Jaques’ Fourth Age of Man limns a figure recognizable enough to anyone who’s ever seen a war movie or even a YouTube clip of steel-spined, high-and-tighted Jack Nicholson barking “You can’t handle the truth!” straight into the straining solar plexus of the handsomely toothy, toothily earnest Tom Cruise. But while it may be fun to read As You Like It during a wee-hours rerun of A Few Good Men, you shouldn’t push the comparison between the two too far. For one thing, if you did, a produce market’s worth of apples and oranges would cascade out of your television; that is, As You Like It is As You Like It, whereas A Few Good Men is, well, A Few Good Men. “Comparisons are odorous,” as Dogberry says in Much Ado About Nothing. For another, the leatherneck whom Nicholson portrays with such barnstorming brio is of a different species—a different genus, really—than Jaques’ aristocratic soldier. The type Jaques sketches, so familiar in the European Renaissance, indeed so standard in all European societies right up to the moment horses and swords yielded the battlefield to armored tanks and machine guns, is all but extinct in our era of all-volunteer armed forces and the military as the Great Leveler that suborns social status to military rank.

To Shakespeare’s audience, an officer and a gentleman was every bit as much the latter as he was the former. Yes, Elizabethan armies had citizen-soldiers, too: the grunts who did the majority of the fighting and dying were recruited from the rank and file of the great unwashed. But Shakespeare’s military men, from Coriolanus and Bertram and Benedick and Don Pedro and Macduff to all the titled blue bloods in all the royal families who make war on one another in all the English history plays, are members of a distinct, exclusive, hereditary, and privileged military caste. The bearded, oath-swearing, honor-obsessed gentleman soldier of Shakespeare’s plays is one of a handful of character types whose apparent similarities to types familiar in our culture serve paradoxically to render them less, not more, familiar.

To understand what Jaques is talking about—or, for that matter, to make sense of any of the Shakespearean character types transformed by time into quaint figures out of some historical diorama—we need to reconstruct a world that existed four centuries in the past. Traces of a culture long gone survive in Shakespeare’s lines, and like clay shards in an archaeological dig, they provide clues about a life and a lifestyle nearly buried by time. Our job is to reassemble these shards into a living whole. Parolles, a character in All’s Well That Ends Well, is one such archaeological trace. This garrulous, obsessive, self-aggrandizing soldier is detail by detail the man described in Jaques’ lines. Read the scenes he’s in, and it’s easy to suppose that Shakespeare kept a copy of the “All the world’s a stage” speech open beside him as he wrote. More surviving shards: older plays, upon which Shakespeare drew as he assembled his indelible gallery of military personages. Plautus, the ancient Roman comic dramatist whom Shakespeare mentions in Hamlet and rips off in The Comedy of Errors, wrote a play called Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier) whose eponymous hero is a type as widely known in the classical world as in the early modern: a hero exactly like the one Jaques anatomizes in his speech. And another shard: contemporary history. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, famous for being the would-be/maybe-was paramour of Queen Elizabeth I and later infamous for leading a rebellion against her that cost him his life, wore a very distinctive beard. Long, thick, orange, and cut square, it set a trend in facial hair that wannabe soldiers imitated up and down England. That trend reached its apogee in 1599, the year Essex went from consort to convict, and the year in which Shakespeare wrote Jaques’ famous lines.

A character in a play, an ancient literary form, a short-lived tonsorial fad. Neither revelatory nor particularly meaningful on their own, when taken together they unlock the fourth of Jaques’ Seven Ages. The key is what Parolles, Miles Gloriosus, and the hirsute Earl of Essex share in common: they’re laughable. Parolles is the comic relief in All’s Well, the butt of a practical joke whose climax is as prodigiously funny as any sequence in Shakespeare. Miles Gloriosus is a knockabout farce whose title character is an absolute and unregenerate buffoon. As for Essex’s beard, check out a portrait of the earl and you’ll see on his chin a barbigerous bulk that makes the poor fellow look like an Elizabethan cross between two Sams: Uncle and Yosemite. When we piece together these Renaissance shards, we see something otherwise invisible in the Support Our Troops culture we inhabit: the soldier as a subject of lampoon, not reflexive and solemn praise. His oaths make him sound like a madman. His beard makes him look like an idiot. And his worship of honor and pursuit of renown lead him to where only a fool would go by choice—straight into the firing line. It turns out that for Jaques—for Shakespeare—the Fourth Age of Man is as ridiculous as the three that came before it.

