Bardisms (23 page)

Jaques’ Fourth Age of Man limns a figure recognizable enough to anyone who’s ever seen a war movie or even a YouTube clip of steel-spined, high-and-tighted Jack Nicholson barking “You
can’t handle
the truth!” straight into the straining solar plexus of the handsomely toothy, toothily earnest Tom Cruise. But while it may be fun to read
As You Like It
during a wee-hours rerun of
A Few Good Men
, you shouldn’t push the comparison between the two too far. For one thing, if you did, a produce market’s worth of apples and oranges would cascade out of your television; that is,
As You Like It
is
As You Like It
, whereas
A Few Good Men
is, well,
A Few Good Men
. “Comparisons are odorous,” as Dogberry says in
Much Ado About Nothing
. For another, the leatherneck whom Nicholson portrays with such barnstorming brio is of a different species—a different
genus
, really—than Jaques’ aristocratic soldier. The type Jaques sketches, so familiar in the European Renaissance, indeed so standard in all European societies right up to the moment horses and swords yielded the battlefield to armored tanks and machine guns, is all but extinct in our era of all-volunteer armed forces and the military as the Great Leveler that suborns social status to military rank.

To Shakespeare’s audience, an officer and a gentleman was every bit as much the latter as he was the former. Yes, Elizabethan armies had citizen-soldiers, too: the grunts who did the majority of the fighting and dying were recruited from the rank and file of the great unwashed. But Shakespeare’s military men, from Coriolanus and Bertram and Benedick and Don Pedro and Macduff to all the titled blue bloods in all the royal families who make war on one another in all the English history plays, are members of a distinct, exclusive, hereditary, and privileged military caste. The bearded, oath-swearing, honor-obsessed gentleman soldier of Shakespeare’s plays is one of a handful of character types whose apparent similarities to types familiar in our culture serve paradoxically to render them less, not more, familiar.

To understand what Jaques is talking about—or, for that matter, to make sense of any of the Shakespearean character types transformed by time into quaint figures out of some historical diorama—we need to reconstruct a world that existed four centuries in the past. Traces of a culture long gone survive in Shakespeare’s lines, and like clay shards in an archaeological dig, they provide clues about a life and a lifestyle nearly buried by time. Our job is to reassemble these shards into a living whole. Parolles, a character in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, is one such archaeological trace. This garrulous, obsessive, self-aggrandizing soldier is detail by detail the man described in Jaques’ lines. Read the scenes he’s in, and it’s easy to suppose that Shakespeare kept a copy of the “All the world’s a stage” speech open beside him as he wrote. More surviving shards: older plays, upon which Shakespeare drew as he assembled his indelible gallery of military personages. Plautus, the ancient Roman comic dramatist whom Shakespeare mentions in
Hamlet
and rips off in
The Comedy of Errors
, wrote a play called
Miles Gloriosus
(
The Braggart Soldier
) whose eponymous hero is a type as widely known in the classical world as in the early modern: a hero exactly like the one Jaques anatomizes in his speech. And another shard: contemporary history. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, famous for being the would-be/maybe-was paramour of Queen Elizabeth I and later infamous for leading a rebellion against her that cost him his life, wore a very distinctive beard. Long, thick, orange, and cut square, it set a trend in facial hair that wannabe soldiers imitated up and down England. That trend reached its apogee in 1599, the year Essex went from consort to convict, and the year in which Shakespeare wrote Jaques’ famous lines.

A character in a play, an ancient literary form, a short-lived tonsorial fad. Neither revelatory nor particularly meaningful on their own, when taken together they unlock the fourth of Jaques’ Seven Ages. The key is what Parolles, Miles Gloriosus, and the hirsute Earl of Essex share in common: they’re laughable. Parolles is the comic relief in
All’s Well
, the butt of a practical joke whose climax is as prodigiously funny as any sequence in Shakespeare.
Miles Gloriosus
is a knockabout farce whose title character is an absolute and unregenerate buffoon. As for Essex’s beard, check out a portrait of the earl and you’ll see on his chin a barbigerous bulk that makes the poor fellow look like an Elizabethan cross between two Sams: Uncle and Yosemite. When we piece together these Renaissance shards, we see something otherwise invisible in the Support Our Troops culture we inhabit: the soldier as a subject of lampoon, not reflexive and solemn praise. His oaths make him sound like a madman. His beard makes him look like an idiot. And his worship of honor and pursuit of renown lead him to where only a fool would go by choice—straight into the firing line. It turns out that for Jaques—for Shakespeare—the Fourth Age of Man is as ridiculous as the three that came before it.

