Hearing testimony, weighing precedent, reviewing case law, and handing down verdicts, the Justice of Jaques’ Fifth Age lives life at a sedate, deliberative pace. No surprise there: with an all-you-can-eat buffet of good capon at his constant disposal, and an inexhaustible supply of old saws and modern instances ready for pronouncement across the dinner table, why should he hurry? Instead he ambles and meanders, just as middle age, the phase of life he represents, often fills a long stretch, perhaps even lasting a few decades. The Justice presses pause on Time’s shuffling iPod, and if life is indeed an (Elizabethan) cabaret, old chum, then the Fifth Age is its intermission.

Intermission is a theater term, of course: the pause between acts of a play. Jaques says the Sixth Age shifts into place, and that’s a theater term, too. On its surface, the word’s meaning, something like “moves or transfers from one place or state to another,” is obvious enough—it has a physical, material aspect suggesting the bodily changes that happen between middle and old age. But in the theater, a “shift” is a change of scenery, a rearrangement of props, furniture, and other bits and pieces, that moves or transfers the action of the play from one place to another, and that carries the story, and the audience, forward into the next series of events.

This theatrical sense of “shifts” builds on the metaphoric line that Shakespeare—okay, Jaques—develops from the beginning of the Seven Ages speech through its end: the world is a stage; the men and women, actors who exit and enter; and each age, a role to be performed. The Justice, just prior to the scene shift into Age Six, “plays his part,” and when he finishes delivering his lines, stagehands emerge from the wings, shift some stuff about, and—presto!—a new scene, and a new Age of Man, begins. Its star, like those of the five preceding scenes, is a human type we recognize, but this time, he bears no generic label such as infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, or justice. This time, his label is specific, a brand name, the moniker of a figure from—wouldn’t you know?—the theater itself. The Sixth Age’s seismic shift lurches it into the time of the pantaloon, il pantalone.

Il pantalone is a stock character in the Italian commedia dell’arte, the popular, semi-improvised comic theater tradition that evolved in sixteenth-century Venice and endured for over two hundred years. Derived from previous vernacular entertainments, especially the New Comedy of ancient Rome, the commedia was all the rage in Italy and well enough known in Renaissance England that its character types appear in comedies by most of the major playwrights of the day. Some even show up as the dramaturgical skeletons on which the personalities of the others of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages avatars are built: commedia’s innamorato is the lover, sighing and silly; il capitano, the swaggering military man with more bluster than bravery; and il dot-tore, the doctor, the learned, self-serious, middle-aged gasbag.*

But while Jaques—okay, Shakespeare—certainly has that group of characters in mind in this speech, the only one he names and describes in perfect Italianate detail is il pantalone. In the classic commedia scenarios, il pantalone is always old, and usually withered or otherwise infirm. He always wears slippers, sometimes eyeglasses, and generally carries a pouch, whose contents he jealously guards, usually by hunching over it in a bent-knee, curved-spine posture that makes him look even older than he is. With his traditional red hose, black cape, and mask with a huge hooked nose, il pantalone is quite a sight. He’s the very stereotype of crotchety, dyspeptic old age.

I suppose by now I needn’t point out that the pantaloon is also an utter fool. (He wouldn’t feature so prominently in this speech chock-full of folly if he were a man of wisdom and perspicacity.) His main folly: an unholy devotion to filling his pouch with cold cash. His isn’t any garden-variety cheapness. No, it is instead a miserliness so hardcore that it flouts the desires of every other character in every story the pantaloon appears in, and thus becomes the engine that drives the entire commedia form. Il pantalone won’t part with a penny—not to his underpaid and overworked servant, arlecchino (aka the motley-wearing clown, Harlequin); not to il capitano, who’d like to borrow a couple of bucks so he can grab a bite to eat after a hard day of vanquishing enemies; and most definitely not to his handsome ward, the innamorato, who needs some dough in order to make headway with his innamorata. Such a tightwad is the pantaloon that he’d rather make do with worn-out old possessions than spend any coin on new gear. Hence the “well-saved” hose from his younger years: they may be way too big for him in his shriveled old age, but he isn’t about to part with capital for something as frivolous as legwear that actually fits. Piping and whistling his way through complaints, irritations, and assorted senior moments, the pantaloon is as cockamamie—and as noisy—as any of the other dramatis personae who populate Jaques’ morose and tedious teatrum mundi.

And yet, I can’t hear Jaques paint his word portrait of the preposterous pantaloon and his baggy trousers that flap in the wind without thinking of an image of an entirely different nature. A few summers ago I tuned into CNN to watch its coverage of the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy. By then, the ranks of surviving veterans—never large to begin with, given the staggering carnage of that ferocious battle—had thinned, and those happy few of the Greatest Generation who’d made the pilgrimage to Omaha Beach were in their seventies, if not older. Some had spectacles on their noses, some carried pouches on their sides: bags containing cameras, passports, and the other trappings of international travel and ceremonial commemoration. Some spoke to reporters, and yes, it was plain to hear how the timbre of their once manly voices was now noticeably squeaky and reedy. But what caught my eye and lumped my throat was this: many of these well-saved Private Ryans insisted on walking those famous French sands in the very uniforms they’d worn there six decades earlier. Their shanks were shrunken now, to be sure, and their government-issued combat fatigues were at least one world too wide. But these men were no pantaloons, no foolish dotards. Quite the contrary: they were conquerors. Applied to them, Jaques’ patronizing language took on another dimension, and Shakespeare, out of context and remembered on an occasion he could neither imagine nor intend, elicited not laughter and derision but admiration, sympathy, deference, and warmth.

