Bardisms (37 page)

When you quote these four lines, try to take note of the fact that they comprise two rhyming couplets (the Friar’s speech is thirty lines long, all of it in rhyme).
Live
and
give
obviously rhyme.
Lies
and
qualities
make a so-called near-rhyme: they are almost but not quite the same sound. The rhymes give the passage a slight sense of quaintness, of expressing tried-and-true wisdom. Let your listeners hear it.

I sometimes recite these lines at the cash register when I visit health food stores to stock up on echinacea, Chinese herbs, and other remedies. It’s a habit that irritates my wife but most of the time earns a smile from the yogi hemp-head true believer who rings up my purchase.

WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING MORE FOR HIM

When natural cures fail and modern hospital technology throws up its hands, turn to Cerimon, the Hippocrates of
Pericles
. His Bardism on medical futility couches some harsh news in kindness and eloquence.

There’s nothing can be ministered to nature

That can recover him.

—C
ERIMON
,
Pericles
, 3.2.7–8

How to use it:

Swap in
her
if need be.

Certainly useful to the
Grey’s Anatomy
set, Cerimon’s brief statement might also prove valuable when applied metaphorically to anyone incorrigible: a madcap friend who won’t stop joking; a professional daredevil determined to encase himself in ice for a week; an adventure tourist bent on a bungee-jumping expedition around the world.

I’M GOING TO SUE FOR MALPRACTICE

Cerimon possesses at least the dignity to report on his own professional impotence in person. Other Shakespearean physicians are far less respectful to their charges. In this blunt and sobering Bardism, Lucrece complains that inattentive doctors are the moral equivalents of venal judges and cruel tyrants. Use it not only on those—I hope rare—occasions when the doctor’s orders aren’t doing the trick, but also whenever your struggles are overlooked by those who should be paying attention.

The patient dies while the physician sleeps;

The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds;

Justice is feasting while the widow weeps;

Advice is sporting while infection breeds.

—The Rape of Lucrece
, 904–7

In other words:

The sick person passes away while the doctor snoozes. Starving children go hungry while the corrupt leader responsible for their privation parties down. Those in the criminal justice system are out having lunch instead of busy prosecuting the murderer of the bereft widow’s husband. Disease spreads like wildfire while the experts are on the golf course.

Some details:

Shakespeare sustained his theater career alongside an entirely separate and equally successful life as a poet. Yes, his thirty-eight magnificent plays are his claim to fame today, but had you asked a Londoner of the early seventeenth century who William Shakespeare was, he’d have answered, “He’s the brilliant bloke who wrote that gorgeous and titillating
Venus and Adonis
.” That poem, from which we quoted in Chapter Three, was more successful by a mile than even his best-selling published plays: there were nine separate printings of it during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and a handful more in the two decades after his death.
Venus and Adonis
, along with
The Rape of Lucrece
, Shakespeare’s other great narrative poem, quoted here, show that Shakespeare was and is not only the world’s greatest playwright, but that he’s one of the geniuses of non-dramatic English poetry, too.

While it’s likely that Shakespeare turned to poetry in order to help pay the bills during the plague years of the early 1590s, when he would have been on forced furlough from his regular gig at the government-closed playhouses, it’s by no means clear that he regarded poetry as a secondary calling. Quite the contrary: of the more than three dozen of his works that reached print, the only two we can be certain he personally supervised through the publishing process were
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
.

Both poems are over a thousand lines long. Both are inspired by stories Shakespeare found in the work of his favorite classical author, Ovid—stories to which he’d return many times throughout his career. Both are about lust and its consequences, and both link sex and death in ways that would make Dr. Freud dance a jig. In the first, the wicked Tarquin, a member of Rome’s ruling family, rapes Lucrece, wife of the General Collatine, while the latter is away in battle. Lucrece, horrified and ashamed, commits suicide. When Collatine returns to Rome and learns what’s happened, he raises a revolt against the Tarquins, which leads to the foundation of the Roman republic. In
Venus and Adonis
, a handsome young man, Adonis, refuses the rapacious sexual advances of Venus, the middle-aged goddess of love. He goes off to hunt and is gored to death by a wild boar. Venus is so devastated that she curses love, which is why to this day love and pain are always intertwined (one example: “It [i.e., love] shall be cause of war and dire events, / And set dissension ’twixt the son and sire”). Both poems show flashes of the genius Shakespeare will manifest steadily later in his career, and both deploy dramatic effects in an unusually sophisticated way—no surprise given that their author already knew a thing or two about playwrighting. I teach material from both poems in my acting classes, and my students enjoy it. I recommend taking a look at them sometime.

SHAKESPEARE ON NEWS

What news on the Rialto?

—S
HYLOCK
,
The Merchant of Venice
, 1.3.33

Arthur Miller articulated a fundamental principle of good dramatic construction in one of his many essays about his writing process. “Every line of dialogue in a play,” he pronounced, “must deliver new information. If it doesn’t, then it must be cut.” Miller’s plays—the early ones, anyway—abide scrupulously by this rule, and are as lean and tightly composed as any of the masterpieces of world dramatic literature. Miller’s model during that first phase of his career was one of the pillars of the canon, Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama. Norway’s favorite son was another writer fanatical about cutting away the fat until all that’s left is dialogue that drives the play forward, that delivers news.

Shakespeare’s artisanship is less disciplined than either Miller’s (a carpenter by avocation, whose love of precision and handicraft is as visible in every mortise and tenon he joined as it is in his characters’ speech) or Ibsen’s (an abstemious Scandinavian whose revulsion at excess is evident in his life as well as his work). Yet for all the Bard’s sprawl and ornament—his piling on of metaphor and linguistic filigree, and his refusal to say something once when he can say it three times—he is in his own way a devout preacher of Miller’s “new information or cut it” gospel. Witness the hundreds and hundreds of times he writes the word
news
. That little syllable catapults his plots forward as characters ask “What’s the news with thee?” or demand “How now, what news?” or declare “This is the news at full.” Indeed, Shakespeare delivers so much
news
that he could bring a smile to the stony visages of Miller and Ibsen, tongue-tie Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and Charlie Gibson, and pick up a Pulitzer or two, all without breaking stride. Here’s a selection of some of his stop-the-presses bulletins: Bardisms for the news junkie.

BREAKING DEVELOPMENTS…

If I ran the Federal Communications Commission, I’d mandate that television stations replace the familiar stentorian bark of “We interrupt this program for a special report” with this more poetic formulation. Use it to announce your unfolding story.

With news the time’s in labor, and throws forth

Each minute some.

—C
AMIDIUS
,
Antony and Cleopatra
, 3.7.80–81

In other words:

There’s so much news that it’s like the world is a woman pregnant with it, and she’s in the delivery room giving birth to more by the minute.

I’VE GOT GOOD NEWS!

There’s no more delightful duty than to be a messenger carrying wonderful news. Celebrate your felicitous info by announcing it thus:

Tidings do I bring, and lucky joys, / And golden times, and happy news of price.

—P
ISTOL
,
Henry IV, Part II
, 5.3.89–90

In other words:

I’ve got something to say, and it’s about joyous good fortune, and beautiful moments, and giddy news that’s really valuable.

IT’S ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER

Alas, not all news is good, and bad news has an irritating habit of clustering together and hitting like a tsunami. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions,” says Claudius to his wife in
Hamlet
. She echoes him a few scenes later with this Bardism, Shakespeare on the Occasion of the World Coming to an End.