It begins with caterwauling and vomit.

Such is the stark and altogether unceremonious verdict rendered upon life by William Shakespeare, the eternal, inimitable, and ineffable Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

So much of the mystery and mythology surrounding Shakespeare has to do with the beauty and wisdom of his insights into human nature, and the noble sensibility behind their poetic expression. Yes, yes, that sparrow’s fall does indeed have a certain special providence about it, and, to be sure, the defining quality of mercy is precisely that way it cascades gently down, like rain from heaven. But a baby? Alas, what descends from a baby are substances resistant to euphemizing metaphor, and defiant to characterization by such felicities as “God-like uniqueness” and “heavenly rain.” No, no. From a baby drop drool, spit-up, pee-pee, and poop. Not even the epochal mimetic gifts of Shakespeare could poeticize those.

This is why his description of the First Age of Man, infancy, is so marvelous. Instead of some lines-long rhapsody about skin soft as down, or dove-like cooing, or beatific smiles, Shakespeare offer only two gerundial verbs, two little words, of brain-addling noise and stinking bodily fluids: mewling and puking. There’s nothing grand about them, nothing noble. The Sweet Swan of Avon is nowhere to be found. Rather, we’re visited by a tired, even slightly irritated father, trying to go about his day while Junior cries and makes. It’s an image striking in its realism, honesty, and truthfulness, and in all its blunt indecorousness, it sounds a lot like infancy as we know it to be.

I think of this Shakespeare, the one who trades in vomit and caterwauling, as the doppelgänger of that other, more familiar Shakespeare, he of the whatever-named but still sweet-smelling rose, and the summer’s day to which I’m not sure I shall compare thee. And if the latter Shakespeare writes poetry, then the former writes a kind of anti-poetry, a poetry of what’s usually non-poetic, composed in an unmistakably “Shakespearean” language whose beauty, such as it may be, is its ordinariness, Shakespearized.

Such a language is audible in the odd prosody of mewling and puking. It takes a great writer to serve perfect mewl when the mental thesauri of mere mortals would run dry after shriek, screech, wail, and, in a reach, waaah. Making mewl the first syllable in a verse line is also a neat trick. It breaks the expected rhythm of iambic pentameter, which would place an unstressed syllable in that position, and places a stressed one there instead. This syncopation not only jars our ears in the same manner as a baby’s cry but also sets us up for the one-two punch landed when the pattern repeats milliseconds later in puking, also accented on its first syllable. In its resolutely non-iambic refusal to go with the flow, this language suggests that there’s no way this particular baby will be calmed. Then, there’s the assonance of the “liquid U” in both words (the sound that letter makes as a long vowel: you), a pretty piece of poesy that suggests at once the cloying nasality of a baby’s drone, as well as that apt exclamatory response to all things gross-out, ewwwwwww. Mewling and puking may speak well about cacophonous midnight meltdowns and hot regurgitation, but they well bespeak a writerly gift for marshaling an offbeat and idiosyncratic imagination to the English language at its most muscular, expressive, and bracing.

This gift is on display in all the Shakespeare excerpted below. Shakespeare on infancy may not wield the emotional heft of Shakespeare on love or pack the philosophical wallop of Shakespeare on death, but it lacks none of the linguistic virtuosity, uncanny verisimilitude, or heart-stopping incisiveness of any of the excerpts we’ll find in the latter Six Ages of Man when we hear Shakespeare on the occasions of grown-up life.

SHAKESPEARE ON THE EXPERIENCE OF CHILDBIRTH

The pleasing punishment that women bear.

—AEGEON, The Comedy of Errors, 1.1.46

Though never depicted onstage, births deliver quite a few bouncing babies offstage in Shakespeare’s plays. Since he had three children of his own, he no doubt knew something about the birthing process, and it’s interesting to note which aspects of it stick in his mind. This selection of Bardisms covers a range of childbirth experiences.

WHY NEWBORNS CRY

Here’s Shakespeare’s explanation of what’s behind that piercing bawl that’s every human being’s first utterance.

We came crying hither;

Thou know’st, the first time that we smell the air,

We wail and cry….

When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools. 5

—KING LEAR, King Lear, 4.6.172-77

How to use it:

I found these lines of great comfort to my inconsolable little one, or, perhaps more accurately, of great comfort to myself in rationalization of my failure to console her.

If you don’t have a baby of your own, keep this handy as a nicely erudite editorial comment on the nearest squalling bundle of joy. (Just think how much cruising-altitude tension could be eliminated were flight attendants instructed always to quote this Bardism, Shakespeare for the Screaming Kid in the Bulkhead Seat.)

Some details:

This excerpt is from the famous “Dover Cliff” scene in King Lear. Gloucester, the king’s old friend and counselor, blind, in pain, and despairing over his son’s treachery, has come to Dover to commit suicide by jumping off its famous white cliffs. Lear, too, is desperate, driven mad by the cruelty of his daughters Goneril and Regan, and he’s been wandering the countryside, railing at the world’s manifold injustices. He encounters his sad friend and philosophizes with extraordinary insight and considerable cynicism about life and death.

Lear’s interpretation of why babies cry is certainly a dark one, and strikingly modern in its bleakness and nihilism. It seems almost to belong to the worldview of the twentieth-century master Samuel Beckett (“we are born astride a grave”), and indeed, some productions of King Lear render the knolls atop Dover Cliff as a landscape as grim as that in Beckett’s seminal work Waiting for Godot. Yet the image of life as a “stage of fools” is in its own way a comic one. (Certainly whenever I whispered these lines to my crying baby daughter, they struck me as sounding more comforting than ominous.) The best productions of King Lear capture this double-sidedness, this proximity of the funny and the awful, and create from the image of two broken old men pondering the dilemmas of infancy a kind of horrid laughter.