Jaques’ Sixth Age imagery requires more words than any of the five before it or the one after it. Its text is full of alliteration (shrunk shank, world wide), antithesis (manly versus childish), and even rhyme (side and wide). Its music plays the same symphony of atonal asininity that Jaques conducts so masterfully from the instant he gives the downbeat of “All the world’s a stage.” Its tone, however, stakes out new territory. There may be an unmistakable foolishness about the old, cheapskate pantaloon, but there’s a sadness about him, too. There’s a sense of lost vitality and irretrievable youth, of a life with fewer sunrises ahead than sunsets behind, of physical malady and spiritual malaise, and of an end drawing ever more rapidly near. The Sixth Age, that is, is the age of wistfulness. Its substance is reminiscences, valedictories, and, alas, hospitals. It’s a time of observing, taking stock, and watching the clock wind down to stillness. The pantaloon is cranky and parsimonious, but he’s got a perfect excuse: how else to fill all the time he must spend waiting, waiting?

Of the pantaloon and what’s on his mind, Shakespeare has much to say, and he says it in the Bardisms collected in this chapter.

SHAKESPEARE ON OLD AGE

I am old, I am old.

—FALSTAFF, Henry IV, Part II, 2.4.244

In a surprising passage midway through Henry VI, Part II, King Henry fantasizes about the life he might have led had he been born a regular Joe instead of le roi. He imagines himself a “homely swain” (i.e., a simple shepherd), and contrasts the responsibilities and worries of leadership—paranoia about disloyal underlings, the burdens of statecraft and warfare—with a shepherd’s far less stressful preoccupations: tending the flock, shearing their woolen coats in springtime, sitting around and meditating, taking a nap. In the end, Henry concludes, the shepherd’s peaceful existence “would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.”

But the king never reaches the white-haired time of life, and he goes to his grave in tumult, not quiet. Such is the fate of most of Shakespeare’s kings, and for that matter, most of his senior citizens, and with good reason: the shepherd’s senior years may be pleasant and calm, but who would want to watch a play about them? The turbulent dotages of Lear and Gloucester, Falstaff, Polonius, Prospero, and dozens of other characters provide Shakespeare the stuff of memorable drama. For these figures, old age is a time of yearning for an ease and grace that they sorely desire, but that events stubbornly refuse to provide. Still, the Bard grants to a handful of his éminences grises a moment of respite in which to frame their advanced age with a consoling sense of acceptance, and in at least one case, a proud sense that geriatric needn’t mean defunct. Shakespearean superannuation is no picnic, but at least it’s good for a few comforting turns of phrase.

WE WERE YOUNG ONCE UPON A TIME

Here are some Bardisms for those sepia-toned moments when a mournful nostalgia warms the heart and mists the eyes. First, a lament about how the years separate one from joys fondly remembered:

Where is the life that late I led?

—PETRUCHIO, The Taming of the Shrew, 4.1.121

Next, a mournful admission that one’s mortal coil seems no longer to shuffle off to Buffalo with quite the energy it once did:

You and I are past our dancing days.

—CAPULET, Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.29

And then, two sparkly-eyed reminiscences about tripping the light fantastic back in the day:

Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent!

—SHALLOW, Henry IV, Part II, 3.2.29–30

We have heard the chimes at midnight.

—FALSTAFF, Henry IV, Part II, 3.2.197

How to use them:

These brief lines are well suited to a toast to bygone times, or when reminiscing about past fun with friends and family, or for commiserating with a pal about the slower pace of life’s later chapters.

Petruchio’s late means “lately,” or “once upon a time”; Shallow’s Jesu—a term he uses interchangeably with Jesus—is pronounced JAY-zoo.

Some details:

Falstaff’s wonderful metaphor of his party-boy youth—he stayed up late enough to hear the church bells chime midnight—supplied Orson Welles with the title for one of the best Shakespeare films ever made. Chimes at Midnight is a 1965 screen adaptation of Welles’ Five Kings, his famous stage condensation of Shakespeare’s English history plays. The film tells the stories of Henry IV, Parts I and II and Henry V and features not only Welles’ own finest performance as Falstaff but also countless sequences that show his unparalleled mastery of filmmaking. Scene after scene, he translates Shakespeare’s text into cinematic terms so evocative that Shakespeare himself couldn’t have imagined them better. The climactic battle sequence is an extraordinary tour de force, and its camera work and editing have been studied, emulated, and stolen wholesale in just about every war movie made in the past four decades (directors Mel Gibson and Steven Spielberg explicitly acknowledged their borrowings from Welles for the battles in, respectively, Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan). Chimes at Midnight is difficult to find because of legal entanglements dating back to the shenanigans Welles pulled, in his post–Citizen Kane disfavor, in order to get the movie made, but now and then it shows up on television. See it if you can.

I’M IN GOOD SHAPE FOR MY AGE

One Shakespearean character who manages to grow old gracefully and without too much Sturm und Drang is Adam in As You Like It. Perhaps his happy fate is a function of the actor who played him: theater lore holds that William Shakespeare himself trod the boards in the role. He’d have been in his thirties at the time—less than half the character’s age—so it’s hard to credit the legend too far, but it’s fun to imagine him pronouncing this delightful Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of the Spry Old Fox.

