Bardisms (39 page)

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.

“An old man is twice a child,” Rosencrantz tells Prince Hamlet, who moments earlier mocked the elderly Lord Polonius as a “great baby” who is “not yet out of his swaddling-clouts.” The maxim “old men are twice children” was a commonplace in the Renaissance, but I like to think that Rosencrantz alludes not to the conventional wisdom but instead to Jaques’ Seventh Age.

Of course, I can’t prove that
As You Like It
was on the Masterpieces of World Drama syllabus at the Danish school Rosencrantz and his sidekick Guildenstern attended. But one of the things that happens when you spend as much time with these characters as I do is that they become very real people in your imagination. And as real people, they can go and read the same plays, even Shakespeare plays, that other real people read. To my mind, Hamlet’s read
Richard II
and
Henry V
, Coriolanus knows
All’s Well That Ends Well
, and Desdemona could ace an exam on
Much Ado About Nothing
. The characters may not be able to read ahead to the ends of their own plays, but I see no reason to deny them the glories of all the others. Besides, I can support this unorthodox theory on postmodern grounds: Shakespeare’s company employed a small number of actors—a core group of sixteen, who played all the principal roles in any given play. Thus Laertes “is” Macduff “is” Hotspur, because the same fellow played all three. And Hermia “is” Celia “is” Hero for the same reason. In this sense, Rosencrantz may not literally know Jaques or have ever heard him speak, but “Rosencrantz”—in the form of the actor who played him—certainly heard “Jaques”—in the form of the actor who played him—list the Seven Ages on that great day in theater history when
As You Like It
premiered. Jaques was likely played by Richard Burbage, who also played Hamlet—apparently he was especially convincing as a melancholy cynic with an ironic bent. Shakespeare’s company, unlike most of today’s thespians, performed a different play every day, so it was theoretically possible that Burbage-as-Jaques could tell his cast-mates about how life tends toward second childishness on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, as Hamlet, he could listen to one of them tell him about how an old man is twice a child. Such was the funhouse mirror existence of a Shakespearean actor in the English Renaissance.

My twenty-year run in the contemporary Shakespearean theater has given me the chance to watch our era’s Burbages at work, and although I’ve seen them give performances of jaw-dropping excellence and stirring emotional truthfulness, I don’t know if it’s even possible for them to inhabit Shakespeare’s words, to
live
them, in quite the same manner Burbage and company did. For those artists—the Founders, if you will—“all the world’s a stage” wasn’t just a line in a speech, it was a way of life. In Shakespeare’s theater, the boundary between onstage and off was permeable and the frontier line separating these realms, ever changing. Not all the sophistication of our modern theater can conjure such a reality. Our culture—scientific, rational, accountable—is ineluctably different from that of the English Renaissance, and it simply won’t allow for such contingent and elusive constructs.

In the English Renaissance, world and stage were two shifting points on a single continuum, and experts on the period show us how deeply this notion penetrated the entire worldview of Shakespeare’s day. Theater historians and archaeologists argue that the very architecture of the Globe Theatre itself encoded the idea. There, the audience and the actors occupied the same space, under the same open roof, lit by the same gray afternoon light of the overcast London sky. Above the theater’s main entrance gate, custom holds, was a crest showing Hercules bearing the earth on his shoulders, and the Latin motto “
Totus mundus agit histrionem
,” or “The entire world is a playhouse.” This striking assertion helps make clear why Jaques’
last scene of all
ends a strange, eventful
history
: the word was not merely a synonym for “story.” Like
shifts
in Jaques’ Sixth Age,
history
also carried with it a theatrical undertone, because during the English Renaissance, chronicle plays—works that depicted human lives unfolding against epic tapestries of large national themes—were labeled by that generic term (as in Shakespeare’s
The History of King Lear
,
The History of Henry IV
, and
The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice
). “History” the recorded facts and “history” their dramatization are interchangeable. All the world’s a stage, all people are actors, and all of life is a play. If that’s true, then a playhouse is a stage upon a stage, an actor is a person playing the part of a person playing a part, and a drama is an artistically crafted version of a life that’s already artistically crafted. The theater of the English Renaissance was a kind of Dreamland, a Coney Island fantasy palace populated by exotics and attended by people whose real life was, at least according to the sign above the theater door, as fictional as the story they were watching. When the play ended, both groups—actors and audience—simply went away, and ended, too. The players disappeared into some unseen backstage nowhere, and the audience returned to its world, which was—fasten your seatbelts—a stage!

To be sure, man’s Seventh Age is not about the endless feedback loop of life and theater. Instead, it’s about the end of this strange, eventful tale. The Seventh Age is death. But to Jaques—all right already, to Shakespeare—death and the end of a play are two ways of looking at the exact same phenomenon. In his last play the Bard makes the connection clear. “Our revels now are ended,”
The Tempest
’s Prospero announces when the play he presents at the wedding party of his daughter and son-in-law concludes. “These our actors,” he continues, “were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” Jaques was written nearly a dozen years earlier, and so he doesn’t have Prospero’s poetic precision on the subject. But what Prospero spells out is what Jaques implies in describing the
last scene of all
as
mere oblivion
.
Mere
is Elizabethan for “utter, total, absolute.” Death is in this sense a process of annihilation, or, more accurately, sublimation: the direct transformation of solid into gas, the melting of what we are, into air. Into thin air.

