The third of Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man describes that momentous time when love first blooms, signaling the end of childhood and the imminent start of adult life. Jaques renders the previous two ages, infant and schoolboy, in images of near-photographic realism, and describes the subsequent four, virility through senility, in terms as pitying as they are precise. Only in Age Three, the Lover, does he allow himself—does Shakespeare allow him—a slightly different, somewhat more cavalier tone. Perhaps this is because apparently Jaques was once quite the Casanova: “Thou thyself hast been a libertine,” Duke Senior tells him a few moments before Jaques launches into his famous seven-part speech. This revelation always comes as a surprise in the theater. We can well imagine the acerbic, contrarian, and dark-as-Turkish-coffee soul we see before us as a squalling infant, and his diffident and difficult personality suggests that his school days weren’t exactly a lark. But a lover? It’s an intriguing prospect, and it makes us wonder just who were the women (or men, or both) who once came under his spell, and from whom, if the duke is to be believed, Jaques contracted enough venereal diseases to leave him with plentiful “émbossed sores and headed evils.” In the third age of his own life, in other words, Jaques was no swooning swain, but was instead a syphilitic cicisbeo.

Given this squalid past, Jaques’ flip fillip here is quite delicious. He depicts the typical lover not as a lothario like himself, but instead as an over-the-top hothouse flower issuing amatory sighs of Bessemer intensity. Pining away, the lover waxes poetical not about his beloved’s winning personality, her heartwarming smile, or that magical week they once spent snorkeling in Cabo, but instead about those majestic twin arches of short hair that so beguilingly line the ridges on his inamorata’s brow. It’s quite mad.

With this outlandish construction, Jaques squeezes into sixteen short words an entire literary tradition of overcooked love poetry. He knows—Shakespeare knows—that something about love encourages poets to turn up the heat. After all, does anyone but a love poet really wish, for instance, to die with Wendy on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss, or actually believe that, say, a full moon shining bright strikes the retina in the shape of a big pizza pie? There’s a craziness to such images, an excessiveness that neatly manages to capture and express the wild hormonal rush that is first love. The magnificent insanity of a love poem written about an eyebrow lends to the Third Age of Man a certain loony aspect and makes this affectionate, if nonetheless scornful, image the most captivating one in a speech chockablock with stunners.

Consider how Shakespeare—how Jaques—puts the image together. First, note the extraordinarily melodic word music of its second line, and in particular its orotund vowels. The complaining long i in sighing; the extended, all-consuming ur in furnace, the woebegone long o in woeful, and the muffed shriek of ballad ’s short a—aahhhhyyyeee, ohhhhhhh, urrrrrrrrr, aaaaaaaaaaa—together these keening notes make a tone poem of lovelorn agony with more minor-key modulations than a Schoenberg chorale. Next, note where the line ends: After ballad but before made, or, put another way, smack in the middle of the single idea ballad made. This, you will recall from “Seven Steps to Shipshape Shakespeare,” is called a run-on line ending, and it creates that important springboard to thought that gives to Shakespearean verse its special feeling of spontaneity and naturalism. The lover writes a ballad…to what? To his lover’s beauty? To his own besotted bliss? To the exquisite mystery of love itself? No. Something much more unexpected. He writes a ballad…to what?…wait for it…okay, get this!…ready?… to his mistress’ eyebrow! The line ending after ballad gives Jaques an opportunity to find this bizarre and deflating image, to coin it in the moment, to click on the Google in his brain and send it searching for the perfect, most arresting, most memorable image of the silly lengths to which love pushes us.

Many of Shakespeare’s observations on love share with Jaques the view that this emotion is one of extremes, and that it drives lovers to sighing, ballad singing, and other, even more outré behaviors. “We that are true lovers run into strange capers,” says Touchstone, in the same play as Jaques. The detail in which Shakespeare particularizes these capers in all their lunatic strangeness is what makes his Bardisms on love some of his most poetically efficacious writing. Of course, the excerpts below, which look at love in so many of its manifestations and configurations, which unfold so broad a range of its joys and stings, represent only a tiny fraction of everything Shakespeare wrote on the subject. Still, they present a rather astonishing demonstration of the powers of a poet who, like Jaques, can conjure the affect he describes even while he’s busy describing it. Shakespeare on love, alongside perhaps only Shakespeare on death, is Shakespeare distilled to his very essence. It is Shakespeare expressing emotion at its purest, rendering life at its most recognizable, and composing language at its most fluent, telling, and revelatory.

SHAKESPEARE ON LOVE

Love is a spirit all compact of fire.