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty,

For in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

The means of weakness and debility. 5

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,

Frosty but kindly.

—ADAM, As You Like It, 2.3.48–54

In other words:

I may look old, but I’m still vigorous and full of beans. That’s because, when I was young, I made sure not to take anything that would inflame my passions and stir me up to no good. And I didn’t go crazily chasing after all sorts of things that would in the long run be bad for me. The result is that in my old age, I’m like a bracing winter’s day: cold, but enjoyable.

 

How to use it:

I’ve pressed this speech into service on two very different occasions. The first was when a pal told me that his seventy-five-year-old dad had just won a tennis tournament held in his Florida retirement community. “Tell him to say this when he accepts his trophy,” I advised, and Papa did, to general approbation. The second was when a student of mine asked for something to read at her uncle’s seventieth-birthday party. I advised her to substitute he and his for Adam’s I and my and to present the passage as Shakespeare’s tribute to her hale and hearty uncle. She reported that the speech was met with gales of laughter: apparently her uncle’s youth was not quite as abstemious as Adam’s, so the lines about having avoided rebellious liquors took on an amusing irony. Lusty also prompted giggles, especially from my student’s aunt, who gave her husband a knowing—and appreciative—wink!

The pronouns she and her will render Adam’s text suitable for Eve.

SHAKESPEARE ON GRANDPARENTHOOD

Thy grandam loves thee.

—KING JOHN, King John, 3.3.3

Few events mark the beginning of the Sixth Age of Man as definitively as the birth of a grandchild, yet grandparents in the Complete Works are thin on the ground, and what few there are hardly embody the cookies-and-cardigans warmth I associate with my own parents’ parents. At the same time, dynastic issues are everywhere in the canon; in practically every single play some part of the story turns on what’s bequeathed by an ancestor to his or her progeny, be that their moral values, some political imperative, or money and real estate. For Shakespeare, each generation is a product of all the generations that precede it, and so firmly is this genealogical principle embedded in his works that his briefest glance in its direction communicates it with force and clarity. The Bard doesn’t need to put a forefather onstage in order to convey his presence in the lives of his descendants; merely mentioning his name or one of his famous exploits summons everything that person could have wished to leave his dynasty. And that, I think, is why Shakespearean grandparents are so scarce in the flesh. The very DNA of the plays encodes the essence of “grand-parentness,” so Shakespeare can economize on ink and vellum by not writing the actual people. Put another way, in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the idea grandma is a perfectly sufficient substitute for Grandma herself.

In life, of course, no such grandmotherly substitution is imaginable. Paradoxically enough—and fortunately for those Shakespeare quoters in need of a Bardism for Mom’s mom—in two lines out of the thousands and thousands he wrote, Shakespeare managed to express, even absent a grandma, just what grandmas are all about.

GRANDPARENTS HAVE A LOT OF LOVE TO OFFER

Those two lines are spoken by Richard III as he labors to persuade a horrified Queen Elizabeth to allow him to marry her young daughter. Richard imagines a future in which his bride will bear him children who will call him father and the Queen grandmother. And those grandchildren, although sired by a man she hates, will nonetheless, Richard assures the Queen, be “even of your mettle, of your very blood,” and so will “be a comfort to your age.” It’s a bold rhetorical move that yields Richard what he seeks, and yields us Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Visit to Granny’s House.

A grandam’s name is little less in love

Than is the doting title of a mother.

—KING RICHARD, Richard III, 4.4.273.12–273.13

In other words:

The word Grandma has in it the same amount of love as the very love-filled word Mama.

 

How to use it:

Feel free to change the gender of the lines—grandam becomes grandsire, and mother becomes father.

These lines can help grandparents convey to their families exactly how intense is their love for their grandkids. They can also serve as an expression of affection and gratitude to Gram and Gramps for the quantity and quality of their love. Perhaps most useful of all, they can mediate the kinds of disputes that arise when Granny lets the kids chow down on Pop-Tarts in direct contravention of Mom’s prohibition against excessive sugar intake. (Disputes, I should add, I know nothing about.)

SHAKESPEARE ON TRIBUTES

Give me a staff of honor for mine age.

—TITUS, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.198

The Sixth Age of Man is a time when work wraps up and life slows down. The lean and slippered pantaloon walks more slowly, talks more slowly, and often thinks a bit more slowly than he did back in the high-energy salad days of Ages Three and Four. A mentor of mine once told me that the reason people slow in old age is because taking a more leisurely approach to time is their hard-earned reward for seven long decades of hurtling, hustling, and bustling. Looked at in this way, retirement isn’t the end of a career in the workforce, it’s the beginning of a new career of unhurried experiences and easygoing pleasures. This explains why a gold watch is the standard retirement gift: the retiree deserves to tell the hours of his repose in style. For those occasions on which that gold watch is presented, for those moments when the reward that is the Sixth Age’s slower pace is publicly bestowed, indeed, for those situations when words of tribute of any kind are called for, Shakespeare’s ready for action.

YOU ARE A VERY SPECIAL GUY

One of the great things about Shakespeare’s words of tribute is that they manage to be moving and heartfelt without being sentimental. Here are two wonderful examples.

First, no character treads the line between true feeling and treacle better than Hotspur, the no-nonsense soldier we’ve met before. His tribute to Lord Douglas, his Scottish comrade in arms, is one of my favorites: matter-of-fact, yet full of love.

