Some years ago I was called upon to speak in public at a number of big life moments that took place over the course of a short span of months. Two of my best friends got married, and I toasted them. I got married, and I spoke at engagement parties, in the ceremony itself, and in a toast to my bride at the reception. I stepped down from a long-held post, and I saluted my staff and supporters. I roasted a colleague at a swank party for a watershed birthday, and I eulogized a dear family friend at a quiet memorial service.
Casting about for inspiration as I prepared my remarks for each event, I turned immediately to a volume that’s been at the heart of my professional career for nearly two decades. That tome is Western literature’s greatest repository of wit, wisdom, solace, spiritual nourishment, poetic uplift, psychological insight, emotional passion, poetic virtuosity, and just plain beautiful writing: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
The Bard didn’t let me down. Through my work directing, writing about, and teaching him, I knew his canon pretty well cold. But I was dazzled to find the incredible number of passages in his plays and poems that seemed tailor-made for celebrations, personal milestones, and just about every one of life’s big moments. Shakespeare, I was relieved and delighted to discover, is pitch-perfect for all occasions.
Soon I’d collected Shakespeare quotations for my various needs.
For my best friend and his bride, whose love for one another struck me as uncommonly deep, I talked about this line from As You Like It: “My love hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.” (I explained that in Shakespeare’s day, the Bay of Portugal was thought to be the deepest body of water on Earth, so any love that’s like it must be pretty darned deep.)
At a religious ceremony the weekend before my wedding, during which the story of Noah was read from the Bible, I commented on the amazing fact that there’s a line in Shakespeare that actually talks about both weddings and also old Noah himself (it’s in As You Like It as well, when Jaques the cynic encounters a gathering of three betrothed pairs and says: “There is, sure, another flood toward, and these couples are coming to the ark”).
At my colleague’s fiftieth birthday party, I reassured him with this line from Sonnet 104: “To me, fair friend, you never can be old.”
And at my family friend’s funeral, I shared this beautiful passage from the little-known play Cymbeline:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,Nor the furious winter’s rages;Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
In the years since that run of toasts and tributes, I’ve quoted Shakespeare on even more varied occasions, sometimes when speaking in public, but just as often when sending a note or even when simply musing to myself:
On the occasion of my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary: “The benediction of these covering heavens / Fall on their heads like dew, for they are worthy / To inlay heaven with stars!”
On the occasion of a magnificent sunrise over Joshua Tree National Park: “But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.”
On the occasion of hearing a grandmother tell her grandson not to eat so fast: “With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder.”
And on the occasion of my godson’s bris: “This was the most unkindest cut of all.”
Before long, people who had heard me wax Shakespearean on some occasion or other began to call or e-mail me for advice.
Hey Barry, I’ve also got to give a toast at a friend’s wedding. Is there a good Shakespeare quote you can send my way?
Yikes! I have to make a presentation in front of the whole company at a product launch next week. Got any Shakespeare for me?
Baz, I went out with a really great girl last night and I totally fell for her. I want to send her an e-mail asking her out on another date. Can you shoot me some good Shakesey that’ll really blow her away?
I had a great time answering every request.
Shakespeare for the Occasion of a Wedding? Try Sonnet 116, the nuptial classic: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”
Shakespeare for the Occasion of a Pep Talk? Lots of great choices. Check out “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” from Julius Caesar, or “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” from Henry V.
Shakespeare for the Occasion of Seeking a Second Date? Here’s a good one from The Tempest: “I would not wish / Any companion in the world but you.”