Exhuming the bones of a faded culture isn’t the only way to sense Jaques’ sardonic tone. The words he uses and the way he arranges them also hint at his perspective. The soldier’s oaths are
strange
, an adjective that in Shakespeare almost always means “abnormal,” “so unusual that it’s astonishing”; certainly his pardine chin-beard is all that, too. He’s
jealous
—excessively, even suspiciously, vigilant about or devoted to his code of honor. His anger is
sudden
: shocking, surprising, perhaps even unmotivated, and there’s a capriciousness in the sound of the alliterative
qu
’s of
quick in quarrel
. These details give us a noisy and eccentric firebrand—I see in my mind’s eye a Napoleonic sort, a beribboned, bewhiskered bantamweight of a guy, all chin up and chest out, all hair-trigger and in your face—but it’s the next details that tell us he’s truly nuts. The fourth line in the image insists that what the soldier values above all is
reputation
, which for Jaques is an attribute entirely devoid of value. It’s but a
bubble
, something trivial and empty, something fragile, temporary, and easily destroyed. And
reputation
scans with five syllables here—
REP-you-TAY-sheeun
—a fact that somehow puts the whole idea in quotation marks and lends it an affected, preposterous aspect. More absurd than the bubble itself is the precise location where the soldier seeks it, a place set up by a superbly provocative line ending after
reputation
:

Seeking the bubble reputation

(Where?—Ready?—Really want to know?—Okay, then)

Even in the cannon’s mouth.

Who but a nincompoop would willingly, recklessly look there?

The Third Age was about swoons and breathlessness, and the Fifth will comprise corpulence and pompous tedium. At least this Fourth Age, despite its fatuousness, is a time of energy and physical vigor. The Bardisms below, then, include not only Shakespeare on the Soldier’s Occasions, those life events concerning combativeness, courage, victories, and losses, but they also glance at Shakespeare on the Occasions of Life’s Vibrant Years, those times of productivity and achievement, professional conduct, and personal accomplishment.

SHAKESPEARE ON SOLDIERS

To th’ wars, my boy, to th’ wars!

—P
AROLLES
,
All’s Well That Ends Well
, 2.3.262

Most of Shakespeare’s soldiers are cut from cloth different from the one Jaques talks about. Their cloth is not buffoonish, but is instead distinctly crimson in hue. In
Henry V
, for example, soldiers “nothing do but meditate on blood.” In
Richard II
, they open “the purple testament of bleeding war.” In
Macbeth
, their weapons have “smoked with bloody execution.” Usually, when Shakespeare thinks
soldier
, he writes
violence
,
blood
, and
death
.

Usually, but not always. Sprinkled throughout the canon are a small number of speeches that portray a third kind of soldier, a man who is neither a foolish braggart nor a killing machine. These speeches frame a figure of upstanding morals, dashing countenance, refined carriage, abundant bravery, and consummate charm. Shakespeare’s model soldiers represent the best of the European aristocratic military tradition. They are exemplars of that tradition’s highest values, which are summed up in a famous volume scholars know Shakespeare read: Baldassare Castiglione’s Renaissance classic,
The Book of the Courtier
.

Castiglione was an eminent Italian diplomat who began his career in the court of the Duke of Urbino, a scintillating place of unparalleled cultural, artistic, and intellectual sophistication.
The Book of the Courtier
distills the essence of Urbino’s charms, and spells out the qualities that make it the ideal Renaissance court. Chief among them is the presence of countless Renaissance gentlemen, perfect specimens who are, in short, everything you’d want your son to grow up to be. Their defining attribute, the most important ingredient of the ideal chivalric life, is something called in Italian
sprezzatura
. The word is almost impossible to render in English, except by making reference to the defining characteristics of the Count of Monte Cristo, or James Bond, or, ironically, Shakespeare’s own perfect soldiers.
Sprezzatura
has to do with effortlessness, ease in all situations, the ability to make even the most arduous task seem casual, and a knack for seeming to do the most challenging things without devoting to them any preparation or even a moment’s thought. Shakespeare’s soldiers have
sprezzatura
to spare, and when you have occasion to talk about anyone in the service, you can turn to them for the words you’ll need.

HE DISTINGUISHED HIMSELF IN BATTLE

Here’s Shakespeare for the Occasion of the Honorable Discharge, or the Medal-Pinning Ceremony, or even the Admiring Salute.

He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.

—M
ESSENGER
,
Much Ado About Nothing
, 1.1.40

How to say it:

If your sprezzaturish soldier is a woman, then start with
She
, and if the person you’re talking to is no lady, then substitute
sirrah
(SEER-ah) or
fellow
, or, to avoid gender altogether, try
truly
.

LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

When journalistic panjandrum Ted Koppel watched American troops drive their tanks into Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he quoted
Henry V
—or what he said was
Henry V
; it was actually
Julius Caesar
, but Ted still gets an A for effort—when he turned to the camera and gravely said, “Wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.” Okay, so the actual quote begins
Cry havoc
, not
wreak
, and it’s
let slip
the dogs, not
unleash
. Whatever. A hat tip to Ted for finding a Bardism for the most unlikely of occasions.

PLEASE DON’T LET MY BELOVED SOLDIER GET INJURED

The folks back on the home front always worry sick about their brave sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and mothers and fathers on the front lines. This Bardism is Shakespeare’s expression of the prayer in their hearts, Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Loved One in Harm’s Way:

O you leaden messengers

That ride upon the violent speed of fire,

Fly with false aim, cleave the still-piecing air

That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord.

—H
ELENA
,
All’s Well That Ends Well
, 3.2.108–11