ADOPTION

Shakespeare’s view of childbirth isn’t limited to the biological. He also explores adoption, a process by which a child already born to one mother is “born” to a second.

I say I am your mother,

And put you in the catalogue of those

That were enwombèd mine. ’Tis often seen

Adoption strives with nature, and choice breeds

A native slip to us from foreign seeds. 5

You ne’er oppress’d me with a mother’s groan,

Yet I express to you a mother’s care.

—COUNTESS, All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.3.126–32

In other words:

I’m telling you: I’m your mother. And I count you among the list of my biological children. We see plenty of cases where adoption parallels the natural process, such as when we graft a twig from an unusual plant onto another one, making two distinct species into one. You never made me groan with pain in childbirth, yet I still feel for you all a mother’s love.

 

How to say it:

This is a passage in which antithesis does a lot of work. Be sure to stress the oppositions between adoption and nature, native slip and foreign seeds, mother’s groan and mother’s care, and oppress’d me and express to you.

The verbs in the passage are also quite expressive and should be highlighted: am, enwombèd, strives, breeds, oppress’d, and express.

I once heard an adoptive mother say these lines on her daughter’s wedding day. It was quite moving.

Some details:

The image in line 5, about native slip and foreign seeds, is worth a closer look. Scientific inquiry took off during the English Renaissance, and in particular, understanding in the area of natural sciences leapt forward. The notion that man could “strive with nature” to nature’s betterment remained a new and controversial idea, but in botany, at least, it was demonstrated repeatedly and vividly through the creation of many new hybrid species of flowers and other plants. Shakespeare turns again and again to images of gardening, planting, and cultivation in his works, but hybridization seems to interest him especially. (His most thorough examination of the subject is in The Winter’s Tale, where Perdita and Polixenes conduct a long debate on the morality of the process, and that of tinkering with nature at all.) He sees plant grafting as somehow magical, a perplexing riddle, in which something can be man-made, yet still have about it all the authenticity and power of nature at its purest. Paradoxes of this sort riveted Shakespeare, and in this regard, he is very much a man of his time: countless other Renaissance writers and thinkers wrestled with the disorienting ramifications of the period’s new scientific discoveries. Yet the incisiveness of Shakespeare’s imagination—his remarkable ability to translate specific scientific knowledge into sublime poetic insight—marks him very much a man apart. To view a mother’s love for her adopted child as a kind of botanical procedure is something that only this writer would, or could, do.

SHAKESPEARE ON NEWBORNS

I think I shall never have the blessing of God till I have issue o’ my body, for they say bairns are blessings.

—CLOWN, All’s Well That Ends Well, 1.3.21

After pregnancy and delivery comes that fateful trip home when Mom and Dad find themselves alone for the first time with their little bundle of joy. Their hungry, screaming, pooping, sleepless little bundle of joy. Between reassuring phone calls from family and friends—“Don’t worry, by three months it’ll be much easier”—these lines of Shakespeare can help you cope with some of the craziness that comes with a newborn, and help deepen your love for your angel.

BABY LOOKS LIKE MOM AND DAD

Sonnet 3 is one of the series of seventeen “you should have a baby” poems that open Shakespeare’s famous collection of verse. It contains his most memorable description of a child’s resemblance to his or her mother:

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

(A “glass” is a mirror, and Mama’s “lovely April” her springtime days of youthful beauty.)

Shakespeare didn’t write about a baby’s resemblance to Papa until nearly twenty years later:

[indicating a baby] Behold, my lords,

Although the print be little, the whole matter

And copy of the father: eye, nose, lip,

The trick of’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley,

The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, 5

The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.

—PAULINA, The Winter’s Tale, 2.3.98–103

In other words:

Look, everyone: it may be a small copy, but it reproduces the father in every detail. Eyes, nose, lips, his very distinctive frown, his forehead—no, seriously—even the little indented groove between his nose and upper lip,* the cleft on his chin, the distinctive dimples on his cheeks, his smile, and the exact pattern and structure of his hands, nails, and fingers.

 

How to use it:

I love reading this short passage with my daughter in my arms, although I’m happy that it’s not entirely true (especially the nose part) and that she resembles her beautiful mother far more than she does me!

Although the baby in the play is a girl, nothing in the speech prevents it being said of a boy. And if, as in my daughter’s case, it’s the mom who is more clearly reflected in the wee one’s features, simply substituting mother for father in line 3, her for each his in the speech, and of her for of’s in line 4, will make it work fine.

LULLABY

One way to help a baby sleep is to sing a lullaby. Shakespeare writes a very pretty one in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s sung by the fairies for their queen Titania as she retires for the night.

You spotted snakes with double tongue,

Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;

Newts and blindworms, do no wrong;

Come not near our Fairy Queen.

Chorus:

Philomel with melody,

Sing in our sweet lullaby;

Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby.

Never harm

Nor spell nor charm

Come our lovely lady nigh.

So good night, with lullaby.

Weaving spiders, come not here;

Hence, you long-legged spinners, hence;

Beetles black, approach not near;

Worm nor snail do no offense.

Repeat chorus.

—FAIRIES, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2.9–23

In other words:

Don’t show your faces, all you multicolored, forked-tongued snakes, and you spiky hedgehogs. Don’t make trouble, you poisonous lizards and tiny-eyed reptiles. Don’t come near our fairy queen.