By God, I cannot flatter, I do defy

The tongues of soothers, but a braver place

In my heart’s love hath no man than yourself.

—HOTSPUR, Henry IV, Part I, I, 4.1.6–8

In other words:

I swear to you, I’m incapable of flattery. I’ve got no time for smooth-talking yes-men. But I will say this: I hold no man in higher esteem than I do you.

 

How to use it:

I once heard the chairman of a college English department bid farewell to a retiring professor with these words, and they brought a tear to the eye of everyone in the room. The strength of the first phrase, which insists that the speaker isn’t given to hyperbole and excessive praise, somehow makes the lines especially emotional.

This Bardism is an ideal retirement tribute, but it works equally well as a commendation on a job well done, or even as an expression of warmth and gratitude between close friends.

Hotspur’s final line is built according to a favorite Shakespearean pattern: a polysyllabic word at the end of a line of monosyllables, as in “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Give each of the eight single-syllable words its own deliberate weight (In. My. Heart’s. Love. Hath. No. Man. Than.) and you’ll find that the longer, two-syllable word yourself jumps out of your mouth and takes on a special emphasis.

Address this speech to a woman by adding the letters wo to man in its last line.

Second is Duke Vincentio, the measured hero of Measure for Measure. Here he publicly acknowledges the excellence of Angelo, his meritorious subordinate.*

O, your desert speaks loud; and I should wrong it

To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,

When it deserves, with characters of brass,

A forted residence ’gainst the tooth of time

And razure of oblivion. Give me your hand, 5

And let the subject see, to make them know

That outward courtesies would fain proclaim

Favors that keep within.

—DUKE VINCENTIO, Measure for Measure, 5.1.9–16

In other words:

Those things about you that are praiseworthy are very noticeable, and I’d be dishonoring them to keep quiet about them, and to hide my affection for them. They should have lasting monuments erected to them, strong fortresses that will withstand time’s ravages and never fall into obscurity. Let me shake your hand, and let everyone see me do it. They’ll understand that this gesture of politeness shows how deeply I feel about you, and how many good turns I intend to do you.

 

How to say it:

This speech is perfect for public ceremonies of acknowledgment and appreciation. The Duke praises his deserving associate before the citizenry over whom he reigns; you’re more likely to be praising yours before your employees, co-workers, or friends. Feel free, then, to replace line 6’s the subject with some more appropriate collective phrase: my colleagues, my family, this gath’ring, the comp’ny. Note that the speech is appropriate for honorees of either gender.

Some highly charged language expresses the passion and energy of this lavish tribute. The honoree’s deserving doesn’t mumble or huff, but speaks loud; it deserves to be written in brass, the medium of all great monuments, so that it will defy time’s devouring tooth, and stand fast against oblivion’s determination to raze it. Allow these powerful words their full expressive rein.

The Duke’s verbs are vivid and should be given their due: wrong, lock, deserves, give, see, know, proclaim.

Note the physical business that the speech demands: the Duke takes Angelo’s hand on line 5. I remember seeing a production in which the Duke clutched Angelo’s hand in both of his and then pressed it to his heart. The actor playing the role obviously felt that this gesture was more of an outward courtesy than a mere handshake would have been. Feel free to borrow that interpretation.

SHE IS A VERY INSPIRING WOMAN

If you’re looking to stroke the ego of a female friend, peer, or partner in crime, you can’t do better than this extravagant Bardism, spoken about Queen Margaret after she gives a stemwinder of a pep talk to the troops under her command in the Wars of the Roses. Margaret is one of a small number of women in the plays who do military service, and the only one whose oratory rivals anything screamed out by Henry V.

Methinks a woman of this valiant spirit

Should, if a coward heard her speak these words,

Infuse his breast with magnanimity

And make him, naked, foil a man at arms.

—PRINCE EDWARD, Henry VI, Part III, 5.4.39–42

In other words:

I think a woman whose character is as upstanding as this one’s could fill a coward with courage simply by saying the kinds of things she always says. She could inspire a naked man to defeat an armored soldier.

 

How to use it:

This speech is about a woman whose work or great achievements have to do with her powers of speech. Introduce your remarks by citing some of the special and stirring things your honoree has said, then move into this Bardism to explain how inspirational you find her. However, if you need to talk about a gal whose gifts are not merely of gab, worry not: some minor tweaks to the second half of line 2 will save the day. Again, begin by describing what it is that’s so unique and motivating about this woman—her deeds, her work, her example, say—and then point out, with some gently rewritten Shakespeare, that if a coward saw her do these deeds, or make this work, or reach this goal, or set this standard, he’d become magnanimous and invincible.

Be sure to draw the contrast between the craven coward of line 2 and the magnanimity he’d gain from your fine female friend’s inspirational ministrations.

SHAKESPEARE ON HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin As self-neglecting.