Exhuming the bones of a faded culture isn’t the only way to sense Jaques’ sardonic tone. The words he uses and the way he arranges them also hint at his perspective. The soldier’s oaths are strange, an adjective that in Shakespeare almost always means “abnormal,” “so unusual that it’s astonishing”; certainly his pardine chin-beard is all that, too. He’s jealous—excessively, even suspiciously, vigilant about or devoted to his code of honor. His anger is sudden: shocking, surprising, perhaps even unmotivated, and there’s a capriciousness in the sound of the alliterative qu’s of quick in quarrel. These details give us a noisy and eccentric firebrand—I see in my mind’s eye a Napoleonic sort, a beribboned, bewhiskered bantamweight of a guy, all chin up and chest out, all hair-trigger and in your face—but it’s the next details that tell us he’s truly nuts. The fourth line in the image insists that what the soldier values above all is reputation, which for Jaques is an attribute entirely devoid of value. It’s but a bubble, something trivial and empty, something fragile, temporary, and easily destroyed. And reputation scans with five syllables here—REP-you-TAY-sheeun—a fact that somehow puts the whole idea in quotation marks and lends it an affected, preposterous aspect. More absurd than the bubble itself is the precise location where the soldier seeks it, a place set up by a superbly provocative line ending after reputation:

Seeking the bubble reputation

(Where?—Ready?—Really want to know?—Okay, then)

Even in the cannon’s mouth.

Who but a nincompoop would willingly, recklessly look there?

The Third Age was about swoons and breathlessness, and the Fifth will comprise corpulence and pompous tedium. At least this Fourth Age, despite its fatuousness, is a time of energy and physical vigor. The Bardisms below, then, include not only Shakespeare on the Soldier’s Occasions, those life events concerning combativeness, courage, victories, and losses, but they also glance at Shakespeare on the Occasions of Life’s Vibrant Years, those times of productivity and achievement, professional conduct, and personal accomplishment.

SHAKESPEARE ON SOLDIERS

To th’ wars, my boy, to th’ wars!

—PAROLLES, All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.3.262

Most of Shakespeare’s soldiers are cut from cloth different from the one Jaques talks about. Their cloth is not buffoonish, but is instead distinctly crimson in hue. In Henry V, for example, soldiers “nothing do but meditate on blood.” In Richard II, they open “the purple testament of bleeding war.” In Macbeth, their weapons have “smoked with bloody execution.” Usually, when Shakespeare thinks soldier, he writes violence, blood, and death.

Usually, but not always. Sprinkled throughout the canon are a small number of speeches that portray a third kind of soldier, a man who is neither a foolish braggart nor a killing machine. These speeches frame a figure of upstanding morals, dashing countenance, refined carriage, abundant bravery, and consummate charm. Shakespeare’s model soldiers represent the best of the European aristocratic military tradition. They are exemplars of that tradition’s highest values, which are summed up in a famous volume scholars know Shakespeare read: Baldassare Castiglione’s Renaissance classic, The Book of the Courtier.

Castiglione was an eminent Italian diplomat who began his career in the court of the Duke of Urbino, a scintillating place of unparalleled cultural, artistic, and intellectual sophistication. The Book of the Courtier distills the essence of Urbino’s charms, and spells out the qualities that make it the ideal Renaissance court. Chief among them is the presence of countless Renaissance gentlemen, perfect specimens who are, in short, everything you’d want your son to grow up to be. Their defining attribute, the most important ingredient of the ideal chivalric life, is something called in Italian sprezzatura. The word is almost impossible to render in English, except by making reference to the defining characteristics of the Count of Monte Cristo, or James Bond, or, ironically, Shakespeare’s own perfect soldiers. Sprezzatura has to do with effortlessness, ease in all situations, the ability to make even the most arduous task seem casual, and a knack for seeming to do the most challenging things without devoting to them any preparation or even a moment’s thought. Shakespeare’s soldiers have sprezzatura to spare, and when you have occasion to talk about anyone in the service, you can turn to them for the words you’ll need.