Chorus: You nightingale, sing and make our sweet lullaby. Lulla, lulla, lullaby. May no ill will, nor no evil spell nor magic charm, ever come near our lady. So lullaby and good night.

Don’t get near us, you poisonous web weavers, you long-legged silk makers. Just get away from here! Don’t come around, you black beetles. Don’t make mischief, you worms and snails.

Repeat chorus.

 

How to say it:

The music to which Shakespeare set this lullaby doesn’t survive from the play’s first performance in 1594. Modern productions must commission new tunes for it, and for the handful of other songs in the play. Even without music, however, the soft beauty of the lines is easy to hear. Harley Granville-Barker, one of the great Shakespearean directors of the early twentieth century, described how the language of this and the other songs in the play literally conjures the fairy world to life: “The lilt, no less than the meaning [of the song], helps to express them [i.e., the fairies] to us as beings other than mortals, treading the air.”

To tread the air yourself, be sure to take note of the rhyme scheme in the song (tongue-seen-wrong-queen, hear-hence-near-offense, etc.) and the strong rhythmic pulse of every stanza, and if you don’t want to make up a tune of your own, use these in a kind of chant or legato bedtime rap, and with them create the smoothly soporific tone every lullaby requires.

Whether you sing or speak the lines, try to convince your listener that you’re really talking to all those nasty creepy-crawlies in the song and commanding them to stay away. The more the creatures sound like a catalogue of Halloween goblins, the better the chorus works to create a bedtime atmosphere of safety and sweetness.

If you’re singing to a boy, substitute baby for lady in the chorus. Fairy Queen is slightly trickier to rewrite, because whatever replaces it must rhyme with seen. You’re in luck if your son is named Dean, Gene, or, in a stretch, Ian, but if he’s not, then I’d go with little bean.

Some details:

The fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has inspired more creativity in directors and stage designers than perhaps anything else in Shakespeare. Be the fairies portrayed as gossamer-winged, Pre-Raphaelite cherubs with flowing white gowns and shoulder-length curls; pale-skinned, black-eyed Victorian urchins in sailor suits and velvet dresses; or some abstract collection of imps informed by cultural influences as diverse as the Brothers Grimm, Japanese Kabuki, or post-punk 1990s London—all of which I’ve seen, and many others besides—their appearance does much to define the tone of the play and its world. It also determines whether the emphasis of this lullaby is on the universe of scary, poisonous creatures who threaten nightly to attack Titania in her sleep (in one production I saw, a fairy in mid-verse found a spider crawling along the ground and, in an Elizabethan version of Fear Factor, ate it), or whether the point of the song is that Titania will rest safe and sound despite whatever potential dangers lurk around her (this is the more usual approach, all featherbedding, diaphanous linens, and harp glissandos).

SHAKESPEARE ON DAUGHTERS

I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter.

—PROSPERO, The Tempest, 1.2.16–17

In Shakespeare’s period as today, readers were tempted to parse works of fiction for traces of their authors’ biographies and personal beliefs. And just as today our own Philip Roth has filled novel after novel with screeds against readers who assume a priori that his characters speak his own personal views and that his life and his art necessarily coincide, so the authors of the English Renaissance vociferously denied that their works contained details from their own lives, or that their characters bore any resemblance to real-world figures a clever reader could identify. Still, none other than Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, the Philip Roth of his day, tacitly acknowledged that no matter how vigorously he may deny it, an author’s personal life simply must suffuse his works. In a moving poem written in memory of his son Benjamin junior, who died in childhood, Jonson calls the boy his “best piece of poetry.” Life and art may not be the same thing, Jonson seems to say, but at times the line between them shrinks very, very thin.

We cannot know if Shakespeare read Jonson’s poem, although we can suppose he shared the sentiment, because his own son Hamnet died a few years before Jonson’s. Hamnet Shakespeare. Swap out the n in his name for an l, and it’s hard not to see English drama’s most famous character, who dies prematurely while trying to live up to his father’s expectations of him, as in some way a manifestation, if not an outright reincarnation, of the playwright’s only son. It’s almost impossible to read all of Shakespeare and not come away with a sense that the deepest of the man’s private obsessions, emotional wounds, pet peeves, and secret dreams are on display in his pages. He hated crowds, he preferred the country to the city, he found France beautiful even though the French drove him crazy, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t like drunks. He grieved his son’s memory. He adored his mother but found his father frustratingly aloof.

Nowhere do Shakespeare’s personal manias creep into his works more clearly than in his depictions of fathers and their daughters. If Hamlet is a projection of his son, then Juliet, and Goneril, and Regan, and Cordelia, and Perdita, and Marina, and Miranda, and Rosalind, and Portia, and on and on, might be projections of his daughters, Susanna, born only six months after Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway, and Judith, Hamnet’s twin. The joys and frustrations of fathering a girl are so vividly particularized in Shakespeare that it’s tempting to imagine him writing these father-daughter relationships as a kind of therapy.

Tempting, however, is different from advisable. As a reader who would yearn for the Complete Works of Roth as well as a Complete Shakespeare if ever I were abandoned on a desert island, I hastily admit that biographical speculation of the sort I’ve indulged in here is extremely hazardous, and as an imaginative artist myself, I recognize that one needn’t have lived every possible experience in order to depict some of them believably in fiction. But as you browse this selection of Shakespeare for Daughters, as well as Shakespeare for Sons, for Fathers, and for that matter, for Mothers, ask yourself this: no matter how supreme his imagination may have been, could Shakespeare have captured these relationships so truthfully without reflecting at least a little on his own experience of them?

