Bardisms (28 page)

SHAKESPEARE ON WORK

I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;

If it be a man’s work, I’ll do it.

—C
APTAIN
,
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.

—A
NTONY
,
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.

—A
NTONY
,
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.

—P
UCK
,
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.

—F
ALSTAFF
,
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.

The wars ended, the brave soldiers return home and resume their civilian lives. There are families to raise, homes to build, businesses to run. Step by step society walks forward, in the Renaissance as in our own time, as yesterday’s moony youth matures into today’s conquering hero and then tomorrow’s seen-it-all elder. So steady is this progression, so stable, that society anticipates it, formalizes it, and frames it with the trappings of institution. Rules evolve and structures for governance develop. Bylaws describe procedures, mechanisms resolve disputes, insurance mitigates risk, and soon all that might be turbulent acquires, like the actors under Hamlet’s tutelage, “a temperance that may give it smoothness.” In such a world, change comes not fast and furious but slow and steady, and moderation—conservation—is the watchword, protecting, defending, and reassuring. Safety first: there is a tide in the affairs of men, to be sure, but it ebbs just as certainly as it floods, and the law of entropy—that everything tends slowly toward stasis—applies to human interactions no less than it does to the interplay of subatomic particles.

Entropy is a law whose jurisdiction is the Court of Midlife, where the attorneys who argue cases are members of the Middle-Aged Bar Association and the presiding judge is the Honorable Justice Jaques’ Fifth Age. Justice JFA, as he’s known, is serious-minded, as witness his intense gaze. A tad overweight—that happens when the odometer clicks past forty—he’s nonetheless appearance-conscious, sharing with the soldier of Jaques’ Fourth Age a taste for distinctively styled facial hair. Not shy about speaking his mind, he’s ready for any subject with both time-tested wisdom and also the latest cutting-edge theory. All in all, he seems to be everything you’d want in a judge, the very model of modern jurisprudential probity.

But wait—this judge springs from Shakespeare’s (well, from Jaques’) imagination. And just as a Jaquean baby is merely bodily fluids and noise, a schoolboy always a truant, a lover by definition a silly twit, and a soldier perforce a bragging idiot, so for Jaques an apparently unimpeachable jurist is in fact anything but. The four seemingly beguiling lines with which he—with which Shakespeare—paints a word portrait of a figure of Solomonic wisdom and integrity turn out on closer inspection to encode enough subversive detail to freeze a gavel in midstrike.

Consider the capon that lines the Justice’s round belly. It sounds from the context as though it’s some kind of delicacy, the sort of rich dish served in the wood-paneled dining room of the club to which the Justice belongs, and that’s partially correct. A capon is a male chicken whose meat is uncommonly tasty and moist thanks to its very high fat content. The bird is fat because it’s raised to be much more sedate than the typical cock, normally so aggressive that it’s bred for fighting as often as for eating. Caponization, the process that becalms the bird, is achieved by castrating the poor thing at a young age and then encouraging its couch-potato (coop-potato?) lifestyle until it’s all chubby and ready for slaughter. Caponization is illegal in most countries today (although capon meat itself is not, oddly) making capon a boutique dish that’s as expensive and hard to find as a cheeseburger made of Kobe beef, but in the Renaissance, capon was the decadent repast that everyone craved. Priced beyond the reach of most mere mortals, and certainly above the pay grade of a civil servant like a justice of the peace, it became the ideal gift to present when looking for a favor. One anonymous wag of the period makes plain in a fun piece of doggerel that in law courts, capon was the bribe of choice:

Now poor men to the justices

With capons make their errants,

And if they hap to fail of these,

They plague them with their warrants.
*

So redolent with chicken fat was the air in the chambers of many local magistrates that they came to be known as “capon justices,” and in a parliamentary debate on the issue only a year after Jaques’ speech was first spoken at the Globe, an MP railed, “A justice of the peace is a living creature that for half a dozen chickens will dispense with a dozen of penal statutes.”

In the unlikely event that Shakespeare’s audiences weren’t up on the latest trends in judicial bribery, then the latest trends in judicial facial hair would have given them another clue about the Justice’s true character. Jaques’ irritation at men’s beardly vanity—his soldier was “bearded like the pard” in emulation of the great military man the Earl of Essex; now his judge sports a “beard of formal cut,” that is, trimmed with a special, and presumably pretentious, appropriateness to its wearer’s vaunted station—was common among satirists of the period. One of the greats, the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, penned an attack against the affectations of the smarter set called
The Anatomie of Abuses
, and he rants in it that a conspiracy among barbers is responsible for the beardly excesses of the day. Stubbes catalogues the many absurd styles a man could request: the French cut, the Spanish cut, the Italian cut, the Dutch cut, the new cut, the old cut, the bravado cut, the mean cut, the gentleman’s cut, the common cut, “and infinite like vanities which I overpass.” It’s easy to imagine Jaques—and Shakespeare—leafing through Stubbes with a belly laugh and a notebook at the ready, and then deploying snippets of his hilarious venom when choosing to detail the most venal of the Seven Ages of Man.

And just in case Jaques’ descriptions of the Justice’s diet and look don’t sufficiently convey the fact that he’s a bungler, the things he says surely will. He’s got old material and new; the old (
wise saws
) are canned sayings, clichés, overused to the point of becoming trite; and the new (
modern instances
) are, like everything else
modern
in Shakespeare’s canon, trivial, ordinary, commonplace, the kind of self-consciously up-to-date insight that’s absurd on its face if not altogether meaningless. Justice Fifth Age dispenses wash-and-wear advice of the TV talk-show variety: “There’s no time like the present” passes for eternal wisdom, and “Pink is the new black” represents the cutting edge in words to live by. The very sounds of Jaques’ description echo with the Justice’s pomposity and windbaggery. The sonorous vowels that dot the speech—“fair round belly” resounds with
aaaayyy
,
owwwww
,
ehhhhh
, and “eyes severe and beard of formal cut” features
aaaayyy
,
eeeeerr
,
eeeeerr
,
awwwwr, uhhhhh
—signal even to a listener who speaks no English that something about this fellow isn’t quite right. And the whopper vowels in “wise saws” are hewn roughly at their ends by buzzing
z
’s, telling us unmistakably that while this sad-eyed fellow may be an expert in the law, he’s also no slouch at bloviation. No wonder Jaques, for whom wit and pith are the ultimate values, finds him contemptible.

To be sure, the subversive significance of capons, formal beards, old saws, and modern instances isn’t necessarily accessible to today’s Shakespeare fans, or Shakespeare quoters. As one editor of
As You Like It
remarks of the capon as bribe, “The allusion here was probably more intelligible in the time of Shakespeare than it is at present.” That’s undoubtedly so, but for me, retrieving these lost nuances of meaning is part of the fun of working on the Bard’s plays. To exhume from beneath the lines such details as the barbers whose crazy tastes in beards made them into Elizabethan versions of Edward Scissorhands is to travel backward in time to a Tudor England in which the familiar “ye olde” image of thatched roofs, thick beams lacing geometric patterns through walls of white stucco, and smiling wenches yo-ho-ho-ing tankards of ale in the friendly confines of the Publick House becomes something more complex, something more real. Something more like life.

That’s how I like my Shakespeare: recognizable, actual, and alive. That Shakespeare, and not the one on the porcelain plate for sale in a Stratford souvenir stand, is the one who comes to mind when I read in the morning paper of a local official who sold his influence to the highest bidder—for cash, not capons, but what’s the difference? That Shakespeare, and not the one mummified by some BBC recording from 1950, is the one whose voice rings in my ear when I read an interview with, say, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (he of the eyes severe), in which wise saws and modern instances express his views on important matters of yesterday and today. The living Shakespeare is the one who makes you say, “That’s it, exactly!” Shakespeare alive is Shakespeare for all occasions, and Shakespeare for the Fifth Age of Man is Shakespeare for the real events of midlife: events concerned with sophisticated things, mature themes, and matters monetary, dietary, and judiciary.

SHAKESPEARE ON MIDDLE AGE

I am declined Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much.

—O
THELLO
,
Othello
, 3.3.269–70

Shakespeare died in 1616 at age fifty-two, and it’s a commonplace in discussions of the Bard’s life and times that while fifty-two seems terribly young in comparison to our modern life spans of eight decades or more, in comparison to the average Renaissance life expectancy of thirty-five or so, Shakespeare enjoyed a respectably long run. But that fixation on thirty-five as life’s terminus can be misleading. History records countless individuals who lived decades longer than Shakespeare, some in his own family, and the dramatis personae of the playwright’s own canon would fill to capacity the waiting room of any Jacobean geriatrician.

In truth, the period’s average life expectancy is more accurately understood as an expression of how unlikely it was to make it out of childhood in the first place. After all, mathematics yields an average life expectancy of thirty-five when one person dies at sixty-five and another at five—the lower number makes all the difference. Shakespeare’s day knew infant mortality rates that were shockingly high, and various incurable childhood diseases claimed half of all English children by the time they reached four. Half of the half of girls who survived puberty died giving birth to the next generation, and half of the half of boys who were their peers died either in one of the endless military conflicts of the age, or of the plague or some other epidemic disease, or from primitive and ineffectual medical practices, or of malnutrition, or lack of proper sanitation, or from some noxious agent in the food supply, or, or, or, or. Death was woven prominently into the fabric of every life, and in such a context, Shakespeare’s survival into middle age must be reckoned a triumph of endurance and a cause for celebration.

I’M BETWEEN OLD AND YOUNG

One vivid Shakespearean take on middle age acknowledges how hard it is to define anything that’s in the middle: it’s neither one extreme nor the other, neither what came before nor what’s coming after. Jaques’ Fifth Age? Think of it in terms of other periods of life that are a bit easier to pin down. If life is a journey, then middle age is a kind of layover between the young soldier’s foolish excesses, the behavior of man’s Fourth Age, and the nostalgic senior citizen’s overly sentimental effusions, the dotage of man’s Sixth.

KING LEAR
How old art thou?

KENT
Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for anything. I have years on my back forty-eight.

—
King Lear
, 1.4.33–35

In other words:

KING
lear How old are you?

KENT
I’m not that young that I get infatuated with a woman for some pretty feature like a nice voice. And I’m not that old that I start getting all mushy and sentimental about any random thing. I’m forty-eight.

How to say it:

Note how indirectly Kent answers Lear’s question. Rather than just stating his age straight out, he offer instead a wry riddle. There’s wit about his first sentence, an ironic and winking sense of humor. The second sentence, on the other hand, is plain, hard fact. Imagine the difference between “Well, I’m old enough to vote but not old enough to collect Social Security” and “I’m thirty-nine years old.” There’s a shift of tone between the two sentences. When you quote this speech, embrace that shift, and have fun with the witty way you stall before pronouncing your true age.

Kent makes expert use of a series of antitheses:
young
versus
old
is of course the central one, along with
to love
versus
to dote
, and
for singing
versus
for anything
.

It would be easy enough to offer a female-gendered equivalent of this speech, but since it’s extraordinarily ungentlemanly to ask a woman her age, I’ll spare my women readers on the shy side of fifty the awkwardness of having a way to answer.