Fielding countless such requests, and dispatching hundreds of lines of Shakespeare to family, friends, and acquaintances from all over who were in the midst of life events of every kind, it occurred to me that what I was doing was something that Shakespeare himself would have recognized. There’s a moment in Hamlet when the eponymous prince, thunderstruck at the discovery that his seemingly charming and gregarious uncle is in fact a fratricidal maniac, decides to write down that piece of information for future reference: “My tables,” he cries, referring to his tablebook, a kind of Elizabethan notepad,
My tables—meet it is I set it downThat one may smile and smile and be a villain.At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
Modern audiences chuckle at the odd sight of a man who’s just met his father’s ghost taking the time to jot down the general life lesson he’s learned in the process. But audiences in the Renaissance wouldn’t have found the behavior the least bit peculiar. They, like Hamlet, routinely took note of epigrams and aphorisms, memorable turns of phrase, and other useful bits and bobs of knowledge encountered in their reading or their lives. They collected these linguistic cuttings, organized into categories, in scrapbooks called Commonplace Books, a “commonplace” being any adage, axiom, or maxim that seemed to express some pearl of wisdom about some universal human condition or situation. The English Renaissance, a period when the classical profundities of the sage ancients were revered as the highest possible cultural values, was the heyday of these books. They were regarded as so essential to living a properly intellectual life that the technique of keeping a good Commonplace Book was taught in school, and they were so beloved that they became a literary subgenre, and eminent scholars and gentlemen often published theirs to benefit the wider reading public.
Many Commonplace Books from the period survive. They share a conspicuous and striking feature: the author most frequently quoted—seventy-nine times in one particular book—is none other than William Shakespeare. Even in his own day, the Bard was recognized as the leading author of language that renders pithily all the immense size and scope and feeling and sweep of the human experience. When the stakes are as high as they ever get, the emotions as turbulent, and the psychic strain as immense—when we learn that our uncle murdered our father, say—no normal utterance, no mere quotidian language, can express our state. Such times demand something of an entirely different magnitude: the immensity and scale of Shakespeare. His is a sensibility at the human frontier; his, an imagination that holds fast the wildest intangibles; his, a language capable of expressing in finite terms those outsized, amorphous, jumbled storms that shake and roil a human heart under duress. And his, a literary technique and writerly skill that can condense all this into a few lines.
Call them Bardisms. Shakespeare’s bite-sized quotes for the outsized human occasion.
Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions is my contribution to the Commonplace Book tradition. Inspired by all those friends to whom I’ve sent Shakespeare quotes over the years, its aim is to enhance public discourse and enrich private reflection with a compilation in one place of Shakespeare’s many grand thoughts on life’s special moments.
A few words about how Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions is organized, and how it might be useful.
This book’s purpose is not only to gather and present Shakespeare’s choicest observations on myriad human affairs, but also to provide concrete tools for using them in remarks both written and delivered aloud. Its simple pointers, drawn from my many years’ experience as a teacher and director of Shakespeare’s plays, are easy enough for anyone to apply and are explained in terms basic enough for anyone to understand. These tips help unlock the mysteries of Shakespeare’s text, lifting the veil of obscurity from his words and making his writing feel as fresh and vital as this morning’s newspaper. Bardisms will foster a sense of ownership of Shakespeare’s words and a new appreciation for the wide variety of his writing, turning it into a natural frame of reference not only for countless special life moments but also for the stuff of the everyday. The book is meant to inspire confidence that you can quote this celebrated and wonderful writer without sounding phony, dilettantish, or the least bit cockamamie.
Bardisms is designed for ease of use. After this introduction comes “Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare,” a survey of the basic techniques that professional theater artists use to achieve immediate clarity with Shakespeare’s text, and which the average reader can apply to the same end. Next is the heart of the book: Shakespearean passages about dozens of life occasions, explicated. The book sticks to the practical Shakespeare, a writer who talks about the regular things that make up daily life. It eschews, for the most part, the ruminative Shakespeare, the poetical thinker about broad or abstract concepts. Thus you’ll find Shakespeare for the Occasion of a Funeral, words applicable to a real-life situation, but not Shakespeare for the Fate of the Eternal Soul, philosophical meditations on an ineffable human concern. (That stuff will come in this book’s sequel!)
Quotations are presented in rough chronological life order, as organized by the categories in one of the most famous of all Shakespearean speeches: the “Seven Ages of Man,” from As You Like It. Thus, Chapter One, “At First, the Infant,” includes Shakespeare on the occasions of birth and the subject of family. Chapter Two, “Then the Schoolboy,” presents Shakespeare for life occasions related to youth, education, recreation, and holidays. Chapter Three, “And Then the Lover,” comprises material on love, courtship, marriage, and weddings. Chapter Four, “Then a Soldier,” considers Shakespeare for martial occasions, as well as those of our professional years, such as work, confrontations, reputations, winning, and losing. Chapter Five, “And Then the Justice,” includes occasions on which the Justice described in the “Seven Ages” would be full of opinions: middle age, wit, boredom, gratitude, apologies, and parties. Chapter Six, “The Lean and Slippered Pantaloon,” mines Shakespeare’s thoughts on the issues of old age: retirement, health and medicine, grandparenthood, and so forth. Finally, Chapter Seven, “Mere Oblivion,” focuses on how Shakespeare views the occasions of life’s final phase, including death, funerals, memorials, and the loss of loved ones. Each chapter opens with a close reading of the apposite lines from the “Seven Ages of Man,” along with some observations on what they can add to our appreciation of the phase of life they survey.
The Shakespearean excerpts in the book vary in length from a few words to a few dozen lines, and the selections draw upon almost all of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, providing a broad overview of the range of genres, styles, and modes in which he wrote, the more to appreciate his works and his genius. Each excerpted passage is accompanied by a commentary made up of some combination of three discrete sections. The first, “In Other Words,” translates Shakespeare into accessible and easy-to-understand modern English. Next, “How to Say It” or “How to Use It” offers a bulleted list of tips that show how to apply the techniques from the “Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare” to the specific text in question. This section sometimes also recommends ways to frame a given excerpt with brief introductory remarks, and in many cases suggests how to use it elegantly in written communication. When a given Shakespeare quote includes language specific to the dramatic situation in the play from which it’s taken—proper names, gendered language, and so on—“How to Say It” suggests minor textual adaptations that can widen the excerpt’s range of applicability.
The third section following each entry is called “Some Details,” and it explores provocative historical or literary insights into the text under review. These cover a wide swath, from some technical aspect of Shakespeare’s writing present in the quoted lines to contextual information about the play in which the passage appears, an examination of illuminating particulars from Shakespeare’s life and times, or a discussion of what eminent readers have thought about questions raised by the lines. In short, this part of the commentary delves into the sublime and the ridiculous in Shakespeare: material that can be useful, surprising, amusing, or just plain silly. The information in “Some Details” can help add nuance and dimension to your use of Shakespeare for the occasions of your life, but even if you’re not planning to quote him at your niece’s confirmation or your neighbor’s housewarming, “Some Details” shows how endlessly fascinating he is and how much fun delving into the Bard and his works really can be.
Two indexes make both the Shakespearean excerpts and the commentary easy to search for subjects and occasions of interest.
All the Bard in this book is taken from The Norton Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt, editor, which I regard as the best single-volume edition of the plays and poems now in print. Citations give the speaker’s name, the play’s name, and the relevant act, scene, and line numbers in the format act.scene.line. (For example, “Messenger, Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.40” means the quoted text appears at Act 1, Scene 1, line 40 of Much Ado, and is spoken by the Messenger.) The Norton Shakespeare is based in large part on The Oxford Shakespeare, a cutting-edge and quite controversial 1986 edition of the Complete Works. Despite its overall excellence, the Oxford is marred by a sometimes unbridled revisionist spirit, and it makes some idiosyncratic choices—changes in characters’ names, changes in titles of plays, omissions of cherished passages—all buttressed by careful and sound scholarship, but all regarded as wildly iconoclastic in the very conservative world of Shakespeare studies. The Norton editors took note of the backlash against the Oxford’s aggressive idiosyncrasies and retreated from the most excessive examples. But The Norton Shakespeare still retains some readings that would disorient the non-specialist public, and so when I’ve quoted a Bardism that the Norton renders in some unfamiliar way, I’ve taken the liberty of silently reverting to a less alienating form.