HE DISTINGUISHED HIMSELF IN BATTLE

Here’s Shakespeare for the Occasion of the Honorable Discharge, or the Medal-Pinning Ceremony, or even the Admiring Salute.

He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.

—MESSENGER, Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.40

How to say it:

If your sprezzaturish soldier is a woman, then start with She, and if the person you’re talking to is no lady, then substitute sirrah (SEER-ah) or fellow, or, to avoid gender altogether, try truly.

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LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

When journalistic panjandrum Ted Koppel watched American troops drive their tanks into Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he quoted Henry V—or what he said was Henry V; it was actually Julius Caesar, but Ted still gets an A for effort—when he turned to the camera and gravely said, “Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.” Okay, so the actual quote begins Cry havoc, not wreak, and it’s let slip the dogs, not unleash. Whatever. A hat tip to Ted for finding a Bardism for the most unlikely of occasions.

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PLEASE DON’T LET MY BELOVED SOLDIER GET INJURED

The folks back on the home front always worry sick about their brave sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers on the front lines. This Bardism is Shakespeare’s expression of the prayer in their hearts, Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Loved One in Harm’s Way:

O you leaden messengers

That ride upon the violent speed of fire,

Fly with false aim, cleave the still-piecing air

That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord.

—HELENA, All’s Well That Ends Well, 3.2.108–11

In other words:

Hear me, you bullets, you lead deliverymen that travel fast on a fiery explosion: miss your mark! Split apart the air that closes together again behind you, air that makes a whizzing noise as you fly. Just don’t touch my husband!

 

How to say it:

Helena’s metaphor here imagines bullets as messengers made of lead that ride violently and fast not on horseback but instead on fire. It’s an image that’s typical of her rich imagination, which marks her as one of the most poetical of all Shakespeare’s heroines. To bring this speech to life, imagine that wherever you are, you’re capable of speaking directly to the enemy artillery being fired on whatever battlefield where your beloved may be fighting. Think of yourself making a cell-phone call to an AK-47 in Anbar Province: “Yo, bullets! Listen up! Make all the noise you want, but don’t hit my honey!”

The monosyllabic phrases on lines 3 and 4 are the most important words in the speech. Take your time with them and give each word in them real weight. Fly. With. False. Aim! Do. Not. Touch. My. Lord!

The vowels in these lines are also indispensable and highly expressive. The long o sound that starts the speech; the three long i’s in ride, violent, and fire; the long i, long a, long e, ooooh, uhhhh, and awww of lines 3 and 4: these make Helena’s speech into a kind of aria of plaintiveness and desperate prayer. Explore them.

Substitute lady for lord, or, if some other term is more appropriate to your soldier, use boy, girl, man, or wife.

SHAKESPEARE ON REPUTATION

The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away,

Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay.

—MOWBRAY, Richard II, 1.1.177–79

Shakespeare’s was a period obsessed with rank, status, and hierarchy. Among the hoi polloi, one’s place in the pecking order determined everything from where one lived to whom one married to what one did on the job. At court, the other end of the social spectrum, the vicissitudes of rank also counted for everything. The game of “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out,” as Lear puts it, was a blood sport. A gaffe could be disastrous, a faux pas could derail a career, and a scandal could—and often did—end in tragedy. Sound familiar? In the Renaissance, as today, when “mistakes have been made,” the consequences are dire. That explains why nearly every one of Shakespeare’s mentions of reputation comes in the context of the unbearable thought of its endangerment or imminent loss, and why his most vivid passages on the matter remain among the most frequently quoted lines from his plays. For all the differences between our society and Shakespeare’s, they have in common a fear of public disgrace and a keen sense of the devastation that follows it.

