Bardisms (41 page)

Some details:

The literary excellence of this most famous of Macbeth’s utterances has earned it pride of place in many books about Shakespeare, but the speech has also, oddly enough, found its way into a rather less likely body of literature: studies about the American presidency.

No commander in chief was more of a Bardophile than the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe’s devotion to Shakespeare and his works surpassed that of even the noted presidential Shakespeareans John Adams, his son John Quincy, Thomas Jefferson, and John F. Kennedy, all of whom are on record declaiming iambic pentameter in the Oval Office.

Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare was
Macbeth
, and his obsession with the play is well documented. He is known to have carried a worn copy of the drama with him in the years he traveled up and down Illinois practicing law, and witnesses attest to many spontaneous White House references to and recitations from the play so passionate that they sometimes moved the great man to tears. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” gripped Lincoln’s imagination in a particularly strong—and, given what the speech talks about, a particularly odd—manner. One contemporary recalled in his memoir that he visited Lincoln late one night during the terrible summer of 1864, one of the most violent periods in the Civil War. Lincoln was asleep at his desk, “ghastly pale, rings under his caverened eyes.” His Shakespeare lay open beside him. Lincoln started awake and immediately read aloud Macbeth’s remarkable speech, with its imagery of life as bad acting and of human endeavor as mere empty sound that punctuates our inevitable march toward death. When he finished, Lincoln said of this extreme nihilism and utter hopelessness that “it comes to me tonight like a consolation.” It’s hard to think of a more revealing, or chilling, insight into the terrible psychic burdens borne by a president in wartime.

Some of Lincoln’s successors shared his fixation on this speech. Ronald Reagan cited Shakespeare frequently during his presidency, quoting everything from the ever-popular “There is a tide in the affairs of men” and the pro-democracy catchphrase “the people are the city” from
Coriolanus
to the title of one play in a witty blast at Jimmy Carter, whose economic policies Reagan found to be “a tragic comedy of errors.” Reagan’s most detailed remarks about Shakespeare, however, centered on
Macbeth
. At an appearance at a Tennessee school, the president recited the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from memory when a teacher asked him his favorite line in the canon. Unlike Lincoln, who was rattled to the point of despair by the bleakness of Macbeth’s vision, Reagan construed the lines as a reinforcement of his trademark “Morning in America” optimism. “I hope that none of you ever get that pessimistic or that cynical about life,” he told the students assembled to hear him. “I think that humankind is very important, and their lives are not as futile as he [i.e., Macbeth, or perhaps Shakespeare] would have us believe.”

Another president who gravitated toward Macbeth’s great soliloquy of wretchedness: Bill Clinton. At a White House poetry event, the president recalled the lines—flawlessly—and commented wittily that
Macbeth
, which is, after all, about murdering your way to power and then getting murdered once you have it—was “hardly designed to entice me to a public career,” but added that through the play, “I learned about the dangers of blind ambition, the fleeting nature of fame, the ultimate emptiness of power disconnected from higher purpose.” He returned to the passage in his autobiography, noting that he’d looked it up while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. He found it still “full of power for me, a dreadful message.” But there were no Lincolnesque caverened eyes for Bill Clinton; instead, his sparkled with a Reagan-like commitment to seeing the bright side: “I was always determined [that Macbeth’s bleakness] would not be the measure of my life.” Bill Clinton was perhaps the one president who understood the playwright as fully as Lincoln did before him. “Old Will had it right,” he discovered. “Life is comedy and tragedy.” He added, “Mr. Shakespeare made me a better president.” It’s a sentiment that a select few of the men in this most exclusive of clubs would share.

SHAKESPEARE ON THE LOSS OF LOVED ONES

O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,

And snatch them straight away?

