Bardisms (38 page)

One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,

So fast they follow.

—G
ERTRUDE
,
Hamlet
, 4.7.134–35

In other words:

The bad news is coming on so fast and furious that each piece trips over the one in front of it.

SHAKESPEARE ON WEATHER

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

—M
ACBETH
,
Macbeth
, 1.3.36

Just as he’s standing by with a pithy phrase for life’s red-letter days—the weddings we love and the funerals we don’t—Shakespeare’s also ready with tidbits for the everyday moments that make up the majority of the days of our lives. No subject of conversation better suits those quotidian occasions—standing on line at the grocery store, whiling away the wait at the bus stop, greeting a neighbor across a picket fence—than that old standard, the weather. The Bard’s a past master on the topic, as these Bardisms attest. Use each to comment on the meteorological event it describes, or as a gloss on some metaphorical version of said atmospheric condition.

IT’S THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER / IT’S THE DEAD OF WINTER

As the mercury soars, bear this Bardism in mind:

Fie, this is hot weather, gentlemen.

—F
ALSTAFF
,
Henry IV, Part II
, 3.2.90

And as the mercury plunges, remember this one:

’Tis bitter cold, / And I am sick at heart.

—F
RANCISCO
,
Hamlet
, 1.1.6–7

HERE COMES THE SPRINGTIME THAW

Worried that winter will never end? Or that some other, more personal stretch of icy cold and early dark might never lift? Queen Margaret has some words of encouragement that will help you await the arrival of warmer days.

Cold snow melts with the sun’s hot beams.

—Q
UEEN
M
ARGARET
,
Henry VI, Part II
, 3.1.223

THAT WAS QUITE A DELUGE

Here’s Shakespeare on the Occasion of Touring the Storm Damage. For the more poetically inclined, it’s also a Bardism about how the whips and scorns of time leave us looking a little green around the gills.

Much rain wears the marble.

—G
LOUCESTER
,
Henry VI, Part III
, 3.2.50

In other words:

Rain can erode even things as durable as marble.

’TAIN’T A FIT NIGHT OUT FOR MAN NOR BEAST

“This disturbèd sky / Is not to walk in,” advises the sage Cicero in
Julius Caesar
when he spots Cassius running around, shirtless, in the middle of a storm. I’ve taken the Roman orator’s counsel to heart on many occasions, even quoting it when urging my wife to take an umbrella with her into a cloudy Brooklyn day. Cicero’s words might have benefited other Shakespearean characters had they heard them: King Lear on the heath, the sailors in the opening scene of
The Tempest
, and the eponymous hero of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known late plays,
Pericles
. Here’s his Bardism for a raging storm.

Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!

Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man

Is but a substance that must yield to you,

And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.

—P
ERICLES
,
Pericles
, 2.1.41–44

In other words:

Let up a little, you furious heavens! Wind, rain, and thunder, please bear in mind that man is made of weak stuff that must bow down to your force. I, as such a man, surrender to you.

Some details:

Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson dismissed
Pericles
and its plot full of coincidences and melodramatic contrivances—shipwrecks, storms, resurrections, reunions—as “a mouldy tale…and stale.” Perhaps so, but it’s fresh in one sense, at least: the play is the first of Shakespeare’s late-career experiments with a form critics label tragicomedy or romance.
Cymbeline
,
The Tempest
, and
The Winter’s Tale
are also in this genre, and if they seem the more accomplished plays, that’s not only because by the time he wrote them, Shakespeare had gone through the practice round of writing this one, but also because at least half of
Pericles
is believed to be by someone other than the Bard.