A BLESSING FOR A DAUGHTER

This brief Bardism dedicates this book to my precious daughter. That says about all I need to about how lovely I find it, and the occasion for which I find it apt. (I had planned for it to be the first words my daughter heard when she was born, but the experience of being in the delivery room and watching her entrance into this world crashed my mental hard drive so completely that all I could manage were a few gurgles, yelps, and sighs.)

You gods, look down,

And from your sacred vials pour your graces

Upon my daughter’s head.

—HERMIONE, The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.122–24

Some details:

Shakespeare knew his Bible. This passage reverses one in the Book of Revelation, where heaven is asked to pour down not graces but anger: “And I heard a great voice out of the temple, saying to the seven angels, / Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.” The Bard was apparently moved by this scripture, because elsewhere in his plays contemporaneous with The Winter’s Tale he also imagines the gods who hover above now and then dropping something wonderful down to us mortals who live below. These lines from The Tempest are one example: “Look down, ye gods, / And on this couple drop a blessèd crown.”

But poetry wasn’t the only way Shakespeare made godliness float down onto humanity. Sometimes he’d just have one of the gods drop in for a visit. Theater historians tell us that a small roof hung over the outdoor stage of the Globe Theatre, making a kind of ceiling above the actors’ heads. On it was painted a representation of the heavens, complete with stars, planets, and other astrological symbols (Hamlet calls it “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire”). This ceiling featured a hidden hatch through which actors, singers, or pieces of scenery could descend, suspended on a rig of pulleys and ropes. Hymen, god of marriage, appears from this hatch at the end of As You Like It, and in the late plays this equipment gets a real workout: Jupiter appears in Cymbeline, Juno and Ceres in The Tempest, and Diana in Pericles. Critics call these sequences theophanies, which means, literally, “appearances of God.”

All of this is to say that at The Winter’s Tale’s Globe premiere back in 1610, when Hermione looked up and asked the gods to pour their holy water on her daughter, audiences could have been excused for expecting a literal deluge. And whenever I quote Hermione’s words over my little angel’s head, I too await the opening of the sky and the descent of grace.

THIS BABY GIRL WILL GROW UP TO BE AMAZING

In Shakespeare’s play about him, King Henry VIII asks Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to stand as godfather to his daughter Elizabeth. Cranmer agrees, and offer an extraordinary public tribute to the little princess with a long speech about how fabulous she will be when she grows up. It’s the definitive piece of Shakespeare for Daughters.

This royal infant—heaven still move about her—

Though in her cradle, yet now promises

Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings

Which time shall bring to ripeness. She shall be—

But few now living can behold that goodness— 5

A pattern to all princes living with her,

And all that shall succeed. Saba was never

More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue

Than this pure soul shall be. All princely graces

That mould up such a mighty piece as this is, 10

With all the virtues that attend the good,

Shall still be doubled on her. Truth shall nurse her,

Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her.

She shall be loved and feared. Her own shall bless her;

Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn, 15

And hang their heads with sorrow. Good grows with her.

In her days every man shall eat in safety

Under his own vine what he plants, and sing

The merry songs of peace to all his neighbors.

God shall be truly known, and those about her 20

From her shall read the perfect ways of honor.

-CRANMER, Henry VIII, 5.4.17–37

In other words:

This royal baby—may heaven always revolve around her!—although she’s still in her crib, already promises a million blessings, which will in the fullness of time come to fruition. She will one day be—although few people alive today will see it—an inspiration to all the leaders of her generation, and all that will come after. Not even Beersheba desired wisdom and goodness more than this pure soul will, and Beersheba journeyed all the way to visit King Solomon in order to gain wisdom from him. All the graces customarily associated with a princely person (which this baby is) and all the virtues customarily associated with a good person (which this baby is) will always be multiplied in her. Truth will breast-feed her. Holy and heavenly thoughts will advise her. She’ll be adored and respected. Those who know her will bless her. Those opposed to her will tremble like grain in the wind, and hang their heads in sadness. Goodness will prosper as she prospers. During her lifetime, every man will be safe in his own home, will enjoy the fruits of his own labor, and will sing happy songs of peace to all his neighbors. True religion will prevail, and everyone around her will learn from her how to be honorable in all things.

 

How to say it:

The long speech is one of the best demonstrations of how the Paper Trick, described in “Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare” above, can really unlock a dense passage of Shakespeare. As you’ll recall, in order to use it, you simply take a blank piece of paper and cover all but the first line of the speech. Take a breath, say that line (This royal infant—heaven still move about her—), and when you reach its end, slide your paper down to reveal the next line. Take a breath, then say that line (Though in her cradle, yet now promises). Then move your paper down, breathe, and say the next line. Continue like this until you reach the end of the speech, and you’ll find that the speech unfolds from your mouth like a flower blossoming in spring. Repeat the Paper Trick a few times, then try the speech once without it, trying to make it flow as naturally as you can. Notice how the line-by-line structure of the verse remains in your mind even when you’re not concentrating on this formal aspect of the speech. That’s how Shakespeare writes. You can never go wrong if you phrase his verse speeches one line at a time.

