Bardisms (4 page)
Authors: Barry Edelstein
Hamlet could say that hell itself breathes out any of a million things into this world, and that the day would do any of a thousand things when it sees his bitter business. But the exact words he chooses are
contagion
and
quake
. The line endings give him opportunities to find specific ideas and express them in specific words.
Run-on lines are very special in Shakespeare, as in all verse. They provide the actor an opportunity to make his mind and his character’s one and the same. They tell the actor to ask “What next?” and then to search for precisely the right word that expresses in every last nuance what it is he’s trying to say. Ask
(what?)
at the end of every single line, or have a friend shout it out for you, and as you answer the question you’ll begin to write the language for yourself.
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
(whaddaya mean?)When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
(what?)Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
(what else?)And do such bitter business as the day
(what about it?)Would quake to look on. Soft! Now to my mother.
A technique I call the “Paper Trick” is an easy and effective way to quickly get you phrasing verse one line at a time. Simply take a blank piece of paper and cover the speech you’re working on, revealing only its very first line. Say that line, and when you reach its end—and only when you reach its end—slide the paper down to reveal the next line—and only the next line. Say that line, slide the paper down again, say the next line, then slide and speak, slide and speak, slide, speak, until you reach the end of the speech. I promise that the speech will become significantly clearer and easier to say on the very first pass through it. With practice, this one-line-at-a-time phrasing will become as instinctual to you as normal speech.
Two caveats. First, beware of regarding the line ending as a pause. It isn’t. It’s a moment of thought, a momentary scan of your mental hard drive, or, as the eminent British Shakespeare director Sir Peter Hall calls it, an “energy point.” It
moves you forward
onto the next idea, just as a springboard moves you forward from the pool’s edge into the water. The line ending isn’t about stopping, it’s about continuing ahead. Listen to yourself and make sure you’re not sounding like a metronome—ten beats, pause, ten beats, pause, ten beats, pause. Know that if the technique of phrasing with the verse line sounds awkward to your ears or makes you feel uncomfortable, you can ignore it and read the lines as though they were prose. You might disappoint the English professors among your listeners, but the Shakespeare police won’t come and throw you in theater jail.
Second, don’t interpret phrasing with the verse line as a command to ignore punctuation altogether. Especially within lines, the punctuation provides invaluable information about sense, rhythm, phrasing, and even tone. Strike a balance between following it and hewing to the rigorous construction of the verse, and you’re home free.
STEP 7:
Monosyllables and Polysyllables: Note the Words with Only One Syllable and the Ones with a Lot of Them
One of Shakespeare’s specialties is to work dazzling rhythmic magic by alternating between passages in which the words have only one syllable and passages comprising words with many syllables.
Monosyllables generally require an actor to slow down and really invest in an idea one word at a time. It’s no coincidence that many of Shakespeare’s most famous phrases are monosyllabic: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” “To be or not to be.” “To thine own self be true.” “Out damned spot, out I say.” “It was Greek to me.” “The ides of March.” Even the not-so-famous phrase we saw above, “Now could I drink hot blood.” In each case, each individual word is important and demands emphasis, and the overall thought demands a deliberate, if not to say stately, pace, which makes it endure in our minds.
Polysyllables, on the other hand, have a sprightliness and speed. In the “hot blood” passage above, the eight words
very witching, churchyards, itself, contagion, bitter business,
and
mother
, all polysyllabic, take on a distinctive quality simply because they are sprinkled amidst thirty-six thudding monosyllables. These words demand their own particular pace and feeling.
I’ll point out the places where a series of monosyllables is particularly noteworthy, or where a sudden switch to polysyllables makes a word or idea jaunty, memorable, and fun.
So there you have it: the Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare.
There are many more techniques to discuss—how important words tend to fall in certain places in the lines; how vowels and consonants come together to make a very idiosyncratic Shakespearean music—and I will touch on some of them throughout this book.
But for starters, try these seven. Try a handful; try only one. Each will help demystify some small corner of Shakespeare’s legend. Each will bring Shakespeare’s language closer to you, and you closer to Shakespeare’s language. Through these techniques, Shakespeare will become to you, as he is to me now two decades into my work on him, a friend to whom you can turn on all occasions.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’s eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
—J
AQUES
,
As You Like It
, 2.7.135–165
At First the Infant
SHAKESPEARE FOR THE OCCASIONS OF BIRTH AND FAMILY LIFE
At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
It begins with caterwauling and vomit.
Such is the stark and altogether unceremonious verdict rendered upon life by William Shakespeare, the eternal, inimitable, and ineffable Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.
So much of the mystery and mythology surrounding Shakespeare has to do with the beauty and wisdom of his insights into human nature, and the noble sensibility behind their poetic expression. Yes, yes, that sparrow’s fall does indeed have a certain special providence about it, and, to be sure, the defining quality of mercy is precisely that way it cascades gently down, like rain from heaven. But a baby? Alas, what descends from a baby are substances resistant to euphemizing metaphor, and defiant to characterization by such felicities as “God-like uniqueness” and “heavenly rain.” No, no. From a baby drop drool, spit-up, pee-pee, and poop. Not even the epochal mimetic gifts of Shakespeare could poeticize those.
This is why his description of the First Age of Man, infancy, is so marvelous. Instead of some lines-long rhapsody about skin soft as down, or dove-like cooing, or beatific smiles, Shakespeare offer only two gerundial verbs, two little words, of brain-addling noise and stinking bodily fluids:
mewling
and
puking
. There’s nothing grand about them, nothing noble. The Sweet Swan of Avon is nowhere to be found. Rather, we’re visited by a tired, even slightly irritated father, trying to go about his day while Junior cries and makes. It’s an image striking in its realism, honesty, and truthfulness, and in all its blunt indecorousness, it sounds a lot like infancy as we know it to be.
