Bardisms (9 page)

Not every Shakespearean expression of love for a father is spoken by a lying sociopath like Goneril. Some are true-hearted and straightforward, and all the more touching for being so. Here’s a Bardic boast that any child proud of his or her father can make with absolute sincerity.

The spirit of my father grows strong in me.

—O
RLANDO
,
As You Like It
, 1.1.59

How to use it:

The father whose spirit energizes Orlando is, alas, no longer alive. This line is therefore particularly well suited to those moments in life when paternal values imparted long ago suddenly seem relevant and finally make sense, and when your conduct in a difficult situation really puts into practice lessons from your dad that you never even knew you’d learned.

But it needn’t be solely for occasions focusing on a deceased father; an athletic dad who coaches his son’s Little League team, say, might spend his days hoping to hear his little boy utter this line as he steps into the batter’s box before swatting a line drive.

SHAKESPEARE ON SIBLINGS

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

—K
ING
H
ENRY
,
Henry V
, 4.3.60

John and Mary Shakespeare had eight children. Joan and Margaret, their first- and second-born, died in infancy. William was number three, followed by Gilbert, another Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. When Will died in 1616 at age fifty-two, only his sister Joan was still alive. She lived another thirty years, to age seventy-seven, which was an unusually long time in this period of short life expectancies.

Little is known about these brothers and sisters of the great man. Like the first Joan and her sister Margaret, Anne also died young, not in infancy but at age eight. Gilbert spent a few of his early adult years in London but returned to his native Stratford and became a successful businessman there. The only evidence of Richard is a record of his funeral, at age thirty-nine, in a Stratford parish register. The second Joan is remembered primarily because both her son and grandson achieved some fame as actors in London, in her brother William’s plays. (Joan’s grandson, Charles Hart, was the great Falstaff of the Restoration period.)

Only in the case of Edmund, the youngest Shakespeare sibling, sixteen years William’s junior, does enough evidence survive to allow us to speculate about what kind of brother the Bard might have been. Like Joan’s descendants, Edmund also built a reputation as an actor in London, and also, like them, in William’s plays. His nascent career was cut short by an outbreak of the plague in 1607, when he was twenty-seven, and it’s from reports of his funeral that we can glean how William felt about him.

Held at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, the parish church of the Globe Theatre, Edmund’s funeral was a tremendously lavish affair. Unusually, it was conducted in the morning, most likely so that Edmund’s fellow actors could pay their respects before having to go to work in the playhouses that afternoon. The church’s largest bell tolled for him, also unusually, since smaller church bells customarily knelled deaths. Apparently the large bell rang out so loud and for so long that it was heard throughout the City of London, on the opposite side of the Thames. Edmund was interred in the church itself rather than outside in the churchyard, an honor that increased the cost of the funeral more than fivefold. A journeyman actor would not normally be memorialized by such a series of elaborate tributes, so the only explanation that makes sense of all the extravagant circumstances of Edmund’s burial is the fact of his last name. Because in 1607 William Shakespeare was at the height of his fame, power, and wealth, it seems reasonable to suppose that he arranged and paid for his brother’s funeral. And if this is so, then the lengths to which he went to honor his young sibling suggest that he was a man to whom brotherly love was a very meaningful concept.

Once again we must ask if this smidgen of biographical evidence can shed some light on the fraternal relationships in Shakespeare’s works. And once again we must answer yes if we believe that aspects of a writer’s fictional creations somehow project his own unconscious into the world, but no if we regard him as a working professional cranking out product, his literary imagination completely compartmentalized from his private emotional life. Judge for yourself: below are some of Shakespeare’s writings on the subject of brothers and sisters, and, whether or not they reflect his own feelings, they certainly describe the bond between siblings as one that’s powerful, and, for the most part, positive.

SISTERS ARE CLOSE PALS

One way Shakespeare employs the sibling relationship in his plays is by using it to describe close friendships. If an army is compared to a
band of brothers
, for example, then we infer that it comprises a group of men who share a deep affection and mutual regard for one another. We also learn the converse: that brothers are as tight as any besieged comrades in arms. The metaphor of brotherhood describes the army, and the army expands the resonance of the metaphor of brotherhood.

The female equivalent is a description of what is arguably the closest friendship between girls in the plays. In
As You Like It
the courtier LeBeau tells Orlando that the cousins Rosalind and Celia are a pair “whose loves / Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.” Like the metaphorical connection between soldiers and brothers, this image tells us something about two friends, and also something about the sororal bond: that it must be very deep if it’s as deep as this friendship, whose special closeness Celia details in this superb Bardism, Shakespeare for Sisters:

We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,

And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans

Still we went coupled and inseparable.

—C
ELIA
,
As You Like It
, 1.3.67–70

In other words:

We’ve always slept together, and awakened at the same moment. We’ve studied, had fun, and eaten together. And wherever we went, we were joined at the hip, like the swans that draw the chariot of Juno, queen of the gods.
*

How to use it:

Because to Celia and Rosalind friendship is sisterhood, and sisterhood is friendship, this speech can be used to describe a relationship of either type. A simple introduction—“My relationship with Ashleigh is as close as a beautiful one in a Shakespeare play called
As You Like It
”—is all the setup you’ll require. LeBeau’s line can also be pressed into service to describe your favorite sisterly bond. Just start the line with
their
instead of
whose
.

Eat
at the end of line 2 is pronounced
et
(rhymes with
bet
), because it’s the past tense of the verb
to eat.
Modern Americans would say
ate
, or because of the helper verb
have
in this sentence,
eaten
. But
et
(spelled, confusingly,
eat
) is still in wide use in England, as anyone acquainted with a Britisher will know: “Oy, mate, would you like to ’ave some dinner?” “Cheers, no. I already
et
.”

BROTHERS ARE CLOSE PALS

Two Bardisms from two very different plays articulate Shakespeare’s understanding of brotherly affection. They capture that sense that brothers are intimate teammates, agents for the same secret organization, and co-conspirators on a mission only they are privy to and which can be achieved only through their joint efforts.

From this hour

The heart of brothers govern in our loves

And sway our great designs.

—A
NTONY
,
Antony and Cleopatra
, 2.2.154–56

We came into the world like brother and brother,

And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

—D
ROMIO OF
E
PHESUS
,
The Comedy of Errors
, 5.1.426–27

How to use them:

Both of these speeches can be used to wish auspiciousness to your brothers, or closest friends, as they embark on any undertaking that you feel must be characterized by a mutual respect and love in order to succeed. The opening of a business or the start of a vacation are two occasions that come to mind. The lines can also help patch up a falling-out between brothers or close friends. Dromio’s speech in particular is a heartwarming expression of fraternal equality and warmth.

Dromio is one-half of a set of identical twins, so his first line is a literal reference to the moment of his and his brother’s simultaneous birth.

Antony is reaching out in friendship toward his rival, Octavius Caesar. His speech is a bit more comprehensible if you imagine a comma at the end of its first line, and the word
may
at the start of its second: “From this hour,
may
the heart of brothers…” That is, Antony is expressing his hope that brotherly hearts—hearts that are loving and intimately bound together—will influence, or
sway
, the feelings between himself and Caesar, and will help them achieve great things together.

In both Bardisms, replace
brothers
and
brother
with
sisters
and
sister
to get the all-girl versions.