NOTHING’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY GOOD NAME

If you don’t agree with Richard II’s Duke of Mowbray, quoted above, that a good reputation is “the purest treasure mortal times afford,” then just ask Eliot Spitzer, Gary Hart, Larry Craig, John Edwards, or any of the other beyond-reproach politicos who have in recent years flamed out in public shamefests of their own invention. They’ll tell you what it feels like to utter the cri de coeur that shatters forth from Othello’s Lt. Cassio, the Act 2, Scene 3 lines that are the last word on a precipitous fall from grace:

Reputation, reputation, reputation—O, I ha’ lost my reputation, I ha’ lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial! My reputation, Iago, my reputation!

Scandal-prone politicians usually have only themselves to blame for their tattered reputations. Cassio, on the other hand, is set up by a bad guy: Iago. Honest, honest Iago. In an irony so typical of how Shakespeare sees the world, this hypocrite, this wizard of deceit, this manufacturer of Spitzerian disgraces, gets the great Bardism on the importance of a good reputation.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;

’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

But he that filches from me my good name 5

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.

—IAGO, Othello, 3.3.160–66

In other words:

For men and women alike, my friend, a good reputation is the one valuable possession held closer than any other. Swiping my money is like swiping garbage. It’s worth something, sure, but it’s trivial. It was mine, now it’s his. So what? It belonged to thousands of others before I had it. On the other hand, whoever makes off with my reputation grabs something that doesn’t make him any richer but that leaves me broke in the worst way.

 

How to use it:

With this Bardism, you can urge someone to consider the consequences of their actions before they commit to them. Or you can remind someone who would level an accusation that they hold tremendous power in their hands. It’s Shakespeare on the Occasion of Castigating a Gossip, as well as Shakespeare on the Occasion of “Governor, what were you thinking?”

The speech’s many antitheses are crucial to communicating its sense. Man versus woman; purse versus trash; something versus nothing; mine versus his; and not enriches him versus makes me poor. These antitheses all support an overarching opposition that shapes the entire speech: steals my purse versus filches my good name. Note that the two halves of that juxtaposition are on either side of a very important fulcrum: But. This speech is a great illustration of that little word’s power in Shakespeare. You can’t emphasize it too much. “But” turns an argument around and drives home its central point.

Substitute dear my lady for dear my lord if necessary.

I WANT TO BE KNOWN AS AN HONORABLE PERSON

Shakespeare well knows a storytelling principle that might be called the Gospel According to the Tabloid Journalist: the destruction of a reputation sells more newspapers than the building of one. It sells more theater tickets, too. But unlike the ink-stained wretches of the New York Post, the ink-stained Bard of Avon boasts a preternatural command of a key principle of good dramatic construction, namely, that you can’t get theatrical value out of a giant’s fall in Act 5 unless you’ve established the giant’s spotless bona fides in Acts 1 through 4. Adhering to this principle, Shakespeare makes sure that all his characters who endure devastating public shame—both those who survive it and those who don’t—spend a fair amount of time talking up their devotion to the very values whose abandonment leads to trouble. And no value gets more face time with the canon’s greatest heroes than that old standby of soldiers, politicians, and people of integrity the world over, honor. Brutus talks (and talks) about it; Hamlet soliloquizes about it; Coriolanus rants about it; Hermione and Queen Katherine swear oaths upon it. All these figures enjoy richly deserved reputations for unimpeachable honor. Only one character, however, delivers an all-occasions quotable on the subject: King Henry V, with Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Deep Commitment to Honor:

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;

It ernes me not if men my garments wear;

Such outward things dwell not in my desires.

But if it be a sin to covet honor, 5

I am the most offending soul alive.

—KING HENRY, Henry V, 4.3.24–29

In other words:

I swear to God, I’m not into money. I don’t care how huge an entourage lives off my bank account. I’m not upset if other people use my stuff. These material things aren’t my gig. But if it’s bad to be addicted to honor, then today I consider myself the wickedest man on the face of the earth.