I think of this Shakespeare, the one who trades in vomit and caterwauling, as the doppelgänger of that other, more familiar Shakespeare, he of the whatever-named but still sweet-smelling rose, and the summer’s day to which I’m not sure I shall compare thee. And if the latter Shakespeare writes poetry, then the former writes a kind of anti-poetry, a poetry of what’s usually non-poetic, composed in an unmistakably “Shakespearean” language whose beauty, such as it may be, is its ordinariness, Shakespearized.
Such a language is audible in the odd prosody of
mewling
and
puking
. It takes a great writer to serve perfect
mewl
when the mental thesauri of mere mortals would run dry after
shriek
,
screech
,
wail
, and, in a reach,
waaah
. Making
mewl
the first syllable in a verse line is also a neat trick. It breaks the expected rhythm of iambic pentameter, which would place an unstressed syllable in that position, and places a stressed one there instead. This syncopation not only jars our ears in the same manner as a baby’s cry but also sets us up for the one-two punch landed when the pattern repeats milliseconds later in
puking
, also accented on its first syllable. In its resolutely non-iambic refusal to go with the flow, this language suggests that there’s no way this particular baby will be calmed. Then, there’s the assonance of the “liquid U” in both words (the sound that letter makes as a long vowel:
you
), a pretty piece of poesy that suggests at once the cloying nasality of a baby’s drone, as well as that apt exclamatory response to all things gross-out,
ewwwwwww
.
Mewling
and
puking
may speak well about cacophonous midnight meltdowns and hot regurgitation, but they well bespeak a writerly gift for marshaling an offbeat and idiosyncratic imagination to the English language at its most muscular, expressive, and bracing.
This gift is on display in all the Shakespeare excerpted below. Shakespeare on infancy may not wield the emotional heft of Shakespeare on love or pack the philosophical wallop of Shakespeare on death, but it lacks none of the linguistic virtuosity, uncanny verisimilitude, or heart-stopping incisiveness of any of the excerpts we’ll find in the latter Six Ages of Man when we hear Shakespeare on the occasions of grown-up life.
SHAKESPEARE ON THE EXPERIENCE OF CHILDBIRTH
The pleasing punishment that women bear.
—A
EGEON
,
The Comedy of Errors
, 1.1.46
Though never depicted onstage, births deliver quite a few bouncing babies offstage in Shakespeare’s plays. Since he had three children of his own, he no doubt knew something about the birthing process, and it’s interesting to note which aspects of it stick in his mind. This selection of Bardisms covers a range of childbirth experiences.
WHY NEWBORNS CRY
Here’s Shakespeare’s explanation of what’s behind that piercing bawl that’s every human being’s first utterance.
We came crying hither;Thou know’st, the first time that we smell the air,We wail and cry….
When we are born, we cry that we are comeTo this great stage of fools. 5—K
ING
L
EAR
,
King Lear
, 4.6.172-77
How to use it:
I found these lines of great comfort to my inconsolable little one, or, perhaps more accurately, of great comfort to myself in rationalization of my failure to console her.
Some details:
This excerpt is from the famous “Dover Cliff” scene in
King Lear
. Gloucester, the king’s old friend and counselor, blind, in pain, and despairing over his son’s treachery, has come to Dover to commit suicide by jumping off its famous white cliffs. Lear, too, is desperate, driven mad by the cruelty of his daughters Goneril and Regan, and he’s been wandering the countryside, railing at the world’s manifold injustices. He encounters his sad friend and philosophizes with extraordinary insight and considerable cynicism about life and death.
Lear’s interpretation of why babies cry is certainly a dark one, and strikingly modern in its bleakness and nihilism. It seems almost to belong to the worldview of the twentieth-century master Samuel Beckett (“we are born astride a grave”), and indeed, some productions of
King Lear
render the knolls atop Dover Cliff as a landscape as grim as that in Beckett’s seminal work
Waiting for Godot
. Yet the image of life as a “stage of fools” is in its own way a comic one. (Certainly whenever I whispered these lines to my crying baby daughter, they struck me as sounding more comforting than ominous.) The best productions of
King Lear
capture this double-sidedness, this proximity of the funny and the awful, and create from the image of two broken old men pondering the dilemmas of infancy a kind of horrid laughter.
ADOPTION
Shakespeare’s view of childbirth isn’t limited to the biological. He also explores adoption, a process by which a child already born to one mother is “born” to a second.
I say I am your mother,And put you in the catalogue of thoseThat were enwombèd mine. ’Tis often seenAdoption strives with nature, and choice breedsA native slip to us from foreign seeds. 5You ne’er oppress’d me with a mother’s groan,Yet I express to you a mother’s care.—C
OUNTESS
,
All’s Well That Ends Well
, 1.3.126–32
In other words:
I’m telling you: I’m your mother. And I count you among the list of my biological children. We see plenty of cases where adoption parallels the natural process, such as when we graft a twig from an unusual plant onto another one, making two distinct species into one. You never made me groan with pain in childbirth, yet I still feel for you all a mother’s love.
How to say it:
adoption
and
nature
,
native slip
and
foreign seeds
,
mother’s groan
and
mother’s care
, and
oppress’d me
and
express to you
.
am
,
enwombèd
,
strives
,
breeds
,
oppress’d
, and
express
.