Collaborative playwriting was not uncommon in the period, and Shakespeare shared authorship with others in more than one of his plays. In the case of
Pericles
, he chose a distinctly minor-league partner: the second-tier playwright and pamphleteer George Wilkins, about whom little is known (he once gave a deposition in a lawsuit in which Shakespeare was also a witness; he wrote a novel called
The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre
, which the play follows in many places; he was a small-time pimp). Why Shakespeare would choose such an unlikely and unwholesome writing partner is one of the many things about his life and career scholars can only guess at. Some believe that Wilkins came to Shakespeare’s theater company with the idea of dramatizing his
Pericles
novel, and that when Shakespeare found in it some themes he was already exploring at the time, he jumped on board and made the thing work. Others argue that the play we know today is Shakespeare’s polish of Wilkins’ own draft, or that Wilkins finished an incomplete Shakespearean original. However the play was written, Shakespeare and everyone else in his orbit knew it was lesser stuff, which is why the play wasn’t included in the First Folio of 1623. The mystery of its composition notwithstanding, the play has its charms—the Pericles/Marina father/daughter reunion is one of Shakespeare’s best scenes—and its stageworthiness has been proven many times over the centuries. As for the woebegone George Wilkins, wherever he is today, he can enjoy the knowledge that his name endures as a footnote in the life of a genius. If that seems like cold comfort, it’s at least better than disappearing entirely, which is certainly the fate of those Jacobean whoremongers who didn’t have the good fortune to co-author a play with the immortal Bard.

GLOBAL WARMING

As thrilling as it can be to listen to Shakespeare talk about something in his experience that we recognize as identical in ours despite the centuries that have passed—the beauty of a flower, the giddy whirl of new love—it’s also delightful to hear him prophetically address a phenomenon that hadn’t yet occurred in human history when he was alive. He does so in this excerpt. Greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, melting polar ice, and Al Gore are all things Shakespeare didn’t, and couldn’t, know about, and yet here he talks in unequivocal terms about the harmful effects of climate change. Like so many of the Bardisms in this book, this one demonstrates the uncanny way a shift of context brings new and vivid meaning to a four-hundred-year-old passage of poetic text.

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mock’ry, set. The spring, the summer, 5

The childing autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world

By their increase now knows not which is which.

—T
ITANIA
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, 2.1.107–14

In other words:

The seasons are changing. White-tinged frost now falls on the red rose, and the icy crown of Hiems, god of winter, now sprouts a sweet-smelling garland of summer flowers that seems to mock him. Spring, summer, abundant autumn, tempestuous winter: they’re exchanging their usual appearances. And the astonished world, seeing them spin out of control, can’t tell them apart.

How to use it:

Wow your dinner companions by laying out this beauty of a speech when the talk turns to carbon footprints and the Kyoto Protocol. It’s also great for the next news report of some climate-change-fueled megastorm, or, more simply, for a hot winter day or cold summer one.

Some strong antitheses make this speech work. The image of frost in the lap of a rose is opposed to the equally odd image of flowers set in the crown of Hiems, the god of winter. Think
frosts / rose
versus
Hiems’ crown / flowers
. Note also that
which
versus
which
in the final line is also an antithesis.

Two verbs are crucial here.
Change
at the end of line 6 needs special emphasis, and
knows not
gives the entire speech its kick on line 8. (And note the gong-like monosyllables with which Titania drives her point home: Now.
Knows
.
Not.
Which
. Is.
Which!
)

Some details:

The evocative image
childing autumn
on line 6 of this rich bit of poetry is a hard one to paraphrase.
Childing
seems to be related to giving birth, and so, linked to autumn, the time of harvest, likely means something like “abundant,” or “yielding a large crop.” Titania—well, Shakespeare—is the first person to use the word in this sense in English, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Of course, there’s every possibility that the
OED
got it wrong and that Shakespeare himself wouldn’t recognize this sense of
childing
. That’s because there’s every possibility that he actually wrote a different word. Although Titania says
childing
in the first two published texts of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
—a 1600 quarto and the First Folio of 1623—in the Fourth Folio of 1685 she says
chiding
, making the phrase
chiding autumn
mean, roughly, “harsh November.”
*