Because the speech is long, and because some of the thoughts in it are either quite complicated or not entirely the sentiments a friend might want to wish his friend’s child, you should feel free to make cuts wherever you’d like. For example, life expectancy in our time being rather longer than it was in Shakespeare’s, I’d drop line 5. I’d also cut line 15 and the first clause of line 16—do I really want to predict that a baby will have enemies before she’s even left her swaddling clothes? I’d probably also lose the first half of line 20 (God shall be truly known), not because I don’t wish a religious life on a lovely baby girl, but because this line is really about the disputed politics of religion in Shakespeare’s day, and it doesn’t speak quite as directly to our own.

SHAKESPEARE ON SONS

O wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother!

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 3.2.300

Shakespearean parents of daughters love their girls but try desperately to control them out of a deep fear that things might go horribly wrong if the girls’ fates are left to themselves, especially where husbands are concerned. Shakespearean parents of sons love their boys no less, but they don’t even try to influence their life choices, because they know that no matter what they suggest, want, or do, their stubborn boys will simply reject it out of hand. Put more simply, in Shakespeare, daughters are delightful, enchanting, and entirely lovable—until they discover boys. Then the gates of hell open wide, and there’s never a peaceful moment again. Likewise, sons in Shakespeare are sources of pride and warmth, joy and love—until they reach a crossroads of their own. But it’s not girls that are their undoing, it’s their own pigheadedness, insistence on independence, and implacable, infuriating willfulness. These will wreck a parent’s peace of mind as totally as any bad behavior a wayward daughter can muster.

And yet, of all the varieties of familial love one encounters in the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the love of parents for sons, and especially firstborn sons, may be the most intense and incandescent. To be sure, Shakespearean moms can be less than perfect, loving their sons not wisely but too well, and the Bard’s dads can be imposing, distant figures who intimidate and belittle their boys. But despite their flaws, they love. And love, and love even more. Here are but two expressions of this abundant affection, both of which move me whenever I use them.

IT’S GOOD TO HAVE SONS

When a dear friend called to tell me his pregnant wife’s ultrasound revealed she was carrying twin boys, I rifled through my Complete Works to find something that might take the edge off the happy panic I heard in his voice. I found a wonderful Bardism to commend to anyone blessed with a baby boy.

Why, ’tis a happy thing / To be the father unto many sons.

—KING EDWARD IV, Henry VI, Part III, 3.2.104–5

I ADORE MY SON

This is one of my favorite Shakespeare passages, because it seems to me so truthful and mature an expression of a father’s love for his son. Free of sugarcoating, it captures the way in which parenthood is magical, despite being full of moments as frustrating and hair-raising as any in life.

LEONTES                 My brother,

Are you so fond of your young prince as we

Do seem to be of ours?

POLIXENES                 If at home, sir,

He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;

Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy; 5

My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.

He makes a July’s day short as December,

And with his varying childness cures in me

Thoughts that would thick my blood.

—The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.164–72

In other words:

LEONTES My dear friend, do you adore your young son as much as I appear to love mine?

POLIXENES When I’m at home, he’s everything I do, every moment of my time. He’s my every delight, he’s all I think about. One minute he’s my best friend, the next, he hates my guts. He’s a hanger-on, he’s a fighter, he’s a negotiator—he’s all things. He makes a long summer day feel as short as the winter solstice, and his boyish ways, in their constant changes, snap me out of dark moods and depression.

 

How to say it:

I sent this excerpt to a friend after a wonderful conversation in which he told me how much he’d lately been enjoying time spent with his little boy.

Don’t worry too much about Leontes’ lines that cue Polixenes’ wonderful speech. I’ve included them here only for context. Polixenes’ speech stands on its own, and can even begin with line 4, He’s all my exercise, or, if you like, Tommy’s all my exercise, or whatever Junior’s name may be.

Polixenes’ speech (his name is pronounced puh-LICKS-uh-neez) has some interesting features. If at home is simply there because at this point in the play he’s been away from his beloved boy for nine long months and he misses him. Feel free to drop this phrase in the interest of clarity. The antitheses between friend and enemy and July and December are important. The two occurrences of all, in lines 4 and 6, can be quite powerful: Polixenes’ son takes up his every moment (line 4), and is absolutely everything to him (line 6).

You can make this speech describe your daughter by changing each he to she and, perhaps, cutting line 6—about the parasite, soldier, and statesman—because to Shakespeare these were exclusively masculine character types.

Some details:

Lines 7 and 9 merit closer inspection. When Polixenes mentions a July’s day, he simply assumes that his listeners know he’s referring to how long such a day is (as opposed to how hot or bright or any of the other things summer days are). Good parallel construction would require him to contrast a long July’s day to, say, a day as short as one in December. He doesn’t say anything like that, but instead collapses this latter image into the name of the month itself. Yet we understand full well what he means. This kind of poetic density, in which meanings are implied rather than spelled out, and in which language is imprecise on its surface yet exquisitely concrete in the thoughts behind it, is characteristic of late Shakespeare, and of The Winter’s Tale in particular. It’s Shakespearean writing at its most sophisticated.

Also typical of late Shakespeare is his ability to convey a person’s entire life through one short phrase. Polixenes says that the best thing about his son’s mercurial boyishness is that it eliminates thoughts that would thick [his] blood. In this provocative phrase we get a glimpse of a whole person, with moods, heartbreaks, dark moments, a past that’s led to all these, and a life that extends beyond the boundaries of this moment, this scene’s dramatic circumstances, and even this play itself. But what makes the phrase noteworthy is how unnecessary it is. The story of the play doesn’t require it; Polixenes needn’t have a history of struggles with depression in order for The Winter’s Tale to make sense, and all that’s really required of the character is that he do things that move the plot forward. Still, details such as this one make the whole play more believable, more lifelike, and more real. It’s just good writing, and it’s also gold for an actor: What kind of thoughts are thickening Polixenes’ blood? What’s preoccupying him? Is he worried about his cholesterol, perhaps, or something more metaphysical? For our purposes, such queries are irrelevant—when I sent the passage to my buddy, I wasn’t suggesting that he was in need of antidepressants—but they do help us understand why Shakespeare is for all occasions: because his characters seem to be real people with real lives, to reflect life as we know it to be lived, and, through their extraordinary turns of phrase, to give voice to our own experiences in all their varieties and complexities.