One of the things about Bardisms that make them so much fun to quote is that they can sometimes seem to turn Shakespeare into an expert on things that weren’t even invented during his lifetime. That is, because a Bardism lifts Shakespeare’s lines out of their proper surroundings in the rest of Shakespeare’s plays or poetry, a Bardism can make Shakespeare say things he never said. An example: I determined when my daughter was born that she’d start hearing Shakespeare from the moment she got home from the hospital.* In her first weeks, a lot of my bonding time with her came at the changing table, so I started looking for a Bardism on the subject. I discovered that the word diaper appears exactly once in Shakespeare, in the rarely performed prologue to The Taming of the Shrew. There, the word is used in its Elizabethan sense, as a synonym for “napkin” (some servants discuss what they’ll provide for their lord when he sits down to dinner, and they note that he’ll need a basin in which to wash his hands, and a diaper with which to dry them). I knew I wouldn’t find Pampers in the canon, so I did some lateral thinking and searched for Bardisms on the general subject of change. At last I found this line, spoken by Iago in Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello: “She must have change, she must!”
In its native dramatic context, this line has nothing to do with diapers, of course. It is Iago’s slimy She’s Gotta Have It insinuation that Othello’s wife, Desdemona, cannot help but betray her husband by sleeping with Cassio, then Roderigo, then every other man in town. After all, Iago argues, Desdemona’s from Venice, a city known for the expertise of its prostitutes and the near-nymphomaniacal lusts of its young women. So she must have new sexual partners. She must.
Standing over my sweet, innocent babe at 3:00 A.M., elbow deep in diaper ointment and wipes, was I somehow insulting her virtue by quoting the nefarious Iago? Obviously not. One of the ways Shakespeare manages to speak to all occasions is by virtue of having survived long enough to address them. In every new generation and every new cultural circumstance, he slips the surly bonds of dramatic context and morphs into new shapes he never could have imagined. And as we’ll see many times in this book, these transformations can be a lot of fun. In this sense, while the original context of a speech from Shakespeare is always interesting, that speech’s applicability to the present circumstances is what truly counts. It’s what turns a Shakespearean quotation into a Bardism.
During the few months’ stint of serial Shakespeare citation I described at the beginning of this introduction, I discovered something new about this writer I’d by then come to regard as an old friend. I already knew the extent to which he had enriched my life; my work on his plays as an artist and teacher has shown me around the United States, much of Europe, and parts of Asia, and the places he’s taken me in my imagination have been even more extraordinary. And I already knew his work’s unique way of revealing new details, nearly infinite resonances, each time I went away from it and then came back. But what I learned about the Bard’s knack for saying just the right thing on all occasions is that all occasions are enhanced by his words. What’s special about his poetry is that as it forges new links between experience as it’s lived and experience as it’s described, it somehow manages to deepen lived experience by describing it as vividly as it does.
I’m not the first person to make this claim of old Will, which is fortunate, because it means there’s someone I can turn to for corroboration. As I write this introduction, the great Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart is starring on Broadway in a new production of Macbeth. In an interview about it with the New York Times, he offered a lovely anecdote about how Shakespeare’s touch on all occasions makes those occasions sweeter, richer, and more memorable:
Mr. Stewart described an experience he had recently, as he walked alone before dusk near his rural village in Oxford-shire. “Suddenly I had this urge to speak the role, and there’s nobody about,” he said. “So I started at the top of the play, with ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ and I said the whole role through aloud, just to refresh my memory. It was a long walk.
“But it hit me before I said the lines ‘Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’—That’s exactly how it was,” he continued. “And I thought: This is wonderful. Every night in New York when I come to that part, I’ll remember where I was, on this lonely road with bare fields on either side, and there’s a mist hanging over the field, and indeed there are crows.”
Mists, crows, thick light, and rooky woods—Shakespeare talks about them all, just as he talks about birthdays, funerals, and every other human event in between. He’s graced the occasions of my life in so many beautiful ways, and it’s my joy to commend him to yours.