—DAUPHIN, Henry V, 2.4.74–75

No doubt there are a host of entirely normal physiological changes associated with growing old that result in the Sixth Age’s shrunken shank and piping, whistling voice. On the other hand, these traits may also be symptomatic of ailments that can beset the pantaloon in the December of his years. Illness and infirmity, so dreadfully prominent as life winds down, and an unwelcome intrusion even on life’s most vital years, are widely considered in the Bard’s works. There are characters who catch cold, who suffer accidents and injuries, who speechify on their deathbeds (folklore held that the gift of prophecy was given to the dying in the moments before they expire), even, in Henry IV, Part II, a character who feigns illness in order to get out of doing something he doesn’t want to do (that’s Northumberland, who calls in sick to the Battle of Shrewsbury, thus hanging his own son out to dry—and die—at enemy hands). There is also a smattering of physicians and surgeons in the canon, very few of whom actually manage to cure anyone of anything, perhaps dramatizing Shakespeare’s core belief that the physical ravages of old age no more yield to human intervention than do any of time’s other savagely destructive powers.

The Bardisms below are Shakespeare for Occasions of Aches, Pains, and Visits to the Doc.

A TOOTHACHE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

Compared with the miraculous practice of today’s doctors, medicine in Shakespeare’s period, known as physic, was just this side of voodoo. But Renaissance doctoring, however primitive, was like a visit to the Mayo Clinic compared to Renaissance dentistry, a practice about which the adjective barbaric is a compliment. Although by the late sixteenth century dentists had begun to professionalize themselves through standard training and practices, in most parts of England it remained nearly impossible to receive anything resembling decent dental care. The medieval approach to mouth care continued: dentistry was handled by barbers, who maintained alongside their combs and scissors a veritable torture chamber of hammers, pliers, levers, saws, and other blunt instruments for cutting, drilling, and extracting teeth. Pain-free dentistry? Hardly. But despite the agony of getting dental care, patients sought it out on doctors’ orders: physicians often prescribed tooth extraction as a cure for a whole host of diseases that we know today to be entirely unrelated to the mouth.

People often ask me: “If time travel existed, would you like to go back to Shakespeare’s London?” My answer: “Only if I was sure I didn’t have any cavities.”

There was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,

However they have writ they style of gods,

And made a pish at chance and sufferance.

—LEONATO, Much Ado About Nothing, 5.1.35–38

In other words:

Not even the most thoughtful and analytical person can put up with the agony of a toothache, even if their writings have transcended human concerns, and even if they’ve blown a raspberry at bad luck and suffering.

 

How to say it:

Feel free to interpret the toothache in this passage metaphorically. Leonato’s observation works in the context of any inconvenience that’s grown so annoying that it can no longer be ignored.

End at line 2 if you’d like. Lines 3 and 4, though, are well suited to the stoic in your life who doesn’t usually complain about anything, but whose impacted wisdom teeth have him climbing walls and cursing like a stevedore.

Use the Paper Trick on this passage and you’ll find that it unfolds elegantly, line by line by line. Observe the phrasing break at the end of line 3, and you’ll discover how absolutely perfect is Leonato’s choice of the word pish to express the philosopher’s disdain for every misery, a cavalier dismissal that’s useless in the face of root canal.

MY BODY MAY BE SHOT, BUT MY MIND’S OKAY

Here’s some Shakespeare on the Occasion of Heroically Punching Your Time Card Even Though You Really Should Be Home in Bed. It may not fully satisfy the guy in the next cubicle who’s slathered himself in Purell in order not to catch your flu, but it should at least keep him quiet for a moment.

I am not very sick, / Since I can reason of it.

—IMOGEN, Cymbeline, 4.2.13–14

In other words:

I’m obviously not seriously ill, since I’m still okay enough to talk about my condition.

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LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

When movie star Charlton Heston announced in 2002 that he’d be leaving public life because he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, it seemed entirely fitting that he ended his statement by quoting Prospero from The Tempest. “Our revels now are ended,” the actor said, then skipped a few lines to the really meaty bit: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Heston chose exactly the right character (an elderly artist), at precisely the right moment in his life (contemplating his imminent death), and from just the right play (a work very much concerned with endings and the emotional and psychological preparations they require). We were moved by his plight, stirred by his words, and appreciative of his efforts to locate Shakespearean rhetoric appropriate to the occasion.

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NATURAL CURES ARE THE WAY TO GO

What we’d today call self-help books constituted a small literary subgenre in the English Renaissance, and home remedy manuals filled a significant niche within the category. Sufferers of everything from headache to ingrown toenail could consult various early modern versions of the Physician’s Desk Reference and learn how to prepare concoctions, boluses, and poultices to treat their pains. All the necessary ingredients were as close as the nearest garden: Shakespeare’s pharmacopoeia was Mother Nature. Friar Laurence, the homeopathic healer, clergyman, and (unfortunately idiosyncratic) relationship counselor in Romeo and Juliet, makes the Bard’s most sustained comments on the powers of natural medicine when he first appears in the play:

O mickle is the powerful grace that lies

In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities,

For naught so vile that on the earth doth live

But to the earth some special good doth give.

—FRIAR LAURENCE, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.15–16

In other words:

Let me tell you, there’s goodness and effectiveness in plants, herbs, rocks, and their inherent properties, and it’s strong. Even the worst living things on earth have some good to contribute.

 

How to say it:

When you quote these four lines, try to take note of the fact that they comprise two rhyming couplets (the Friar’s speech is thirty lines long, all of it in rhyme). Live and give obviously rhyme. Lies and qualities make a so-called near-rhyme: they are almost but not quite the same sound. The rhymes give the passage a slight sense of quaintness, of expressing tried-and-true wisdom. Let your listeners hear it.

