffee mugs (I have one, and every morning the witty venom printed on its sides jolts me awake as bracingly as the coffee it contains). Because so many of them are only a mouse click away, I’ve chosen to include only one, my fave. I call this Bardism a non-threat threat, or Shakespeare on the Occasion of Knowing You’d Better Say Something, But Not Knowing Quite What:

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth!

—L
EAR
,
King Lear
, 2.4.274–77

How to use it:

Although in its dramatic context this speech arises from Lear’s profound pain and incontinent anger at the ill treatment his daughters Goneril and Regan have dealt him, it nonetheless has a certain comic aspect. There’s a flustered incredulity and frustrated impotence to it that lend Lear’s fulminations a disconcerting edge of foolishness. This strangely harrowing mixture of the clownish and the enraged is the signature tone of
King Lear
, and this is a speech I cite frequently when trying to explain Shakespeare’s insistence that in good drama—as in life—the risible and the horrible generally live side by side.
    Yet I’ve found myself recommending this speech more for its buffoonish side than its terrifying one. I think it’s the kind of speech you quote with a smile in your eyes when for the umpteenth time your children neglect to clean up their rooms. It’s for the wife whose husband can’t get through his thick head that he needs to put the seat down: “George, if you leave that seat up one more time, I swear to God I’m going to…”

The phrase
on you both
at the end of line 1 can be swapped out for any word or phrase that characterizes the object of your threat:
on you all
;
on you, Frank
;
on those kids
;
on Jane Jones
, and so on.
He
,
she
, or
they
can also substitute for each
I
in the speech should you need to narrate, say, what Pop’s going to do when he gets home.

YOU DON’T SCARE ME, BUB

The Bardism above is for the threatener. Here’s something for the threatenee: a dose of offhand dismissal that’ll throw some water on whoever’s fuming in your face:

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats,

For I am armed so strong in honesty

That they pass by me as the idle wind,

Which I respect not.

—B
RUTUS
,
Julius Caesar
, 4.2.121–24

In other words:

Your threats don’t scare me, Cassius. See, I’ve got the most powerful weapon of all: truth. Your words fly past me like a lazy breeze, and I’m not even paying attention.

How to say it:

Swap in whatever name or other term you need instead of
Cassius
(pronounced either
CASH-us
or
CASS-yus
). If your enemy has a name whose syllable count would ruin the meter of line 1, then I’d suggest
mister
,
buddy
,
bucko
,
boyo
, or the more Shakespearean
sirrah
for a man, and
missy
,
sweetie
,
honey
, or the less contemporary
lady
or
madam
for a woman. I can also image a few gender-neutral, two-syllable curse words that would work here, but this is a family book, so I’ll leave them to your imagination.

Note that line 2 follows the familiar Shakespearean syncopation pattern of monosyllables with a polysyllabic word at the end. This makes
honesty
jump out as a very special and powerful quality. The monosyllabic nature of the majority of the speech conveys just how furious Brutus is, and it’s also in keeping with the tone of restraint characteristic of his speech in general. Say lines 3 and 4 through gritted teeth, really holding back from tearing your foe’s head off, and making your rage seem all the more gigantic as a result.

SHAKESPEARE ON WINNING AND LOSING

It would make any man cold to lose.

—C
LOTEN
,
Cymbeline
, 2.3.3

Winning will put any man into courage.

—C
LOTEN
,
Cymbeline
, 2.3.6

Shakespeare’s brilliant warriors and soldiers go into battle vowing to win, but only half of them succeed. The victors are without exception quick to credit God for their good fortune. The vanquished spread blame somewhat wider, choosing to curse their foes, their weak-willed rank and file, themselves, or even fate. Curiously, given the fifty-fifty split between winners and losers at war, the plays don’t offer a commensurately even distribution of the rhetoric of victory and defeat. There’s vastly more of the latter. Perhaps this reflects Shakespeare’s view that loss is a more poetic condition than gain, or perhaps, since the majority of the canon’s losers die shortly after their fights are done, their thoughts on loss turn out to be thoughts on death, and death always merits detailed consideration. Or maybe it’s just that nobody likes going to war, and so even a resounding victory is redolent with the destruction and violence that were its cost. With that cost still fresh in mind, a stemwinder of a victory speech would only seem inappropriately arrogant, callous, and tone-deaf. Still, their paucity notwithstanding, there are some terrific winner’s circle pronouncements in Shakespeare, one of which I particularly like. I include that Bardism here, along with one of Shakespeare’s most inspirational passages on defeat.

I WON!

Julius Caesar may have achieved Shakespearean immortality through his famous last words,
Et tu Brute
, but he had at least one good line that, although not included by the Bard in Julius’ own play, endures. It was as famous in the Renaissance as it is now, so much so that no less a rhetorician than fat John Falstaff could turn to it when necessary:

He saw me, and yielded, that I may justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, “I came, saw, and overcame.”

—F
ALSTAFF
,
Henry IV, Part II
, 4.2.36–38

How to use it:

This is a great piece of Shakespeare on the Occasion of Bragging Rights. Use it when you’ve triumphed over any nemesis, and simply substitute for the first word,
He
, any subject that fits: for example, “That driver’s license test saw me, and yielded…”