Bardisms (27 page)

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.

—L
ORD
B
ARDOLPH
,
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.

—L
ADY
M
ACBETH
,
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.

—K
ING
H
ENRY
,
Henry V
, 4.3.71

Hamlet expresses a related idea: preparedness matters most.

The readiness is all.

—H
AMLET
,
Hamlet
, 5.2.160

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

Ripeness is all.

—G
LOUCESTER
,
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.

—B
RUTUS
,
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
.