I sometimes recite these lines at the cash register when I visit health food stores to stock up on echinacea, Chinese herbs, and other remedies. It’s a habit that irritates my wife but most of the time earns a smile from the yogi hemp-head true believer who rings up my purchase.

WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING MORE FOR HIM

When natural cures fail and modern hospital technology throws up its hands, turn to Cerimon, the Hippocrates of Pericles. His Bardism on medical futility couches some harsh news in kindness and eloquence.

There’s nothing can be ministered to nature

That can recover him.

—CERIMON, Pericles, 3.2.7–8

How to use it:

Swap in her if need be.

Certainly useful to the Grey’s Anatomy set, Cerimon’s brief statement might also prove valuable when applied metaphorically to anyone incorrigible: a madcap friend who won’t stop joking; a professional daredevil determined to encase himself in ice for a week; an adventure tourist bent on a bungee-jumping expedition around the world.

I’M GOING TO SUE FOR MALPRACTICE

Cerimon possesses at least the dignity to report on his own professional impotence in person. Other Shakespearean physicians are far less respectful to their charges. In this blunt and sobering Bardism, Lucrece complains that inattentive doctors are the moral equivalents of venal judges and cruel tyrants. Use it not only on those—I hope rare—occasions when the doctor’s orders aren’t doing the trick, but also whenever your struggles are overlooked by those who should be paying attention.

The patient dies while the physician sleeps;

The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds;

Justice is feasting while the widow weeps;

Advice is sporting while infection breeds.

—The Rape of Lucrece, 904–7

In other words:

The sick person passes away while the doctor snoozes. Starving children go hungry while the corrupt leader responsible for their privation parties down. Those in the criminal justice system are out having lunch instead of busy prosecuting the murderer of the bereft widow’s husband. Disease spreads like wildfire while the experts are on the golf course.

 

Some details:

Shakespeare sustained his theater career alongside an entirely separate and equally successful life as a poet. Yes, his thirty-eight magnificent plays are his claim to fame today, but had you asked a Londoner of the early seventeenth century who William Shakespeare was, he’d have answered, “He’s the brilliant bloke who wrote that gorgeous and titillating Venus and Adonis.” That poem, from which we quoted in Chapter Three, was more successful by a mile than even his best-selling published plays: there were nine separate printings of it during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and a handful more in the two decades after his death. Venus and Adonis, along with The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s other great narrative poem, quoted here, show that Shakespeare was and is not only the world’s greatest playwright, but that he’s one of the geniuses of non-dramatic English poetry, too.

While it’s likely that Shakespeare turned to poetry in order to help pay the bills during the plague years of the early 1590s, when he would have been on forced furlough from his regular gig at the government-closed playhouses, it’s by no means clear that he regarded poetry as a secondary calling. Quite the contrary: of the more than three dozen of his works that reached print, the only two we can be certain he personally supervised through the publishing process were Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Both poems are over a thousand lines long. Both are inspired by stories Shakespeare found in the work of his favorite classical author, Ovid—stories to which he’d return many times throughout his career. Both are about lust and its consequences, and both link sex and death in ways that would make Dr. Freud dance a jig. In the first, the wicked Tarquin, a member of Rome’s ruling family, rapes Lucrece, wife of the General Collatine, while the latter is away in battle. Lucrece, horrified and ashamed, commits suicide. When Collatine returns to Rome and learns what’s happened, he raises a revolt against the Tarquins, which leads to the foundation of the Roman republic. In Venus and Adonis, a handsome young man, Adonis, refuses the rapacious sexual advances of Venus, the middle-aged goddess of love. He goes off to hunt and is gored to death by a wild boar. Venus is so devastated that she curses love, which is why to this day love and pain are always intertwined (one example: “It [i.e., love] shall be cause of war and dire events, / And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire”). Both poems show flashes of the genius Shakespeare will manifest steadily later in his career, and both deploy dramatic effects in an unusually sophisticated way—no surprise given that their author already knew a thing or two about playwrighting. I teach material from both poems in my acting classes, and my students enjoy it. I recommend taking a look at them sometime.

SHAKESPEARE ON NEWS

What news on the Rialto?

—SHYLOCK, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.33

Arthur Miller articulated a fundamental principle of good dramatic construction in one of his many essays about his writing process. “Every line of dialogue in a play,” he pronounced, “must deliver new information. If it doesn’t, then it must be cut.” Miller’s plays—the early ones, anyway—abide scrupulously by this rule, and are as lean and tightly composed as any of the masterpieces of world dramatic literature. Miller’s model during that first phase of his career was one of the pillars of the canon, Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama. Norway’s favorite son was another writer fanatical about cutting away the fat until all that’s left is dialogue that drives the play forward, that delivers news.

Shakespeare’s artisanship is less disciplined than either Miller’s (a carpenter by avocation, whose love of precision and handicraft is as visible in every mortise and tenon he joined as it is in his characters’ speech) or Ibsen’s (an abstemious Scandinavian whose revulsion at excess is evident in his life as well as his work). Yet for all the Bard’s sprawl and ornament—his piling on of metaphor and linguistic filigree, and his refusal to say something once when he can say it three times—he is in his own way a devout preacher of Miller’s “new information or cut it” gospel. Witness the hundreds and hundreds of times he writes the word news. That little syllable catapults his plots forward as characters ask “What’s the news with thee?” or demand “How now, what news?” or declare “This is the news at full.” Indeed, Shakespeare delivers so much news that he could bring a smile to the stony visages of Miller and Ibsen, tongue-tie Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charlie Gibson, and pick up a Pulitzer or two, all without breaking stride. Here’s a selection of some of his stop-the-presses bulletins: Bardisms for the news junkie.

