Bardisms (34 page)

Some details:

Falstaff’s wonderful metaphor of his party-boy youth—he stayed up late enough to hear the church bells chime midnight—supplied Orson Welles with the title for one of the best Shakespeare films ever made.
Chimes at Midnight
is a 1965 screen adaptation of Welles’
Five Kings
, his famous stage condensation of Shakespeare’s English history plays. The film tells the stories of
Henry IV, Parts I and II
and
Henry V
and features not only Welles’ own finest performance as Falstaff but also countless sequences that show his unparalleled mastery of filmmaking. Scene after scene, he translates Shakespeare’s text into cinematic terms so evocative that Shakespeare himself couldn’t have imagined them better. The climactic battle sequence is an extraordinary tour de force, and its camera work and editing have been studied, emulated, and stolen wholesale in just about every war movie made in the past four decades (directors Mel Gibson and Steven Spielberg explicitly acknowledged their borrowings from Welles for the battles in, respectively,
Braveheart
and
Saving Private Ryan
).
Chimes at Midnight
is difficult to find because of legal entanglements dating back to the shenanigans Welles pulled, in his post–
Citizen Kane
disfavor, in order to get the movie made, but now and then it shows up on television. See it if you can.

I’M IN GOOD SHAPE FOR MY AGE

One Shakespearean character who manages to grow old gracefully and without too much Sturm und Drang is Adam in
As You Like It
. Perhaps his happy fate is a function of the actor who played him: theater lore holds that William Shakespeare himself trod the boards in the role. He’d have been in his thirties at the time—less than half the character’s age—so it’s hard to credit the legend too far, but it’s fun to imagine him pronouncing this delightful Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of the Spry Old Fox.

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty,

For in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

The means of weakness and debility. 5

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,

Frosty but kindly.

—A
DAM
,
As You Like It
, 2.3.48–54

In other words:

I may look old, but I’m still vigorous and full of beans. That’s because, when I was young, I made sure not to take anything that would inflame my passions and stir me up to no good. And I didn’t go crazily chasing after all sorts of things that would in the long run be bad for me. The result is that in my old age, I’m like a bracing winter’s day: cold, but enjoyable.

How to use it:

I’ve pressed this speech into service on two very different occasions. The first was when a pal told me that his seventy-five-year-old dad had just won a tennis tournament held in his Florida retirement community. “Tell him to say this when he accepts his trophy,” I advised, and Papa did, to general approbation. The second was when a student of mine asked for something to read at her uncle’s seventieth-birthday party. I advised her to substitute
he
and
his
for Adam’s
I
and
my
and to present the passage as Shakespeare’s tribute to her hale and hearty uncle. She reported that the speech was met with gales of laughter: apparently her uncle’s youth was not quite as abstemious as Adam’s, so the lines about having avoided rebellious liquors took on an amusing irony.
Lusty
also prompted giggles, especially from my student’s aunt, who gave her husband a knowing—and appreciative—wink!

The pronouns
she
and
her
will render Adam’s text suitable for Eve.

SHAKESPEARE ON GRANDPARENTHOOD

Thy grandam loves thee.

—K
ING
J
OHN
,
King John
, 3.3.3

Few events mark the beginning of the Sixth Age of Man as definitively as the birth of a grandchild, yet grandparents in the
Complete Works
are thin on the ground, and what few there are hardly embody the cookies-and-cardigans warmth I associate with my own parents’ parents. At the same time, dynastic issues are everywhere in the canon; in practically every single play some part of the story turns on what’s bequeathed by an ancestor to his or her progeny, be that their moral values, some political imperative, or money and real estate. For Shakespeare, each generation is a product of all the generations that precede it, and so firmly is this genealogical principle embedded in his works that his briefest glance in its direction communicates it with force and clarity. The Bard doesn’t need to put a forefather onstage in order to convey his presence in the lives of his descendants; merely mentioning his name or one of his famous exploits summons everything that person could have wished to leave his dynasty. And that, I think, is why Shakespearean grandparents are so scarce in the flesh. The very DNA of the plays encodes the essence of “grand-parentness,” so Shakespeare can economize on ink and vellum by not writing the actual people. Put another way, in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, the idea
grandma
is a perfectly sufficient substitute for Grandma herself.

In life, of course, no such grandmotherly substitution is imaginable. Paradoxically enough—and fortunately for those Shakespeare quoters in need of a Bardism for Mom’s mom—in two lines out of the thousands and thousands he wrote, Shakespeare managed to express, even absent a grandma, just what grandmas are all about.

GRANDPARENTS HAVE A LOT OF LOVE TO OFFER

Those two lines are spoken by Richard III as he labors to persuade a horrified Queen Elizabeth to allow him to marry her young daughter. Richard imagines a future in which his bride will bear him children who will call him father and the Queen grandmother. And those grandchildren, although sired by a man she hates, will nonetheless, Richard assures the Queen, be “even of your mettle, of your very blood,” and so will “be a comfort to your age.” It’s a bold rhetorical move that yields Richard what he seeks, and yields us Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Visit to Granny’s House.

A grandam’s name is little less in love

Than is the doting title of a mother.

—K
ING
R
ICHARD
,
Richard III
, 4.4.273.12–273.13

In other words:

The word Grandma has in it the same amount of love as the very love-filled word Mama.

How to use it:

Feel free to change the gender of the lines—
grandam
becomes
grandsire
, and
mother
becomes
father
.

These lines can help grandparents convey to their families exactly how intense is their love for their grandkids. They can also serve as an expression of affection and gratitude to Gram and Gramps for the quantity and quality of their love. Perhaps most useful of all, they can mediate the kinds of disputes that arise when Granny lets the kids chow down on Pop-Tarts in direct contravention of Mom’s prohibition against excessive sugar intake. (Disputes, I should add, I know nothing about.)

SHAKESPEARE ON TRIBUTES

Give me a staff of honor for mine age.

—T
ITUS
,
Titus Andronicus
, 1.1.198

The Sixth Age of Man is a time when work wraps up and life slows down. The lean and slippered pantaloon walks more slowly, talks more slowly, and often thinks a bit more slowly than he did back in the high-energy salad days of Ages Three and Four. A mentor of mine once told me that the reason people slow in old age is because taking a more leisurely approach to time is their hard-earned reward for seven long decades of hurtling, hustling, and bustling. Looked at in this way, retirement isn’t the end of a career in the workforce, it’s the beginning of a new career of unhurried experiences and easygoing pleasures. This explains why a gold watch is the standard retirement gift: the retiree deserves to tell the hours of his repose in style. For those occasions on which that gold watch is presented, for those moments when the reward that is the Sixth Age’s slower pace is publicly bestowed, indeed, for those situations when words of tribute of any kind are called for, Shakespeare’s ready for action.

YOU ARE A VERY SPECIAL GUY

One of the great things about Shakespeare’s words of tribute is that they manage to be moving and heartfelt without being sentimental. Here are two wonderful examples.

First, no character treads the line between true feeling and treacle better than Hotspur, the no-nonsense soldier we’ve met before. His tribute to Lord Douglas, his Scottish comrade in arms, is one of my favorites: matter-of-fact, yet full of love.