 

How to use it:

For all you politicians out there, this is a great speech for that defiant press conference in which you deny all the tawdry allegations against you. You admit to wrongdoing and to being less than perfect, but the crime you cop to is valuing honor higher than anything else in life. It’s a perfect piece of political jujitsu—the iambic pentameter version of the Checkers speech, “I am not a crook,” and “I did not have sex with that woman” all rolled into one. Of course, the speech also works fine with no ulterior motive: use it to announce to the world exactly how unassailable is your rectitude.

To use the speech in tribute to the sturdy weave of another’s moral fiber, simply change the first-person pronouns to the second person if you’re speaking directly to your paragon, or to third-person pronouns if you’re speaking about him or her. Some verbs may have to change, too: I am in lines 1 and 6 would become you are or he is; care I would become care you or cares she.

Henry uses antithesis in an interesting way in this speech. He opposes the abstract idea honor in line 5 to the collective idea outward things in line 4.

Line 3’s ernes is an obscure word. It’s an old spelling of earns, which in Shakespeare’s day could be more or less synonymous with grieves. When I directed the play, that’s what Henry said: It grieves me not if men my garments wear. Feel free to make that change.

SHAKESPEARE ON VIOLENT CONFRONTATION

Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge To cure this deadly grief.

—MALCOLM, Macbeth, 4.3.215–16

In Shakespeare’s plays, as in life, sometimes conflict escalates from the firm but non-violent disagreement of a cold war to the vicious physical confrontation of a hot one. That escalation is accompanied by escalating rhetoric that ratchets up the heat a degree at a time, until it boils over. I despise violence and I’d much rather see disputes resolved over a nice meal than in a back alley, but I’ve watched enough episodes of The Sopranos to recognize that, alas, sometimes a knuckle sandwich is the only food that will do the job. So I here offer a selection of Bardisms I’d call Shakespeare on the Occasions of Violence: making a threat, vowing revenge, and coming to blows.

I’LL GET BACK AT YOU EVENTUALLY

I wouldn’t know much about this, but I understand that certain high school students who prefer books to sports are often picked on by the bully gang. The bespectacled nerds may not be able to hold their own through fisticuffs, but some literary pugilistics can at least generate a buffer of condescension sufficient enough to let them retreat with dignity. Hamlet, hero of brooding bookish types the world over, offers this exemplar of the “Don’t worry, you’ll get yours” genre:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,

The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 5.1.276–77

In other words:

Not even the strongest superhero on earth could bar me from my eventual triumph.

 

How to use it:

Use the rhyme of may and day to put a nice flourish on your vow of revenge to come, making sure that your vocal energy drives through to the word at the end of each line.

Hercules is the most powerful obstacle you can think of, the perfect image of how even the greatest bar won’t stand in your way. Be sure to endow his name with grandiosity and super strength as you say it. The alliterative h’s in Hercules and himself will help you hit a hyperbole home run.

The monosyllabic nature of the second line will make you take it slowly and deliberately, and spread the iambic stress across each word. But remember that cat and dog, like mew and have his day, are antitheses, so those words need special stress.

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!

—LEAR, 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.

—BRUTUS, 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.

—CLOTEN, Cymbeline, 2.3.3

Winning will put any man into courage.

—CLOTEN, 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.”

—FALSTAFF, 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…”

Some details:

Falstaff isn’t the only Shakespearean character with an affinity for Julius Caesar’s famous three-part swagger. Rosalind quotes it in As You Like It, labeling it a “thrasonical brag.”* The wicked queen in Cymbeline quotes the hook-nosed fellow’s catchphrase as well. And the hippie-dippie Spanish poet Don Armado deconstructs Caesar’s boast in a dazzlingly wacky love letter he writes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. For good measure, he also crams in references to King Cophetua and the “indubitate beggar Zenelophon,” whoever they may be.