SHAKESPEARE ON MOTHERS

Nature makes them partial.

—POLONIUS, Hamlet, 3.3.33

Given the strength of the bond between mother and child, it’s remarkable how little Shakespeare actually wrote about it. He dramatizes mother-son (and, to a much lesser extent, mother-daughter) relationships in a number of plays, but he doesn’t exactly anatomize them. His preference is less to talk in the abstract about how mothers and their children relate than simply to show them in action and let these relationships speak for themselves.

Sometimes he chooses not to address the subject at all. Many of the mothers in the plays are conspicuous by their absence: Prince Hal’s mother, the mother of Lear’s three daughters, the mother of Shylock’s beloved daughter Jessica, the mothers of Miranda, Rosalind, Desdemona, Portia, Ophelia, Viola—we hear a resounding silence from these women, who are dead before the curtain rises on the plays in which their children feature. And interestingly, in the case of the character who is arguably the most complex, vividly drawn, and loquacious mother in the plays, Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia, the most emotional moment her son shares with her has in it no language at all, as this simple stage direction from the play demands: “He holds her by the hand, silent.”

What accounts for this strange lacuna in Shakespeare’s output? What do these absent mothers mean? Four hundred years’ worth of critics have had a field day essaying these questions. The political: Shakespeare is a misogynist, so he marginalizes mothers in his works. The practical: In his period, women on stage are played by men in drag, and there is a limited number of talented female impersonators in London’s acting pool, so Shakespeare wisely keeps the number of mothers he needs to a minimum. The poetical: He enhances the metaphorical power of his characters by endowing them with an acute version of a very resonant existential problem, the search for a mother’s love. The psychological: He has an Oedipal attraction to his own mother, and his shame over it causes him to erase the mothers in his plays. The psychological, version B: He has abandonment issues with his own mother, so he can’t help but portray motherless children in his plays. (Poor Mary Arden! Forever subject to character assassination by armchair shrinks, simply for having given birth to the Greatest Writer of All Time.)

We’ll never know the reasons why Shakespeare so scants mothers and motherhood in his works. But whenever I apply the Bardisms below to the mom-related occasions of my life, I sometimes hear King Henry V’s admonition to his outnumbered troops: “The fewer men, the greater share of honor.” That is, the fact that Shakespeare says relatively little about mothers per se simply makes me appreciate those things he does say even more. See if you agree as you survey these bits of Shakespeare for Occasions of the Maternal.

I LOVE MY MOM

Here are two short Bardisms for children who love their mothers. The first works great spoken directly to Mom; the second is best suited to a toast, either from a son to his mother or about a particularly loving fellow who sees the phrase “mama’s boy” as a sincere compliment.

The first:

My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom.

—MARINA, Pericles, 22.66–67

Second:

There’s no man in the world / More bound to’s mother.

—VOLUMNIA, Coriolanus, 5.3.159–60

How to use them:

The first line is great for any son or daughter eager to hug Mom after an absence, or just because.

Volumnia says the second line to her son while trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. Reminding him how bound he is to her, she guilt-trips him into obeying her. Therefore, some mothers may well wish to emulate Volumnia and use this Bardism to bend their wayward child to their desires. But the line can also be of use on any occasion when a parent wishes to praise a wonderful child, when a child describes his or her devotion to Mom or Dad, or when a third party admires a friend’s filial devotion.

Transgender the line if necessary with these changes: “There’s no woman in the world / More bound to her mother,” or “There’s no man in the world / More bound to his father.”

MOTHERS WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN

Throughout this book we’ll see the Bard turn to the natural world in search of metaphors that might shed light on human predicaments. Bees, flowers, fish, trees, weather formations, and especially animals are endless sources of inspiration to him. Like the sermonizing pastor who mines some nugget of holy writ and explicates its moral content as instruction to his parishioners, Shakespeare observes nature in action, then abstracts some detail from what he sees and develops it into a poetic image for human edification. Here, in Macbeth, Shakespeare looks at the protective parental instincts of the animals, particularly the matriarchs of the ornithological realm:

The poor wren,

The most diminutive of birds, will fight,

Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

—LADY MACDUFF, Macbeth, 4.2.9–11

In other words:

When her babies are in her nest, even the lowly wren, the tiniest bird of all, will fight hard against predators many times her size.

 

How to use it:

As a testament to the courage and mettle of mothers, this line is hard to beat. In the playground, at parent-teacher night at school, at the pediatrician’s office, or on the checkout line at Babies“R”Us, quote it whenever you see a mom advocating hard on behalf of her little one.

SHAKESPEARE ON FATHERS

To you your father should be as a god.

—THESEUS, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
1.1.47

The relative shortage of mothers in Shakespeare stands in marked contrast with what can only be called a superabundance of fathers in the plays. Dads and their concerns are one of Shakespeare’s major subjects. The plays feature good dads and bad ones, aloof dads and meddlesome ones, timid dads and self-assured ones, successful dads and failures, controlling dads and ones who are laissez-faire, wealthy patriarchs and impoverished dependents, dads who are anxious, tempestuous, and altogether neurotic, and dads who are as chill as a medicine cabinet full of Prozac. And as varied as are the paternal personalities on display, just as diverse are the emotions they arouse in their progeny.