BREAKING DEVELOPMENTS…

If I ran the Federal Communications Commission, I’d mandate that television stations replace the familiar stentorian bark of “We interrupt this program for a special report” with this more poetic formulation. Use it to announce your unfolding story.

With news the time’s in labor, and throws forth

Each minute some.

—CAMIDIUS, Antony and Cleopatra, 3.7.80–81

In other words:

There’s so much news that it’s like the world is a woman pregnant with it, and she’s in the delivery room giving birth to more by the minute.

I’VE GOT GOOD NEWS!

There’s no more delightful duty than to be a messenger carrying wonderful news. Celebrate your felicitous info by announcing it thus:

Tidings do I bring, and lucky joys, / And golden times, and happy news of price.

—PISTOL, Henry IV, Part II, 5.3.89–90

In other words:

I’ve got something to say, and it’s about joyous good fortune, and beautiful moments, and giddy news that’s really valuable.

IT’S ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER

Alas, not all news is good, and bad news has an irritating habit of clustering together and hitting like a tsunami. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions,” says Claudius to his wife in Hamlet. She echoes him a few scenes later with this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of the World Coming to an End.

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,

So fast they follow.

—GERTRUDE, Hamlet, 4.7.134–35

In other words:

The bad news is coming on so fast and furious that each piece trips over the one in front of it.

SHAKESPEARE ON WEATHER

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

—MACBETH, Macbeth, 1.3.36

Just as he’s standing by with a pithy phrase for life’s red-letter days—the weddings we love and the funerals we don’t—Shakespeare’s also ready with tidbits for the everyday moments that make up the majority of the days of our lives. No subject of conversation better suits those quotidian occasions—standing on line at the grocery store, whiling away the wait at the bus stop, greeting a neighbor across a picket fence—than that old standard, the weather. The Bard’s a past master on the topic, as these Bardisms attest. Use each to comment on the meteorological event it describes, or as a gloss on some metaphorical version of said atmospheric condition.

IT’S THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER / IT’S THE DEAD OF WINTER

As the mercury soars, bear this Bardism in mind:

Fie, this is hot weather, gentlemen.

—FALSTAFF, Henry IV, Part II, 3.2.90

And as the mercury plunges, remember this one:

’Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart.

—FRANCISCO, Hamlet, 1.1.6–7

HERE COMES THE SPRINGTIME THAW

Worried that winter will never end? Or that some other, more personal stretch of icy cold and early dark might never lift? Queen Margaret has some words of encouragement that will help you await the arrival of warmer days.

Cold snow melts with the sun’s hot beams.

—QUEEN MARGARET, Henry VI, Part II, 3.1.223

THAT WAS QUITE A DELUGE

Here’s Shakespeare on the Occasion of Touring the Storm Damage. For the more poetically inclined, it’s also a Bardism about how the whips and scorns of time leave us looking a little green around the gills.

Much rain wears the marble.

—GLOUCESTER, Henry VI, Part III, 3.2.50

In other words:

Rain can erode even things as durable as marble.

’TAIN’T A FIT NIGHT OUT FOR MAN NOR BEAST

“This disturbèd sky / Is not to walk in,” advises the sage Cicero in Julius Caesar when he spots Cassius running around, shirtless, in the middle of a storm. I’ve taken the Roman orator’s counsel to heart on many occasions, even quoting it when urging my wife to take an umbrella with her into a cloudy Brooklyn day. Cicero’s words might have benefited other Shakespearean characters had they heard them: King Lear on the heath, the sailors in the opening scene of The Tempest, and the eponymous hero of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known late plays, Pericles. Here’s his Bardism for a raging storm.

Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!

Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man

Is but a substance that must yield to you,

And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.

—PERICLES, Pericles, 2.1.41–44

In other words:

Let up a little, you furious heavens! Wind, rain, and thunder, please bear in mind that man is made of weak stuff that must bow down to your force. I, as such a man, surrender to you.

 

Some details:

Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson dismissed Pericles and its plot full of coincidences and melodramatic contrivances—shipwrecks, storms, resurrections, reunions—as “a mouldy tale…and stale.” Perhaps so, but it’s fresh in one sense, at least: the play is the first of Shakespeare’s late-career experiments with a form critics label tragicomedy or romance. Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale are also in this genre, and if they seem the more accomplished plays, that’s not only because by the time he wrote them, Shakespeare had gone through the practice round of writing this one, but also because at least half of Pericles is believed to be by someone other than the Bard.

