How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (9 page)

Bonus Passage

When the lovers reach their highest state of confusion, Oberon declares to Puck that it is time to straighten things out. He instructs Puck to use fog to create confusion, then use a magic antidote to sort out the couples. In a hilarious scene of mistaken identities, Puck does just what he’s told, and by the end of the scene, the four lovers are asleep on the ground. Puck’s final “blessing” on the couples is one that you and your children should memorize right now.

Jack shall have Jill;

Naught shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well
.

For me, this epigram stands for the endings of all the romantic comedies ever written. On the surface it means “they all lived happily ever after,” but the subtext is more complex and has a slightly darker cast.
The man shall have his mare again
. Not his woman, but his mare. Bottom became a donkey and then a fairy queen fell in love with him. There are things going on in our lives that are hard to fathom. They are beyond our reach. They live in our dreams.

Jack shall have Jill;

Naught shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well
.

It is especially interesting that Shakespeare has Puck comment on this moment from a distance, as though he is the creator of this “play” that the lovers are enacting in front of him. It’s as though he’s acknowledging that the lovers are operating in a fiction, just the way Jack and Jill are part of a nursery rhyme. Also, Puck is “breaking the fourth wall” of the stage: He is bringing the audience into his conspiracy and acknowledging that he’s in a play that we are watching. Again and again throughout Shakespeare’s plays, we’ll see Shakespeare use the image of a playwright creating a play-within-a-play, making theater versus “real life” a central metaphor of his vision of how we live our lives. At this moment, Puck is the playwright commenting on his “actors”:

Jack shall have Jill;

Naught shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well
.

There is a similar moment in Mozart’s opera
The Marriage of Figaro
when the lovers are in jeopardy despite ruse after ruse to put things right. The crafty servant Figaro has confidence, however, that everything will turn out well, and he likens the situation to watching a comedy onstage, thereby distancing himself for a moment from his fellow actors. He sings:

The theater prescribes

It all ends with a smile.

I only hope that wedding bells

Might keep the peace awhile.

(
The Marriage of Figaro
,
Act II, Scene 10, trans. McClatchy)

I’d be willing to bet that the librettist of
The Marriage of Figaro
(Lorenzo da Ponti) was inspired by Puck’s similar blessing in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. As a writer of stage comedies, I find these lines iconic—they remind me of the whole history of stage comedy—and I have them pinned on the wall just above my desk:

Jack shall have Jill;

Naught shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well
.

Poetry Versus Prose: How Does Poetry Work?

T
hree of the four passages that you have memorized so far with your children are in the form of poetry, and the fourth is in prose. How can your children tell the difference?

As a practical matter, it couldn’t be easier. Point out that with most poetry, and certainly Shakespeare’s poetry, each line begins with a capital letter and each line has a defined length.

I
know a bank where the wild thyme blows
,

W
here oxlips and the nodding violet grows
,

With prose, the lines on the page don’t stop at the end of a rhythmic unit; they just keep snaking along continuously.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream
.

Explain to your children that as a literary matter, the difference between poetry and prose is more complex. In general, prose is the way we speak to each other in everyday language. Poetry, on the other hand, is heightened language that takes us on an emotional, visceral, intellectual
journey every time we say it out loud. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that “prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals the
best
words in the best order.” William Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” And Emily Dickinson said,

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Shakespeare himself defined a poet, right in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Toward the end of the play, Duke Theseus comments on the lovers, who have told him about their strange adventures in the woods. He observes that lovers and poets require the same kinds of seething imaginations in order to turn their dreams into reality:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling
,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name
.

This very passage is a good example of poetry at its best. By creating eight uninterrupted beats in lines three and four,

And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown
,

Shakespeare makes the poet’s thoughts sound like a long ribbon flowing from his brain.

Poetry, by definition, has two levels of meaning. There is the meaning on the surface, what the characters or narrator literally say and do and think; and there is the meaning underlying the verse, the meaning that is implied by what is on the surface. This is created through the intellectual content of the words themselves, as well as the sounds of the words and the rhythms of the lines. Prose, with its practical purposes, is often (though not always) operating on the surface only.

Poetry is not only the best words in the best order; it is also the best rhythms in the best order. Poetry is meant to sound beautiful (or exciting or touching or frightening) when read aloud, while prose is more mundane-sounding and less rhythmic. As my children put it, Shakespeare’s poetry has a heartbeat running through it that they can feel when they read it aloud. Also, in poetry the language tends to be filled with more literary devices, like metaphors and images, with the intention of making the language more rich, complex, and subtle. Prose, on the other hand, feels more like it’s meant to convey information.

That said, there are hundreds of prose passages in Shakespeare that are every bit as rich and complex as poetry. A good example is this passage from
Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Can one imagine a more beautiful, multileveled use of language? And when this passage is read aloud, no one in the world could say whether it was written down as poetry or prose. It is only the arrangement of the words on the page that tells us the category.

It is commonly said that the highborn characters in Shakespeare always speak in poetry while the lowborn always speak in prose. This is an exaggeration, and we see this “rule” being broken all the time in Shakespeare. The claim, however, does have some rough justice. Thus in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the Mechanicals consistently speak in prose (except in their play-within-the-play,
Pyramus and Thisbe
, when they’re trying to sound highborn), and the fairies and the lovers speak consistently in poetry. In
Hamlet
, on the other hand, the Prince of Denmark speaks a great deal of prose, and it is virtually all exciting. Other examples of great prose speakers in Shakespeare include Sir John Falstaff in
Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
, Rosalind in
As You Like It
, and Benedick and Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
.

Shakespeare’s Poetry

Shakespeare’s poetry can be divided into rhymed and unrhymed. When it is unrhymed, it is called blank verse. In his early plays, Shakespeare tended to write a great deal of rhymed verse—he seemed to like the challenge of it, as though he were flexing his young muscles and even showing off a bit. Here is Helena in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
out of breath after chasing Demetrius. Have your children listen for the naturalness of the rhymes, as though writing them were as easy as breathing.

O, I am out of breath in this fond chase
.

The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace
.

Happy is Hermia, wheresoe’er she lies
,

For she hath blessèd and attractive eyes
.

And here is Romeo at the moment he falls in love with Juliet in
Romeo and Juliet
. Again, Shakespeare makes rhyming seem like the easiest thing in the world:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—

Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear
.

Considering the difficulty of rhyming lines with naturalness and sophistication, it is almost shocking to realize that 45 percent of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is rhymed.

As Shakespeare matured, his poetic expression became more complex. One of our family’s favorite passages of blank verse from Shakespeare’s later years is the description of Cleopatra in
Antony and Cleopatra
. Recite it aloud with your children. It is an example of blank verse at its finest.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop
[deck]
was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver
,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster…

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety: other women cloy

The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies…

Iambic Pentameter

Iambic pentameter is the name of the most widely used verse form in English literature. It was used by Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales
and by Milton in
Paradise Lost
, and Shakespeare uses it as the staple verse form for all his plays. The first passage of Shakespeare that we looked at together in this book is in iambic pentameter:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

So is the last passage we just quoted:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

and so are most of the passages that we’ll be learning together in this book.

Iambic pentameter is simply a verse form where each line has five beats (hence the word
pentameter
, since
penta
is the Greek root for “five”) and each beat is an
iamb
(the Greek root for “foot”). An iamb sounds like this: