Bardisms (33 page)

Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.

—B
ALTHAZAR
,
The Comedy of Errors
, 3.1.26

In other words:

As long as you provide a warm welcome, you can have a fab party even without an elaborate spread.

DON’T TELL ME WHAT FUN I CAN AND CAN’T HAVE

It’s inevitable that wherever there’s a celebration, there’s some stiff who wants to shut it down. Here’s Shakespeare for the Jerk Who Harshes Your Buzz.

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

—S
IR
T
OBY
,
Twelfth Night
, 2.3.103–4

In other words:

Do you really believe that just because you don’t like parties, no one else should be allowed to have a good time?

How to say it:

This is Shakespeare’s great cry of “Who the hell do you think you are?!” Use it when your downstairs neighbor starts pounding on his ceiling with a broom to get you to stop Riverdancing with your friends. Wheel it out, too, for any stick-in-the-mud who believes his way is superior to yours, and for every know-it-all who would restrict you with her self-imposed rules and regulations.

The line calls for some serious scorn. To find it, stress the second
thou
, and put
virtuous
in the most dismissive, ironic quotation marks you can. To get a feel for the power of Sir Toby’s famous citation of
cakes and ale
as the ultimate in sensual pleasures (and where would Somerset Maugham be without it?) substitute your favorite gustatory indulgence—the more decadent, the better—then multiply it by one hundred. Despite their many resemblances, Sir Toby is not Homer Simpson (although they both like to burp a lot—indeed,
Belch
is Toby’s last name), and he’s talking about more than just donuts and beer.
Cakes and ale
means every one of life’s pleasures, from the simple to the sublime. Toby’s fury arises from his disbelief that anyone would dare force him to rein in his hedonistic appetites.

Some details:

Thou
in Sir Toby’s line refers to Malvolio, his nemesis, and the steward, or servant-in-chief, at Toby’s niece Olivia’s house, the stately home where Toby lives. Three times in
Twelfth Night
, Malvolio is called a “Puritan.” Modern audiences hear the label as a description of Malvolio’s dour personality, and indeed in his joyless demeanor and fervent opposition to frivolity of any kind, he is puritanical. But Shakespeare’s audience understood the word differently. For them, “Puritan” was a relatively new label for a strain of Protestantism that believed in strict religious discipline, and the reform of Church of England doctrine and ritual in the direction of severity and simplicity. The word thus had a distinctly derisive strain, and it was used by mainstream Protestants as a cudgel to marginalize what they regarded as a growing threat.

And what a threat it turned out to be. In 1600, when
Twelfth Night
was written, the Puritans may have been nuisances, Malvolio-like party poopers, but a mere four decades later, they would be revolutionaries whose political and economic power would overthrow the English monarchy, plant the seeds of the governmental system that rules the United Kingdom today, and, not incidentally, export to the New World many of the political thinkers who would sire the United States of America. As a character in a play, Sir Toby has ample reason to despise Puritans: they loathed the theater—fulminated against it, in fact—and in one of their first acts upon seizing power in 1642, they shut down London’s theater industry. The fifteen words of this one line of Toby’s suggest that Shakespeare saw it coming. With the eerie foresight that great playwrights often display, he captured here what was really the central political story of England in his generation: the mighty struggle for power between the Puritans and their adversaries.

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.

—F
ALSTAFF
,
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?

—P
ETRUCHIO
,
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.

—C
APULET
,
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!

—S
HALLOW
,
Henry IV, Part II
, 3.2.29–30

We have heard the chimes at midnight.

—F
ALSTAFF
,
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
.