Collaborative playwriting was not uncommon in the period, and Shakespeare shared authorship with others in more than one of his plays. In the case of Pericles, he chose a distinctly minor-league partner: the second-tier playwright and pamphleteer George Wilkins, about whom little is known (he once gave a deposition in a lawsuit in which Shakespeare was also a witness; he wrote a novel called The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which the play follows in many places; he was a small-time pimp). Why Shakespeare would choose such an unlikely and unwholesome writing partner is one of the many things about his life and career scholars can only guess at. Some believe that Wilkins came to Shakespeare’s theater company with the idea of dramatizing his Pericles novel, and that when Shakespeare found in it some themes he was already exploring at the time, he jumped on board and made the thing work. Others argue that the play we know today is Shakespeare’s polish of Wilkins’ own draft, or that Wilkins finished an incomplete Shakespearean original. However the play was written, Shakespeare and everyone else in his orbit knew it was lesser stuff, which is why the play wasn’t included in the First Folio of 1623. The mystery of its composition notwithstanding, the play has its charms—the Pericles/Marina father/daughter reunion is one of Shakespeare’s best scenes—and its stageworthiness has been proven many times over the centuries. As for the woebegone George Wilkins, wherever he is today, he can enjoy the knowledge that his name endures as a footnote in the life of a genius. If that seems like cold comfort, it’s at least better than disappearing entirely, which is certainly the fate of those Jacobean whoremongers who didn’t have the good fortune to co-author a play with the immortal Bard.

GLOBAL WARMING

As thrilling as it can be to listen to Shakespeare talk about something in his experience that we recognize as identical in ours despite the centuries that have passed—the beauty of a flower, the giddy whirl of new love—it’s also delightful to hear him prophetically address a phenomenon that hadn’t yet occurred in human history when he was alive. He does so in this excerpt. Greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and Al Gore are all things Shakespeare didn’t, and couldn’t, know about, and yet here he talks in unequivocal terms about the harmful effects of climate change. Like so many of the Bardisms in this book, this one demonstrates the uncanny way a shift of context brings new and vivid meaning to a four-hundred-year-old passage of poetic text.

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mock’ry, set. The spring, the summer, 5

The childing autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world

By their increase now knows not which is which.

—TITANIA, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.107–14

In other words:

The seasons are changing. White-tinged frost now falls on the red rose, and the icy crown of Hiems, god of winter, now sprouts a sweet-smelling garland of summer flowers that seems to mock him. Spring, summer, abundant autumn, tempestuous winter: they’re exchanging their usual appearances. And the astonished world, seeing them spin out of control, can’t tell them apart.

 

How to use it:

Wow your dinner companions by laying out this beauty of a speech when the talk turns to carbon footprints and the Kyoto Protocol. It’s also great for the next news report of some climate-change-fueled megastorm, or, more simply, for a hot winter day or cold summer one.

Some strong antitheses make this speech work. The image of frost in the lap of a rose is opposed to the equally odd image of flowers set in the crown of Hiems, the god of winter. Think frosts / rose versus Hiems’ crown / flowers. Note also that which versus which in the final line is also an antithesis.

Two verbs are crucial here. Change at the end of line 6 needs special emphasis, and knows not gives the entire speech its kick on line 8. (And note the gong-like monosyllables with which Titania drives her point home: Now. Knows. Not. Which. Is. Which!)

Some details:

The evocative image childing autumn on line 6 of this rich bit of poetry is a hard one to paraphrase. Childing seems to be related to giving birth, and so, linked to autumn, the time of harvest, likely means something like “abundant,” or “yielding a large crop.” Titania—well, Shakespeare—is the first person to use the word in this sense in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Of course, there’s every possibility that the OED got it wrong and that Shakespeare himself wouldn’t recognize this sense of childing. That’s because there’s every possibility that he actually wrote a different word. Although Titania says childing in the first two published texts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a 1600 quarto and the First Folio of 1623—in the Fourth Folio of 1685 she says chiding, making the phrase chiding autumn mean, roughly, “harsh November.”*

This is just one of literally thousands of cases in which an oddball Shakespearean word changed its spelling—and therefore its meaning—between the printed versions of his works that appeared during his lifetime and after his death. Unlike writers today, who demand and receive final approval of their texts before any printing presses roll, Renaissance authors neither expected nor enjoyed such proprietary rights in their work. This was particularly true of playwrights, who wrote for performance, not publication, and who sold their plays outright—along with all artistic control of them—to the theater companies that produced them. These companies in turn sold the texts to publishers, who were in no small hurry to supply printed copies of the latest hit script to a public eager to read its favorite plays. Unfortunately, Renaissance printing technology wasn’t built for speed, and to call the laborious process of book manufacturing in the period error-prone would be an understatement. With no author on hand to supervise, print-shop workers could—and did—introduce changes in the texts, based on their own quirks of punctuation and spelling, exigencies of format and space on the page, misreadings and other mistakes, or even simple preference. When a published play text sold especially well, publishers would market subsequent print runs—which meant starting again from scratch, sometimes months or even years later, and introducing yet another set of unauthorized changes.

Thus, Shakespeare may have written childing in 1595, only to have the word get the l beaten out of it by a sloppy typesetter in 1685. Or he may have written chiding, only to have the word gain an l of an extra letter through a mistake in 1600 repeated by a new generation of printers when the First Folio was prepared two decades later, but then corrected sixty years after that. There’s no way to know for sure because Shakespeare’s manuscript of the play doesn’t survive (none of his manuscripts does, except maybe a fragment of a page of a lost play called Sir Thomas More). So which is right, childing or chiding? You decide. Shakespeare’s dead; he won’t know what you’ve chosen. However, he will, I suspect, appreciate the care you’re taking with his words. After all, the process by which Renaissance play texts made it into print shows that just as Shakespeare in the theater is the product of collaboration among many artists and craftspeople—director, actors, designers, technicians, crew—so Shakespeare on the page includes contributions from many people beyond the Bard himself. There’s no reason why you too can’t be one of his artistic partners.