Although the literal translation of “Veni, vidi, vici” is “I came, I saw, I conquered,” Caesar’s catchphrase always shows up in Shakespeare with “overcame” as the English for the third word. This rendering first appears in historian Sir Thomas North’s landmark 1579 translation of the Greek historian Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Countless other verbal parallels establish that this book was Shakespeare’s constant companion as he wrote his Roman history plays. Thus, Shakespeare’s repeated use of came-saw-overcame not only sheds light on one of his historical fixations but also drops a tiny hint about his reading habits. Such little details contribute to a picture of Shakespeare the working writer, reading voraciously, rifling through research materials for stories he can dramatize, and bits of raw ore he can refine and cast into precious theatrical metals.

WE LOST. SO WHAT?

Very few of Shakespeare’s bested warriors live to fight another day, and of those who do, only one manages to find inspiration rather than despair in the experience. Lord Bardolph, one of the rebels against King Henry IV who fails to overthrow him in the battle that ends Henry IV, Part I, proposes in the first scene of the play’s sequel that his gang should make another attempt. He offer this Bardism, Shakespeare for the Occasion of “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.”

We all that are engagèd to this loss

Knew that we ventured on such dangerous seas

That if we wrought out life ’twas ten to one;

And yet we ventured for the gain proposed,

Choked the respect of likely peril feared; 5

And since we are o’erset, venture again.

Come, we will all put forth body and goods.

—LORD BARDOLPH, Henry IV, Part II, 1.1.179–85

In other words:

All of us who are part of this defeat knew that we were trying something so dangerous that the odds were ten to one we’d never make it. And yet try we did, because we stood to gain so much. We refused to think about the dangers that we faced. Okay, we’ve had a setback. Let’s try again! Come on! We’ll put everything we’ve got into it this time!

 

How to say it:

This speech is organized around a powerful central structure that simultaneously employs two related techniques: a build, and also a multiple repetition. That structure is: we knew we ventured…and yet we ventured…venture again. Both techniques turn the entire sequence into one long crescendo. The build, in three parts, is its own kind of escalation: We knew we ventured…and yet we ventured…venture again. To this, the three-peat of venture adds additional force: we knew we ventured…and yet we ventured…venture again. Help Lord Bardolph—help Shakespeare—combine the two techniques into a powerful exhortation by letting this double build work its magic. These are only ten of the speech’s fifty-seven words, but if you hold firm to them, they will guide you through the argument like so many bread crumbs through the dark wood in a fairy tale.

SHAKESPEARE ON MOTIVATING THE TROOPS

But screw your courage to the sticking-place And we’ll not fail.

—LADY MACBETH, Macbeth, 1.7.60–61

Two eminent army generals famously quoted from Shakespeare’s Henry V to their troops: Major General Richard Gale, commander of the British Sixth Airborne Division during World War II, and Major General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the U.S. Army’s First Armored Division at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Both men assembled the troops they were about to send into battle and, to fire them up, raided King Henry’s great St. Crispin’s Day speech, where they found some of the best military motivational material ever written.

The St. Crispin’s Day speech is a long one, and its central section is very specific to England and the English soldiers who fought that day in 1415 on “the vasty fields of France.” As a modern motivational address, it serves better as a resource to be cherry-picked, as Generals Gale and Sanchez did, than as a stand-alone number. In that respect, the speech is much like the entire play, which provides such rousing inspiration for warriors that armies have taken to publishing it for distribution to each man on the front lines.

During the war in which General Gale fought, the United States government printed so-called Armed Services Editions of over a thousand titles of classic and popular literature. Formatted to fit in the pockets of combat pants, they proved so popular that by war’s end over 120 million books had been provided, free of charge, to G.I. Joes in every theater of the conflict. Henry V made it onto the list, more or less, in the form of one chapter in poet and scholar Mark Van Doren’s glorious 1939 volume of commentary, Shakespeare.* As America geared up for General Sanchez’s war, the Armed Services Editions were revived. This time, Henry V was one of only four titles chosen, and fifty thousand copies of it—again pocket-sized—made their way to the deserts of the Middle East. There, Henry’s description of his army as “men wrecked upon a sand” surely didn’t supply much inspiration to our uniformed men and women, but perhaps the first Bardism below did. It’s from Henry V, but one play to raid in search of Shakespeare on the Occasion of Inspiring Your Team:

READY? LET’S ROLL!

