How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (39 page)

Thou canst not then be false to any man
.

And here’s the big finish to the speech:
to thine own self be true
. Like every great writer, Shakespeare proportions his work so that it has a beautiful shape, and part of that shape involves building to this moment:
to thine own self be true
.

Tell your children to think of the entire passage as a whole and notice that it falls into three parts:

1. It starts simply (
Give thy thoughts no tongue,)
.

2. Then it has a middle section containing one good piece of advice after another (listen to people, don’t pass judgment on others, don’t quarrel, be brave, etc.).

3. And then it ends with the most profound piece of advice in the passage—one that illuminates and deepens the rest:

This above all, to thine own self be true
.

And it must follow, as the night the day
,

Thou canst not then be false to any man
.

Simplicity, simplicity. Just as Shakespeare uses simple things to break our hearts in emotional passages—Lear’s button, Desdemona’s handkerchief—so at times he uses simple language to make his most profound statements.

True Story

The day before my daughter left for college—which happened yesterday as I write these words (and yes, it’s true, they grow up faster than you ever believed possible)—we sat down together for the traditional father-daughter talk. And, as I had imagined for years, we discussed, among other things, Polonius’s advice to Laertes. I started to recite the lines that Polonius says just before he begins the passage that your children just learned:
POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame
.

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail

And you are stayed for. There. My blessing on thee
.

And these few precepts, in thy memory
,

Look thou character
.

[See that you inscribe these pieces of advice in your memory.]

When I got as far as
Aboard, aboard for shame
, my daughter started reciting the words from memory—all of them, from
Give thy thoughts no tongue
right through to
thou canst not then be false to any man
. I am not exaggerating one iota. We had recited it so many times over the years that it was simply in her muscle memory. As she recited it, I started to cry. I’m sorry, but I just did. It was the greatest going-away present she could have ever given me.

As of about twenty hours ago, my daughter is a college girl, and I hope she’s following Polonius’s advice.

Hamlet’s Soliloquies

H
amlet
is vast, both emotionally and in sheer stage time. It is the longest of all Shakespeare’s plays: Using the First Folio as a guide,
Hamlet
contains 3,906 lines, while
Twelfth Night
contains 2,579,
Macbeth
has 2,529, and Shakespeare’s shortest play,
The Comedy of Errors
, contains 1,918. In
Romeo and Juliet
, Shakespeare refers to
the two hours’ traffic of our stage
, but most of his plays take a great deal longer than that to perform.

Hamlet
has an unusually high number of plot twists, and giving your children a sense of the whole play, both structurally and emotionally, is a challenge. However, one way to approach it is to teach your children something about each of Hamlet’s major soliloquies and use them as markers along the narrative trail.
Hamlet
is the play in which Shakespeare makes the soliloquy into an art form, and by understanding the placement and meaning of the soliloquies, we can start to see the arc of the play.

As a reminder: We call a speech a soliloquy when a character onstage addresses that speech to the audience, or to himself as if he were thinking aloud. Usually the character is alone onstage, but if he is not, the other characters onstage cannot hear him.

The soliloquy is a stage convention, a technique that playwrights have developed to tell their stories with as much truth and depth as they can muster. This technique may seem unreal, if by reality we mean naturalism. But naturalism is only one kind of theatrical technique, and it is
often the least effective kind. A soliloquy is theatrical in the best sense: It allows the character onstage to convey his innermost thoughts directly to the audience, and it is therefore a way for the playwright—and the audience—to dig as deeply as possible into the reality beneath the mere action.

Hamlet delivers five major soliloquies in the course of the play. They are the pinnacle of literary art in the English language, and your children should become familiar with them. I will now confess that as a boy I memorized all of them. I saved up my money and bought the cast album of a famous production of
Hamlet
that had been on Broadway in the mid-1960s starring Richard Burton, directed by John Gielgud. (It still holds the record for the longest run of
Hamlet
on Broadway.) I listened to the vinyl recording until it literally wore out; but I was a bit of a fanatic about all this (“Do ya think, Dad?” my children have asked), and your children needn’t be. However, they should learn to recognize the opening lines, as well as the significance, of all of Hamlet’s major soliloquies—and by doing so, they’ll learn a great deal about the story, themes, and character of the play as a whole. In the course of this overview, we’ll pick one of the soliloquies and memorize part of it together.