Jaques’ last line is chilling enough when read as a literal description of the final moments of life; we die toothless, blind, and incapable of discernment of any kind. But if we read his four repeats of
sans
, that series of bass notes that toll this magnificent speech to a close, as forerunners of Prospero’s vision of the nothingness that follows the final curtain’s fall, then
sans everything
leaps beyond the literal. Jaques’ last word—
ev-ry-thing
—with its intimation of infinity, tells us that the Seventh Age may be a time of physical decay, but it is also, stunningly, a time of metaphysical transformation and limitless possibility.

We
are
such stuff as dreams are made on. That is, our origins are the material of fictions. Life is evanescent and ephemeral, and after all its sevenfold dramas, and all the turmoil, and all the pomposity and self-importance, and all the foolishness, it ends where it began. In the dark, on a bare stage, our story over, yet somehow ready to begin again, thanks to some impossible-to-name power: magic or art or God or “Shakespeare” or faith or the essence of theater itself, that cascades over the edge of the stage with Niagara force.

Here, then, Bardisms for the Seventh Age. Shakespeare on the Occasions of Oblivion, and for that spark whose flicker kindles new light.

LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, longtime boss of New York’s notorious Genovese crime family, was sentenced to twelve years in prison after a long trial on charges of conspiracy to murder, extortion, and racketeering. His family objected that Gigante was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and therefore incompetent to stand trial; after all, he was famous for shuffling down the streets of Greenwich Village in a ratty blue bathrobe and jabbering to himself like a madman. Prosecutors countered that it was all an act, and U.S. district judge Jack Weinstein agreed, saying “the Chin” was faking his illness in order to escape justice. “One man in his time plays many parts,” wrote Weinstein in his opinion, quoting Jaques in support of his view that Gigante’s second childishness and mere oblivion were simply second-rate theatrics. “The Chin” died in prison in 2005, sans everything.

SHAKESPEARE ON DEATH

Thou know’st ’tis common—all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

—G
ERTRUDE
,
Hamlet
, 1.2.72–73

Love and death: for sheer quantity, these two subjects top the Bardisms list, although it can be a challenge to specify which comes in first and which second. Ranked by line count, love probably wins, but only by a nose. Ranked by potency—by poetry’s power to stun, to clobber, to stop all motion cold—death gets the edge, but that’s perhaps more a reflection of death’s frightful and tenacious hold on the imagination than it is a comment on the relative weakness of Shakespeare’s love poetry. One of art’s great subjects is the intersection between humanity’s terror in the face of death and its ecstasy in the face of romance—where would Italian grand opera, the nineteenth-century English novel, Bosch and Breughel, or all of Greek tragedy be without this theme?—and art often concludes that death is the more overwhelming force.

This, I think, is the reason
King Lear
and
Hamlet
are reckoned the greater Shakespearean efforts than, say,
As You Like It
or
Twelfth Night
, despite those two hardly being chopped liver, as my grandmother would have put it. (And it’s also why the life-affirming comedies are way, way more fun to watch.) I laugh myself to joyous tears at the multiple wedding that concludes
As You Like It
, and my heart leaps when the twins Viola and Sebastian appear together in the final scene of
Twelfth Night
. But as intense as those reactions always are, something of another magnitude happens when Lear howls over his daughter Cordelia, dead in his arms. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,” the king wails, “and thou no breath at all?” and the agony is so profound that I can barely look at it. When Fortinbras enters at the very end of
Hamlet
and gapes at the carnage strewn about the marble halls of Elsinore, I share his disbelief at the devastation. When I staged the murder of Desdemona in a production of
Othello
, I left every rehearsal feeling shaken and drained—the violence in the scene is too mighty, the airless, Stygian darkness in Desdemona’s bedroom too real. Shakespeare knows the force of death, understands its workings, comprehends its annihilating power, and, as always, finds words to express all this in surprising, even shocking, detail—detail so vivid and material that we, like Lear, want to wash our hands before we go on. “Let me wipe it first,” he tells Gloucester, who has asked to kiss the royal palm, “it smells of mortality.” The Bardisms below render in verse various aspects of that cataclysmic scent. I’ve found that they provide some comfort when the ugly whiff wafts across one’s path.

DEATH IS PART OF THE NATURAL COURSE OF LIFE

Gertrude, quoted above, labels death
common
. She means something like “typical,” or perhaps “widespread,” “experienced by everyone,” and hence “ordinary.” Gertrude’s notion—that all living things die—is, in a word, common in Shakespeare: “But kings and mightiest potentates must die, / For that’s the end of human misery,” says the heroic general Talbot, nearly rhyming (
Henry VI, Part I
, 3.6.22–23); doddering Justice Shallow expresses the notion in the comically repetitious phrases of a nutty old man: “Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure. Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die” (
Henry IV, Part II
, 3.2.33–34). And in a little-known late play, written in collaboration with dramatist John Fletcher, Shakespeare articulates “everybody dies” in a lyric that combines cartography, urbanism, and commerce in a remarkable and vivid metaphor:

FIRST QUEEN
            Heavens lend A thousand differing ways to one sure end.

THIRD QUEEN
            This world’s a city full of straying streets, And death’s the market-place, where each one meets.

—The Two Noble Kinsmen
, 1.5.13–16

Here’s another iteration of the “death is common” idea, a Bardism that puts a quite terrible thought into moving and even beautiful poetic form.

This is the state of man. Today he puts forth

The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,

And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,

And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 5

His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,

And then he falls.

—W
OLSEY
,
Henry VIII
, 3.2.353–59