Bardisms (8 page)

What accounts for this strange lacuna in Shakespeare’s output? What do these absent mothers mean? Four hundred years’ worth of critics have had a field day essaying these questions. The political: Shakespeare is a misogynist, so he marginalizes mothers in his works. The practical: In his period, women on stage are played by men in drag, and there is a limited number of talented female impersonators in London’s acting pool, so Shakespeare wisely keeps the number of mothers he needs to a minimum. The poetical: He enhances the metaphorical power of his characters by endowing them with an acute version of a very resonant existential problem, the search for a mother’s love. The psychological: He has an Oedipal attraction to his own mother, and his shame over it causes him to erase the mothers in his plays. The psychological, version B: He has abandonment issues with his own mother, so he can’t help but portray motherless children in his plays. (Poor Mary Arden! Forever subject to character assassination by armchair shrinks, simply for having given birth to the Greatest Writer of All Time.)

We’ll never know the reasons why Shakespeare so scants mothers and motherhood in his works. But whenever I apply the Bardisms below to the mom-related occasions of my life, I sometimes hear King Henry V’s admonition to his outnumbered troops: “The fewer men, the greater share of honor.” That is, the fact that Shakespeare says relatively little about mothers per se simply makes me appreciate those things he does say even more. See if you agree as you survey these bits of Shakespeare for Occasions of the Maternal.

I LOVE MY MOM

Here are two short Bardisms for children who love their mothers. The first works great spoken directly to Mom; the second is best suited to a toast, either from a son to his mother or about a particularly loving fellow who sees the phrase “mama’s boy” as a sincere compliment.

The first:

My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom.

—M
ARINA
,
Pericles
, 22.66–67

Second:

There’s no man in the world / More bound to’s mother.

—V
OLUMNIA
,
Coriolanus
, 5.3.159–60

How to use them:

The first line is great for any son or daughter eager to hug Mom after an absence, or just because.

Volumnia says the second line to her son while trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. Reminding him how bound he is to her, she guilt-trips him into obeying her. Therefore, some mothers may well wish to emulate Volumnia and use this Bardism to bend their wayward child to their desires. But the line can also be of use on any occasion when a parent wishes to praise a wonderful child, when a child describes his or her devotion to Mom or Dad, or when a third party admires a friend’s filial devotion.

Transgender the line if necessary with these changes: “There’s no woman in the world / More bound to her mother,” or “There’s no man in the world / More bound to his father.”

MOTHERS WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN

Throughout this book we’ll see the Bard turn to the natural world in search of metaphors that might shed light on human predicaments. Bees, flowers, fish, trees, weather formations, and especially animals are endless sources of inspiration to him. Like the sermonizing pastor who mines some nugget of holy writ and explicates its moral content as instruction to his parishioners, Shakespeare observes nature in action, then abstracts some detail from what he sees and develops it into a poetic image for human edification. Here, in
Macbeth
, Shakespeare looks at the protective parental instincts of the animals, particularly the matriarchs of the ornithological realm:

The poor wren,

The most diminutive of birds, will fight,

Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

—L
ADY
M
ACDUFF
,
Macbeth
, 4.2.9–11

In other words:

When her babies are in her nest, even the lowly wren, the tiniest bird of all, will fight hard against predators many times her size.

How to use it:

As a testament to the courage and mettle of mothers, this line is hard to beat. In the playground, at parent-teacher night at school, at the pediatrician’s office, or on the checkout line at Babies“R”Us, quote it whenever you see a mom advocating hard on behalf of her little one.

SHAKESPEARE ON FATHERS

To you your father should be as a god.

—T
HESEUS
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
1.1.47

The relative shortage of mothers in Shakespeare stands in marked contrast with what can only be called a superabundance of fathers in the plays. Dads and their concerns are one of Shakespeare’s major subjects. The plays feature good dads and bad ones, aloof dads and meddlesome ones, timid dads and self-assured ones, successful dads and failures, controlling dads and ones who are laissez-faire, wealthy patriarchs and impoverished dependents, dads who are anxious, tempestuous, and altogether neurotic, and dads who are as chill as a medicine cabinet full of Prozac. And as varied as are the paternal personalities on display, just as diverse are the emotions they arouse in their progeny.