Shortly after rhapsodizing on how he and his too-small army are not exhausted and outnumbered but are instead “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” Henry moves on to the task of getting his men stoked, adrenalized, and ready to charge. The key, as he sees it? Being properly psyched up:

All things are ready if our minds be so.

—KING HENRY, Henry V, 4.3.71

Hamlet expresses a related idea: preparedness matters most.

The readiness is all.

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 5.2.160

Gloucester puts a slightly different spin on Hamlet’s notion:

Ripeness is all.

—GLOUCESTER, King Lear, 5.2.11

How to use them:

All three of these short snippets will suit any occasion on which you find yourself at the end of a diving board and about to jump, either literally or figuratively.

Some details:

The subtle distinction between Hamlet’s readiness and Gloucester’s ripeness has inspired reams of scholarly comment. In context, both lines are about what’s necessary in order to accommodate oneself to one’s own death. For Hamlet, the younger man, it’s a question of being prepared, mentally, emotionally, and in every other way. For the older Gloucester, it’s about having fully matured, having lived to the point where the logical next step is to die, to fall, like a piece of fruit from a tree. Wordsworth thought this image was the superior of the two. He famously commented that through Gloucester, Shakespeare teaches us “when we come to die…what is the one thing needful,” and he adds, wonderfully, “and with what a lightning-flash of condensed thought and language does he teach the lesson!”

STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT

Shakespeare appears to have been no procrastinator. For one thing, he turned out an average of two plays each year of his writing life, plus various non-dramatic writing. (That’s roughly twenty lines per day, every day, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that those twenty lines include things like “To be or not to be, that is the question.”) For another, a conspicuously large number of his characters make speeches about how important it is to seize an opportunity when it comes, and not to hesitate, dawdle, or defer matters until later. Of those many bits of Shakespeare on the Occasion of No Time Like the Present, this is my favorite. (Okay, so it argues for a preemptive and ill-planned military assault. As always, the context can be disregarded so that the content can serve when the occasion arises.) It was also a favorite of my grandma Tillie, of blessed memory, and I quote it here for her.

Knowing his army will soon be outnumbered by enemy forces, Brutus, not only a politician but also a capable military man, urges his commanders to take action now and launch a strike immediately.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat, 5

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

—BRUTUS, Julius Caesar, 4.2.270–76

In other words:

Like the ocean, human lives are governed by tides, and, as with a sea journey, if you set sail at high tide, the voyage goes well. But if you don’t, this and every voyage ends with you beached in shallow water, and miserable. It’s high tide right now, and we must either set sail this instant, when all the conditions are favorable, or lose everything.

 

How to say it:

Imagine a number of people gathered together to offer you advice. They counsel restraint, deliberation, slowing down. You know they’re wrong, and so you announce your analysis of the situation, and override their objections. Be sure to give the first phrase a real lift. You’re consciously speaking in metaphor, using carefully crafted, heightened language in order to make a complex idea clear and immediately graspable. Lay it out clearly: Life has tides. Then unpack what you mean by it: and flood tides are preferable to ebb tides. Then drive your point home with the switch to monosyllables: We. Must. Take. When. It. Serves. Or. Lose.

Stress these key antitheses: taken at the flood versus omitted; leads on to fortune versus bound in shallows; take versus lose.

SHAKESPEARE ON WORK

I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;

If it be a man’s work, I’ll do it.

—CAPTAIN, King Lear, 5.3.39–40

Workingmen abound in Shakespeare’s plays. A cobbler and a carpenter open Julius Caesar, two gravediggers ply their trade in Hamlet, a gardener and his assistant tend to fruit trees in Richard II, and a tailor makes Kate a dress in The Taming of the Shrew. There’s also a tailor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His pals, a bunch of “rude mechanicals” with showbiz dreams, include a carpenter, a bellows mender, a weaver, a tinker (an Elizabethan handyman), and a joiner (a woodworker who specializes in framing buildings). The play’s list of characters reads like the program at a tradesmen’s convention.