—P
ERICLES
,
Pericles
, 3.1.22–24

The Bard’s philosophical meditations on death expertly take the measure of a phenomenon that obsesses us all but that few of us can comprehend in any concrete way. That’s one of the great favors Shakespeare the poet does us: he “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name,” as Duke Theseus puts it in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
; that is, he renders in accessible human scale things that in themselves are simply too large for everyday understanding. But Shakespeare the dramatist does us favors, too. He knows that the most effective plays revolve around how the outsized, ineffable forces at work in the universe—the forces to which poets give labels and addresses—impact private, individual lives. His history plays provoke us when they consider war in the abstract, but they move us when they dramatize war separating parent from child. His romantic plays tickle us with some memorable phrase about a lover’s eyes glowing bright, but they swoop our hearts to heaven when they put those bright eyes on stage in front of us, radiating a passion intense enough to power an urban electrical grid. And so it is with his tragedies. They tell us much about what death is, how it works, why it comes, and how inescapable is its grip, and we learn from these passages. Yet when the plays dramatize death, when they show it walking into a home and taking a family member away, then our response moves into another zone. Then we feel, then we remember, then we grieve, then we mourn.

Here are some Bardisms about the personal nature of death. They’re to be consulted at those painful times when death takes that terrible step from literary conceit to palpable presence.

THE DEATH OF A HUSBAND

Widows wander through Shakespeare’s canon bearing witness to the human follies that summon death to curtail the world’s supply of husbands and fathers. Many of these widows declaim their stirring jeremiads about the Angel of Death long after their spouses’ demise. However, one very notable woman watches life ebb from her beloved while cradling him in her arms. Cleopatra’s in-the-moment narration of Antony’s death is as moving a piece of dramatic poetry as any I know, and it’s the Bardism I recommend, quietly and respectfully, to anyone who’s lost a husband, father, or revered mentor.

Noblest of men, woot die?

Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty? O see, my women,

The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My lord! 5

O, withered is the garland of the war.

The soldier’s pole is fall’n. Young boys and girls

Are level now with men. The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon. 10

—C
LEOPATRA
,
Antony and Cleopatra
, 4.16.61–70

In other words:

Will you die, you finest of men? Don’t you even care about me? Do you want me to live in this boring world, which, without you, is about as glamorous as a barnyard? Look, my companions: the world’s most glorious ornament is ruined. My man! The laurel leaves of victory have dried and cracked, the flags have drooped. With the only real man gone, there’s no difference between those who remain and children. Nothing distinguishes between greatness and mediocrity anymore. Nothing special is left on the entire face of the earth.

How to say it:

This Bardism can serve as a tribute to any great person, and not only a husband. It can also with a few changes memorialize a woman: substitute
women
for
men
in line 1, and
lady
for
lord
in line 5. Feel free to change
O see
,
my women
to
O see
,
my friends
, or
my colleagues
, or
my family
, or
my people
.

Cleopatra begins by speaking to Antony, draped in her arms like a secular
Pietà
. She asks him three questions, which he of course does not answer, so midway through line 4 she turns her attention elsewhere: to her women, telling them that the world’s crown has melted. The exclamation “My lord!” at the end of line 5 might also be addressed to the women, but I’ve seen it work more effectively as an intimacy that connects Cleopatra one last time to her love.
All this is to say that a key to speaking this speech is to consider carefully just whom you are addressing. You must do as Cleopatra does and address first the late hero for whom you grieve—by speaking to his spirit in the air, perhaps—then address your listeners, then return briefly to your lord, and then speak again to those around you, telling them all the leveling depredations his absence imposes on the world.

Cleopatra’s three questions in the first section of the speech should build in intensity, as all three-part groupings in Shakespeare should. The next section of the speech, addressed to the women, is composed of a list. It has more than three parts, but it too must build in intensity: (1) the crown melts, (2) the garland withers, (3) the flagpole falls, (4) children are the same as men, (5) difference is erased, and (6) nothing remarkable remains. As you work through these six images, note that the first five are brief and rendered in quite simple language. Allow them their simplicity. The last image is longer and much more complex in vocabulary, syntax, and poetic texture. Allow it scope and space to express the grief and emotion of the moment.

These are some of the key ideas whose richness and imagistic power can help you through this speech:
noblest
,
dull
,
sty
,
remarkable
,
moon
. And here are some verbs that will also lend a hand:
doth melt
,
withered
,
fall’n
,
are level
,
gone
,
is nothing left
.