For all their variety, however, there’s a remarkable consistency to what Shakespeare’s fathers want, namely, the best for their children, but with this caveat: that their paternal benevolence be both proffered and accepted on their own terms. Fathers of sons want their boys to be respectable and respectful, upright and worthy. If they step out of line and fail to live up to their fathers’ expectations, these boys’ll hear about it, and if they do make something of themselves, they’d better be quick to attribute their achievements to the inspiration provided them by Papa. Fathers of daughters want their girls to be virginal until marriage, and when they do walk down the aisle, it must be only into the arms of the man hand-picked for them as the most suitable. If they want to marry some other fellow, they’ll feel a hot and relentless wrath, and they’ll find no end of obstacles placed in their way. (So central is this marriage veto to the father-daughter relationship in Shakespeare that were it taken away, the plots of nearly half of his plays would collapse.)

The young men and women on the receiving end of the fatherly upbraidings in the plays respond in kind, and things grow quickly turbulent. Yet those children who manage to please their fathers both hear from them and say to them some of the most tender, stirring, and unexpected love poetry in the plays.

I LOVE YA, POP

The mother of all father speeches in Shakespeare comes near the beginning of
King Lear
, when the monarch asks his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. Goneril, up first, lays it on thick:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;

Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor;

As much as child e’er loved, or father found; 5

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;

Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

—G
ONERIL
,
King Lear
, 1.1.53–59

In other words:

Dad, I love you more than words can say. I love you more than my eyesight, more than freedom, more than free will. I love you more than any object, however expensive or unusual. I love you no less than I love life itself—life that’s full of grace, good health, beauty, and honor. I love you as much as any child ever loved or any father ever felt. My love can’t be given voice, can’t be put into words. There’s no metaphor I can conjure that can express my love, which is beyond expression of any kind.

How to say it:

This speech relies on one of Shakespeare’s favorite pieces of dramaturgical sleight-of-hand. Goneril says there’s no language that can possibly express her love, and then proceeds to talk quite eloquently about it for several lines. Whenever actors encounter this articulate inarticulacy in Shakespeare, they know that the playwright is giving them a very specific directorial note: you must discover this language as you go along. That is, you must take your time and really find each new line, each new idea, as you get to it. The Paper Trick helps you do that. Just cover all but the first line of the speech, and say only that line. Then move the paper down, revealing the next line only, and say it, and so on. You will find the words forming in your mind a phrase at a time, just as Goneril does.

Alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds, is an important aspect of this speech. The paired consonants in
words
/
wield
,
eye-sight
/
space
,
rich
/
rare
,
less
/
life
, and
father
/
found
give Goneril’s speech a wonderful deliberateness and formality, as well as a distinctly poetic sound.

Antitheses and verbs do much good work here:
child loved
versus
father found
;
love
,
wield
,
be valued
,
loved
,
found
,
makes
, and
love
.

The simple fact that Goneril says
love
or some variation on it four times in only seven lines is also worth noting. You don’t need a Ph.D. in Shakespeare to know that Goneril doesn’t mean a word of this speech and that Lear’s failure to apprehend her hypocrisy leads to cataclysm. Some might say, therefore, that to quote these lines as an expression of sincere love for one’s father is disingenuous at best and an invitation to some seriously bad karma at worst. This notwithstanding, I disagree that the speech should be avoided, and I once attended a wedding where I saw someone address this issue with glorious aplomb. The bride said these lines to her father—quite beautifully—in thanks for making her big day so sumptuous and grand, and then she added something like this: “In Shakespeare, those words are lies, excessive and empty. But to me, they’re as true, simple, and heartfelt as any I’ve ever said.” The spontaneous “
Awwwwwww
” that arose from the wedding guests testified to the effectiveness of this strategy. I know my friend won’t object if I recommend it.