Bardisms (29 page)

LIFE IMPROVES WITH AGE

The conventional wisdom of our new millennium holds that “forty is the new twenty” and “sixty is the new forty.” Shakespeare would, I think, have found both phrases most amusing—and not unfamiliar. He wrote his own version of the wise saw that life begins in middle age, and put it in the mouth of an optimistic and entirely sincere young woman to pronounce to the world.

The heavens forbid

But that our loves and comforts should increase,

Even as our days do grow!

—D
ESDEMONA
,
Othello
, 2.1.190–92

In other words:

May God ordain no other course than this: that as we grow older, our loves may grow deeper, and our material comforts, greater.

How to use it:

This is an ideal bit of Shakespeare for use as a birthday toast to someone in midlife, or on any other occasion that marks a milestone of the middle years: retirement, the purchase of second home, and so on.

Rely on the passage’s three verbs (each of which falls at the end of a verse line) to help you through it:
forbid
,
increase
, and
grow
. Stressing these will in turn help you mark the structural symmetry that shapes Desdemona’s wish: that
good things remain abundant
even as
we get older
.

SHAKESPEARE ON JUSTICE

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil?

—B
ASSANIO
,
The Merchant of Venice
, 4.2.68

It’s obvious from Shakespeare’s plays—brimful of legal language, legal principles, lawyers, judges, and trials—that he knew a lot about the law, and one of the most striking details about his life is how large a proportion of the scant record of it consists of legal documents. Apparently his intimacy with what Hamlet calls quiddities, quillets, cases, tenures, and tricks—lawyerly arcana—derived from his own lived experience. His name appears on many real estate papers, most having to do with the lease, purchase, and sale of the Globe Theatre and the land on which it stood, and on a mortgage for a property he owned in the City of London. His officially notarized last will and testament survives, in which he leaves his wife his “second best bed,” whatever that odd phrase might mean. Surviving court records show that he was the plaintiff in a number of lawsuits, most involving the recovery of debts owed him.

He also testified in a trial or two, including one rather melodramatic case involving a marriage contract that went awry. In the years just prior to his retirement to Stratford, Shakespeare’s London address was a spread of rented rooms in the Silver Street home of French immigrants named Christopher and Marie Mountjoy. Mary, their daughter, fell for a young apprentice in Christopher’s millinery shop. When he asked for Mary’s hand in marriage, Shakespeare, clearly a close friend of the family, officiated at a ceremony in which the young couple formally pledged their troth. The wedding followed, and then, in a twist straight out of one of Uncle Will’s plays, the couple’s loving relationship imploded in an angry dispute over the size of Mary’s dowry. The groom sued, and Shakespeare was summoned to court to swear out a deposition in the matter.

His statement survives, as does his signature on it, one of only six that historians consider authentic. Scholars who’ve analyzed it claim that it’s difficult to miss Shakespeare’s displeasure with the whole affair. “Wm Shakspe,” he scrawled, scarcely legibly, as though his body was out the door before his hand finished writing, as though he managed only barely to stop himself writing his own famous line from
Henry VI, Part II
: “The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers.”

POETIC JUSTICE IS THE BEST KIND

As consistently and prolifically inventive a wordsmith as Shakespeare was, he could now and then outdo even himself. His finest hours are those famous phrases that still appear in the everyday lexicon of English speakers born four centuries after his death—“it’s Greek to me,” “the primrose path,” “my pound of flesh,” “to give the devil his due.” Here’s another: a Bardism for those very enjoyable moments when some jerk gets his long-overdue comeuppance.

Let it work,

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard.

—H
AMLET
,
Hamlet
, 3.4.185.4–185.6

In other words:

Bring it on. It’s great fun when a bomb maker is blown sky high by his own device.

Some details:

Your edition of Shakespeare may call Hamlet’s
engineer
an
enginer
, a spelling that perhaps better conjures the word’s Renaissance meaning. An
enginer
invented and built
engines
, or mechanical devices, and specifically engines of war, or weaponry. Just a few years before Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet
, some creative enginer whose name has been lost to history created a new gizmo for breaching walls or doors. It was a small case packed with explosive materials under pressure and sealed tight, so that when it was set off, it did serious damage. (Understandably, workplace accidents in enginers’ ateliers were common—so much so that Shakespeare could refer to them in a popular play. Whether or not anyone joined Hamlet in finding such mishaps amusing is harder to guess.) This crafty inventor called his creation a
petard
(the final
d
is silent), in tribute, I like to think, to his ten-year-old son, because the word comes from the Middle French
peter
, which means “to fart.” That little piece of information bestows a whole other level of meaning on being hoist with your own petard, but, as Polonius says earlier in the play, “let that go.”

LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

Perhaps the least likely Shakespeare quoter I’ve come across is the so-called twentieth hijacker of 9/11 infamy, Zacarias Moussaoui, a man who was certainly “hoist with his own petard.” Throughout his trial in a Virginia federal court, Moussaoui served as his own counsel, and in that capacity he talked and lectured and harangued and grandstanded for months and months. His courtroom monologues were often all but incomprehensible, and his legal moves sometimes bizarre and contradictory. One such was his decision to withdraw his initial guilty plea after consulting various Islamic legal texts. Oddly, though, when he entered his revised plea of not guilty, it was not the Islamic canon he cited. Instead, Moussaoui said this: “Somebody say [
sic
] to be or not to be, that is the question. And today I say guilty or not guilty, that is the question.” The jury say guilty, and now Moussaoui has all the time he’ll need to grab a book from the library at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and learn just who that somebody was who say “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

BE MERCIFUL, NOT HARSH

Were there a list of the Shakespeare Top Ten, this speech would surely be on it. One of the gems of the Bard’s middle period, it is a superb instance of his gift for writing verse that works simultaneously in its dramatic context and also when lifted out of it. In context, it’s a plea made by one character that another temper his righteous anger and unrestrained appetite for revenge. Out of context, it’s a glorious reminder that justice need not always be harsh, and that compassion, learned from God, is one of man’s highest values.

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.

’Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes 5

The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway. 10

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;

It is an attribute to God himself,

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice.

—P
ORTIA
,
The Merchant of Venice
, 4.1.179–92

In other words:

Mercy is never forced. Instead, it drops gently like rain from heaven. It creates two blessings: it blesses both the person who acts with mercy and also the person who benefits from mercy. And it’s most powerful when powerful people exercise it. On a king, it looks better than even his crown. The royal scepter is a symbol of worldly power, it’s a feature that’s awe-inspiring and majestic, and those qualities are what make a king strong and fearsome. But mercy is a higher sort of power. Its throne is the king’s soul. It’s a characteristic of God himself. And worldly power most closely resembles Divine power when mercy moderates stern justice.

How to say it:

Use this speech on any occasion when some martinet in your life needs to be reminded that even the strictest rules sometimes need bending. Use it also in any situation that calls for moderation, temperance, and a middle path. (Oh, and should you ever happen to be found guilty of a crime, wheel this out when the judge asks if you have anything to say before sentencing.)

I teach this speech when showing student actors how central the concept of antithesis is to Shakespearean thought, and how, for artists in the theater, antithesis refers not only to dictionary opposites but also to ideas whose meanings, though unrelated, are juxtaposed oppositionally by a given speaker. Portia conjures a number of paired concepts, pitted against each other, as she communicates her argument. They include:
not strained
versus
droppeth
(not strict opposites but used in opposition);
him that gives
versus
him that takes
(direct opposites);
mightiest
versus
mightiest
(the same word used as two different parts of speech);
His scepter
versus
mercy
(two abstract ideas, compared antithetically);
earthly power
versus
God’s
(
power
is implied as the object of
God’s
, thus two varieties of power are presented as antithetical), and, most important of all, the speech’s major antithesis,
mercy
versus
justice
(in which the opposition implies that justice is necessarily tyrannical, inflexible, and harsh). As always, stress the terms being compared, and the speech will make instant sense.

A few key verbs are also crucial to Portia’s complex moral argument:
strained
,
droppeth
,
blest
,
blesseth
,
becomes
,
enthroned
,
show
, and most powerful of all,
seasons
. Indeed, that last verb makes line 14 the most important of the whole speech. Portia wants Shylock to know that justice can be qualified, adjusted, toned down, and, by analogy with the verb’s sense in the context of cooking,
enhanced
by being helped with a salty, peppery pinch or two of mercy.

Yet one other approach to this speech is to use the Paper Trick, covering the whole speech with a blank sheet of paper, then revealing it one line at a time as you say it. This will connect you to Portia’s thought process, and will help you lay the speech out for your listeners with remarkable ease and clarity.