For all their variety, however, there’s a remarkable consistency to what Shakespeare’s fathers want, namely, the best for their children, but with this caveat: that their paternal benevolence be both proffered and accepted on their own terms. Fathers of sons want their boys to be respectable and respectful, upright and worthy. If they step out of line and fail to live up to their fathers’ expectations, these boys’ll hear about it, and if they do make something of themselves, they’d better be quick to attribute their achievements to the inspiration provided them by Papa. Fathers of daughters want their girls to be virginal until marriage, and when they do walk down the aisle, it must be only into the arms of the man hand-picked for them as the most suitable. If they want to marry some other fellow, they’ll feel a hot and relentless wrath, and they’ll find no end of obstacles placed in their way. (So central is this marriage veto to the father-daughter relationship in Shakespeare that were it taken away, the plots of nearly half of his plays would collapse.)

The young men and women on the receiving end of the fatherly upbraidings in the plays respond in kind, and things grow quickly turbulent. Yet those children who manage to please their fathers both hear from them and say to them some of the most tender, stirring, and unexpected love poetry in the plays.

I LOVE YA, POP

The mother of all father speeches in Shakespeare comes near the beginning of King Lear, when the monarch asks his three daughters to tell him how much they love him. Goneril, up first, lays it on thick:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;

Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;

Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;

No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor;

As much as child e’er loved, or father found; 5

A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;

Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

—GONERIL, King Lear, 1.1.53–59

In other words:

Dad, I love you more than words can say. I love you more than my eyesight, more than freedom, more than free will. I love you more than any object, however expensive or unusual. I love you no less than I love life itself—life that’s full of grace, good health, beauty, and honor. I love you as much as any child ever loved or any father ever felt. My love can’t be given voice, can’t be put into words. There’s no metaphor I can conjure that can express my love, which is beyond expression of any kind.

 

How to say it:

This speech relies on one of Shakespeare’s favorite pieces of dramaturgical sleight-of-hand. Goneril says there’s no language that can possibly express her love, and then proceeds to talk quite eloquently about it for several lines. Whenever actors encounter this articulate inarticulacy in Shakespeare, they know that the playwright is giving them a very specific directorial note: you must discover this language as you go along. That is, you must take your time and really find each new line, each new idea, as you get to it. The Paper Trick helps you do that. Just cover all but the first line of the speech, and say only that line. Then move the paper down, revealing the next line only, and say it, and so on. You will find the words forming in your mind a phrase at a time, just as Goneril does.

Alliteration, or the repetition of consonant sounds, is an important aspect of this speech. The paired consonants in words / wield, eye-sight / space, rich / rare, less / life, and father / found give Goneril’s speech a wonderful deliberateness and formality, as well as a distinctly poetic sound.

Antitheses and verbs do much good work here: child loved versus father found; love, wield, be valued, loved, found, makes, and love.

The simple fact that Goneril says love or some variation on it four times in only seven lines is also worth noting. You don’t need a Ph.D. in Shakespeare to know that Goneril doesn’t mean a word of this speech and that Lear’s failure to apprehend her hypocrisy leads to cataclysm. Some might say, therefore, that to quote these lines as an expression of sincere love for one’s father is disingenuous at best and an invitation to some seriously bad karma at worst. This notwithstanding, I disagree that the speech should be avoided, and I once attended a wedding where I saw someone address this issue with glorious aplomb. The bride said these lines to her father—quite beautifully—in thanks for making her big day so sumptuous and grand, and then she added something like this: “In Shakespeare, those words are lies, excessive and empty. But to me, they’re as true, simple, and heartfelt as any I’ve ever said.” The spontaneous “Awwwwwww” that arose from the wedding guests testified to the effectiveness of this strategy. I know my friend won’t object if I recommend it.

Not every Shakespearean expression of love for a father is spoken by a lying sociopath like Goneril. Some are true-hearted and straightforward, and all the more touching for being so. Here’s a Bardic boast that any child proud of his or her father can make with absolute sincerity.

The spirit of my father grows strong in me.

—ORLANDO, As You Like It, 1.1.59

How to use it:

The father whose spirit energizes Orlando is, alas, no longer alive. This line is therefore particularly well suited to those moments in life when paternal values imparted long ago suddenly seem relevant and finally make sense, and when your conduct in a difficult situation really puts into practice lessons from your dad that you never even knew you’d learned.

But it needn’t be solely for occasions focusing on a deceased father; an athletic dad who coaches his son’s Little League team, say, might spend his days hoping to hear his little boy utter this line as he steps into the batter’s box before swatting a line drive.

SHAKESPEARE ON SIBLINGS

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

—KING HENRY, Henry V, 4.3.60

John and Mary Shakespeare had eight children. Joan and Margaret, their first- and second-born, died in infancy. William was number three, followed by Gilbert, another Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. When Will died in 1616 at age fifty-two, only his sister Joan was still alive. She lived another thirty years, to age seventy-seven, which was an unusually long time in this period of short life expectancies.

Little is known about these brothers and sisters of the great man. Like the first Joan and her sister Margaret, Anne also died young, not in infancy but at age eight. Gilbert spent a few of his early adult years in London but returned to his native Stratford and became a successful businessman there. The only evidence of Richard is a record of his funeral, at age thirty-nine, in a Stratford parish register. The second Joan is remembered primarily because both her son and grandson achieved some fame as actors in London, in her brother William’s plays. (Joan’s grandson, Charles Hart, was the great Falstaff of the Restoration period.)