Bear in mind as we look at Hamlet’s soliloquies that they are essentially Shakespeare’s way of acquainting us with Hamlet’s interior struggle between, on the one hand, obeying the Ghost’s instructions about revenge and, on the other, following the demands of his own nature, which are rational, moral, and nonviolent. This struggle illuminates the philosophical themes that abound in Hamlet—themes of appearance and reality, the demands of conscience and morality, the nature of action, the relationship of our self to the world. Also, Hamlet’s dilemma has come to symbolize basic structural differences in how we look at the world, especially the dichotomy between Romanticism, with its appeal to the emotions, and Enlightenment, with its appeal to the intellect.

Your children should also recognize that the whole notion of a soliloquy as a theatrical device to illuminate the inner struggle of a character essentially begins with
Hamlet
. Shakespeare’s plays prior to
Hamlet
contain long speeches delivered alone onstage, and many of them are masterpieces, but they are rarely about the character’s inner torment.

Hamlet
, with Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet and Jean Simmons as Ophelia
(photo credit 35.1)

Hamlet’s First Soliloquy:
O that this too, too sullied flesh

Hamlet’s first soliloquy occurs in the second scene of Act I, within minutes of the beginning of the play. As usual, Shakespeare wastes no time introducing us to his protagonist and the emotional heart of the story.

Remind your children that in Act I, Scene 1, two guards, along with Hamlet’s best friend, Horatio, have seen the Ghost of Hamlet’s father walking along the battlements of the castle. (
Who’s there?
) They decide they must tell Hamlet about it, and they hurry off. A moment later, in Scene 2, we meet Hamlet’s uncle and mother, Claudius and Gertrude, newly married, surrounded by their court; and a few moments later we meet Hamlet himself and begin to understand his mental agony.

Scene Work

As I have pointed out before, Shakespeare rarely pussyfoots around with his story. He usually begins his plays by plunging us straight into the action. This same technique holds true in microcosm, in Shakespeare’s scenes. His scenes usually have no preamble: The characters often enter the scenes in mid-discussion. This is why his plays always feel so dynamic. If you have a budding playwright on your hands, this is a great lesson to be learned and remembered.

Similarly, when my children have taken music lessons over the years, their best teachers have emphasized how certain phrases should begin with the kind of breath control and attack that makes you feel as if you are jumping onto a moving train. There should be no resting between such phrases: Keep the energy up, and the art takes care of itself. It’s the same with playwriting. Keep the story moving, and a lot of other problems solve themselves. Remind your children that the arts are related—music, drama, sculpture, painting—and that solutions are often similar from genre to genre.

Back to the First Soliloquy

So, at the beginning of Act I, Scene 2, Claudius and Gertrude are making a public appearance. Claudius deals briefly with a political issue, then grants permission to Laertes to return to France. Crucially, throughout these affairs of state, Hamlet is onstage, silent and alone, dressed in black, brooding on his father’s death and his mother’s disloyalty. Claudius finally turns to Hamlet and says:

But now my cousin
[nephew]
Hamlet and my son,…

How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

Thus, cruelly but with pretended innocence, Claudius reminds Hamlet of his position—he is both nephew and stepson at the same time; and he speaks disparagingly of Hamlet’s mood:
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?

When Gertrude chimes in and asks Hamlet why the recent events seem to have affected him so deeply, Hamlet answers:
‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’
He then assures her that his black clothes, his sighs, his tears, and his other outward shows of grief are indeed
actions that a man might play
[actions that someone might pretend],

But I have that
within
which passes
[is beyond]
show
,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe
.

It is the feelings that Hamlet has
within himself
that matter, he says; and the moment Claudius, Gertrude, and the court depart, as he sits onstage alone in his grief, Hamlet tells us what those feelings are:

O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt
,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew
,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!

That is the opening of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, and if you think your children are up for it, stop right now and teach it to them. You will never, ever regret it.

O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt
,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew
,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!

Here is the whole soliloquy. You should begin by having your children read the real words; then read them the paraphrase to make sure they understand everything. Do it a sentence at a time so that they can follow without confusion.