For the most part, Shakespeare treats these working characters with affection and respect, although he now and then indulges in a few condescending jokes at their expense: their breath reeks of garlic, they’re not the sharpest bunch. These wisecracks would have amused the aristocrats in his audience as much as it would have irritated his working-class, glovemaker father. But although Shakespeare’s aspirational yearnings, royal patronage, and material successes may have aligned his attitudes with those of the high end of the social scale, he never forgot his origins in a working family and a market town. Throughout the canon he nails the technical lingo of workingmen’s crafts with such accuracy that sometimes it feels like he must have moonlighted at Ye Olde Home Depot. And if Shakespeare’s father was indeed put out by his son’s sometime snootiness, William the good papa’s boy apologized by shouting out to his father’s trade in dozens of places, including Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Sonnet 111. In that poem, he observes how our work defines who we are: “my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” The leather dyes that John Shakespeare could no more wash from his skin than Lady Macbeth could Duncan’s imaginary blood from hers gave his boy a way to talk about what his own job had become to him: a permanent mark, a badge of identity, an essential and indelible part of who he was. Dad had to have appreciated that filial salute.

I’M REPORTING FOR DUTY

Given the relentless and breakneck writing pace he maintained all his life, Shakespeare clearly knew what it meant to work hard. This knowledge wends its way into his plays in some terrific passages about rolling up our sleeves, putting our noses to our respective grindstones, and doing the hustle we all must do in order to buy baby those new shoes.

First, Shakespeare on the Occasion of the Expert Coming in to Save the Day:

The strong necessity of time commands

Our services a while.

—ANTONY, Antony and Cleopatra, 1.3.42–43

In other words:

The fierce urgency of now demands that I get to work.

 

How to use it:

Use this speech when you’re the hero arriving to the rescue, as when a firefighter strides over to a wailing child staring up at her cat stuck high in a tree. Or use it as Antony does, as an excuse to make a quick exit from someplace you’d rather not be. Or use it when your employees can’t quite figure stuff out and you need to swoop in to get the job done.

Second, Shakespeare on the Occasion of Whistling While We Work:

To business that we love we rise betime,

And go to’t with delight.

—ANTONY, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.4.20–21

In other words:

We get up early in order to do stuff we love, and we do it joyfully.

 

How to use it:

This is the Bardism you need when your partner moans that the alarm has gone off before sunrise. “I know you want to sleep, but I love my job, so I’ve got to wake up early.” It also serves to rouse an oversleeping teenager who’d rather not get ready for school, work, that ice-fishing trip you’ve been planning, and so on. Or the lines can be bent to a more ironic reading than the one Shakespeare intends. Scheduled to start that house-painting job at 5:00 A.M.? Let Antony express how “happy” you are.

Third, the motto of Elizabethan FedEx, or, Shakespeare on the Occasion of It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be There Overnight:

I’ll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes.

—PUCK, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.175

In other words:

I’m gonna run like heck. (Literally, I’ll tie a belt around the planet in less than an hour.)

 

How to use it:

Puck’s famous line also lends itself to irony. I’ve seen many productions where he sneers the words at his boss, the fairy king Oberon, then lopes slowly offstage like someone being paid by the hour. On the other hand, many Pucks play this moment with genuine, even overeager, enthusiasm. In that sense, it’s a great line for that first week on a new job, when pleasing the boss is your highest priority.

KNOCK YOURSELF OUT, I’LL CHILL

If the three hardworking Bardisms above have tired you out, don’t despair. Here’s another that will justify a little break.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

—FALSTAFF, Henry IV, Part II, 1.2.198–200

In other words:

I’d rather rust away than wear myself down to nothing by working too hard.

 

How to use it:

My own teenage nephew once out-Shakespeared me with this line. When I asked him on a gorgeous spring day why he was inside playing Xbox rather than getting some fresh air outdoors, he answered matter-of-factly with this Falstaffan blow-off. I could only congratulate him in response. Use it, as he did, as the national anthem of the United States of Couch Potatoes.