Only in the case of Edmund, the youngest Shakespeare sibling, sixteen years William’s junior, does enough evidence survive to allow us to speculate about what kind of brother the Bard might have been. Like Joan’s descendants, Edmund also built a reputation as an actor in London, and also, like them, in William’s plays. His nascent career was cut short by an outbreak of the plague in 1607, when he was twenty-seven, and it’s from reports of his funeral that we can glean how William felt about him.

Held at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, the parish church of the Globe Theatre, Edmund’s funeral was a tremendously lavish affair. Unusually, it was conducted in the morning, most likely so that Edmund’s fellow actors could pay their respects before having to go to work in the playhouses that afternoon. The church’s largest bell tolled for him, also unusually, since smaller church bells customarily knelled deaths. Apparently the large bell rang out so loud and for so long that it was heard throughout the City of London, on the opposite side of the Thames. Edmund was interred in the church itself rather than outside in the churchyard, an honor that increased the cost of the funeral more than fivefold. A journeyman actor would not normally be memorialized by such a series of elaborate tributes, so the only explanation that makes sense of all the extravagant circumstances of Edmund’s burial is the fact of his last name. Because in 1607 William Shakespeare was at the height of his fame, power, and wealth, it seems reasonable to suppose that he arranged and paid for his brother’s funeral. And if this is so, then the lengths to which he went to honor his young sibling suggest that he was a man to whom brotherly love was a very meaningful concept.

Once again we must ask if this smidgen of biographical evidence can shed some light on the fraternal relationships in Shakespeare’s works. And once again we must answer yes if we believe that aspects of a writer’s fictional creations somehow project his own unconscious into the world, but no if we regard him as a working professional cranking out product, his literary imagination completely compartmentalized from his private emotional life. Judge for yourself: below are some of Shakespeare’s writings on the subject of brothers and sisters, and, whether or not they reflect his own feelings, they certainly describe the bond between siblings as one that’s powerful, and, for the most part, positive.

SISTERS ARE CLOSE PALS

One way Shakespeare employs the sibling relationship in his plays is by using it to describe close friendships. If an army is compared to a band of brothers, for example, then we infer that it comprises a group of men who share a deep affection and mutual regard for one another. We also learn the converse: that brothers are as tight as any besieged comrades in arms. The metaphor of brotherhood describes the army, and the army expands the resonance of the metaphor of brotherhood.

The female equivalent is a description of what is arguably the closest friendship between girls in the plays. In As You Like It the courtier LeBeau tells Orlando that the cousins Rosalind and Celia are a pair “whose loves / Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.” Like the metaphorical connection between soldiers and brothers, this image tells us something about two friends, and also something about the sororal bond: that it must be very deep if it’s as deep as this friendship, whose special closeness Celia details in this superb Bardism, Shakespeare for Sisters:

We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,

And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans

Still we went coupled and inseparable.

—CELIA, As You Like It, 1.3.67–70

In other words:

We’ve always slept together, and awakened at the same moment. We’ve studied, had fun, and eaten together. And wherever we went, we were joined at the hip, like the swans that draw the chariot of Juno, queen of the gods.*

 

How to use it:

Because to Celia and Rosalind friendship is sisterhood, and sisterhood is friendship, this speech can be used to describe a relationship of either type. A simple introduction—“My relationship with Ashleigh is as close as a beautiful one in a Shakespeare play called As You Like It”—is all the setup you’ll require. LeBeau’s line can also be pressed into service to describe your favorite sisterly bond. Just start the line with their instead of whose.

Eat at the end of line 2 is pronounced et (rhymes with bet), because it’s the past tense of the verb to eat. Modern Americans would say ate, or because of the helper verb have in this sentence, eaten. But et (spelled, confusingly, eat) is still in wide use in England, as anyone acquainted with a Britisher will know: “Oy, mate, would you like to ’ave some dinner?” “Cheers, no. I already et.”

BROTHERS ARE CLOSE PALS

Two Bardisms from two very different plays articulate Shakespeare’s understanding of brotherly affection. They capture that sense that brothers are intimate teammates, agents for the same secret organization, and co-conspirators on a mission only they are privy to and which can be achieved only through their joint efforts.

From this hour

The heart of brothers govern in our loves

And sway our great designs.

—ANTONY, Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.154–56

We came into the world like brother and brother,

And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

—DROMIO OF EPHESUS, The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.426–27

How to use them:

Both of these speeches can be used to wish auspiciousness to your brothers, or closest friends, as they embark on any undertaking that you feel must be characterized by a mutual respect and love in order to succeed. The opening of a business or the start of a vacation are two occasions that come to mind. The lines can also help patch up a falling-out between brothers or close friends. Dromio’s speech in particular is a heartwarming expression of fraternal equality and warmth.

Dromio is one-half of a set of identical twins, so his first line is a literal reference to the moment of his and his brother’s simultaneous birth.

Antony is reaching out in friendship toward his rival, Octavius Caesar. His speech is a bit more comprehensible if you imagine a comma at the end of its first line, and the word may at the start of its second: “From this hour, may the heart of brothers…” That is, Antony is expressing his hope that brotherly hearts—hearts that are loving and intimately bound together—will influence, or sway, the feelings between himself and Caesar, and will help them achieve great things together.

In both Bardisms, replace brothers and brother with sisters and sister to get the all-girl versions.