—Venus and Adonis, 149

“It’s made entirely out of fire,” Venus says of love in Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis, and she should know: she’s the goddess of love, after all. It’s an interesting choice of imagery. Love isn’t made of sugar or fields of lavender or the colors of the rainbow, but of something hot and dangerous. Fire is a substance with definite mass and presence, yet it’s neither solid nor liquid. It’s something in between, something harder to define, ephemeral, impossible to contain. It also happens to be lighter than air. Venus says this line while describing herself as so love-struck by the gorgeous Adonis that she will, “Like a nymph, with long, disheveled hair, / Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.” That is, she’ll be magical, a dancer whose feet never touch the ground. There’s an extravagance to this image, a sense of almost drunken abandon. That’s why Venus says love is a spirit made of fire: she means it’s a spirit in the same way that whiskey or gin is one—it’s a liquor that intoxicates.

The notion that love is a mind-altering substance underpins Venus and Adonis. One of Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems, it was his first work to reach print. The twelve-hundred-line poem is based on a story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Venus decides to sleep with a mortal and chooses the preternaturally handsome Adonis as the best candidate. The majority of the poem relates the increasingly erotic things Venus says as she tries to bed the young man. Though never explicit, some of her more suggestive passages are hot enough to make even Larry Flynt blush. (No doubt this accounted for the poem’s runaway success in the buttoned-down 1590s.) The poem introduces some ideas Shakespeare will return to repeatedly in his ensuing two decades of writing. The misery of unrequited love is one. The imprecision of gender stereotypes is another (in this poem it’s the woman who’s the aggressor and the man who is the coy and demure object of desire). The intense sexual attractiveness of beautiful young men is a third, and a fourth, related to the third, is the fluidity of human sexuality and its resistance to categorization and restraint.

But the most important contribution of Venus and Adonis to the rest of Shakespeare’s output is the poem’s conception of love itself. Like the burning spirit it’s compact of, Shakespeare’s love is impossible to pin down, ever-changing, and can veer in an instant from being a source of comfort to one of destruction. The love of Venus for Adonis is simultaneously comic and tragic, exalted and silly, pathetic and transcendent. It’s fiery love, Shakespeare-style.

LOVE IS THE GREATEST THING EVER

Venus may be the goddess of love, but not even the considerable expressive gifts she displays in her attempted seduction of Adonis can encapsulate in language everything that makes love so powerful a force in human affairs. For this, we must turn to another character from an early Shakespeare work: Berowne, the anti-romantic romantic hero of Love’s Labour’s Lost.

In the play’s first scene, he, the young King Ferdinand of Navarre, and their friends Longaville and Dumaine sign a contract binding themselves to three years of cloistered, full-time study. The four swear to fast one day each week, to sleep only three hours per night, and to have no contact with girls. That last codicil turns out to be the deal breaker. No sooner has the ink on the ascetic contract dried than someone remembers that the beautiful princess of France and three of her ladies are about to arrive in town. So much for the library. The rest of the play is about the ways the young men wriggle out of their commitment to books and into the arms of the gals. By Act 4, everyone realizes they’ve broken their oaths, and Berowne offers an analysis of what it’s all meant. He discourses on how wrong the friends were to forswear women in the first place, and how love itself, not books, is the best education a young man can get. Book knowledge, he argues, resides only in a person’s head,

But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,

But with the motion of all elements

Courses as swift as thought in every power,

And gives to every power a double power 5

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye—

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.

A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

When the suspicious head of theft is stopped. 10

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.

For valor, is not Love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? 15

Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair;

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write 20

Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs;

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

—BEROWNE, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 4.3.301–23

In other words:

Love, discovered by gazing into the eyes of a woman, is not sealed up tight in the brain. Instead, it moves like storms and wind, as quickly as thought itself, into every human faculty. In fact, it enhances the faculties, giving each one powers well beyond its normal functions.

Love makes the eyes see things in special ways. A lover’s eyesight is so acute that an eagle, renowned for its excellent vision, would seem blind in comparison. A lover’s ears can hear sounds quieter than even thieves can hear, and thieves must be capable of hearing the slightest noise. A lover’s touch is more sensitive than the extremely sensitive horns of snails. Compared to love’s, the famously discerning palate of Bacchus, god of wine, is clumsy.

When it comes to bravery, isn’t love like Hercules, picking golden apples in the last of his twelve labors? Love’s as intellectually sophisticated as the Sphinx, with her insoluble riddle. It’s as lively as the lute of Apollo, god of music, which was strung with his own hair. And when love talks, the voices of the gods themselves join in, and together they sing a sweet lullaby to the heavens. No poet dares pick up a pen unless his ink is mixed with love’s sighs. If it is, then his poetry will soothe wild beasts and infuse tyrants with gentleness and patience.

 

How to say it:

This speech is great for any occasion on which love is the prime mover: an engagement party, a wedding, a landmark anniversary. It’s especially useful in the case of a love that has triumphed against long odds or formidable obstacles. Also, I know of at least one instance when someone sent these lines to a lover to tell her that her love had made him a better person. All you need is a little intro in which you say that you’re going to talk about the powerful force that brought everyone together today, or that changed your life: love.

Like any long speech, this one becomes a bit easier to handle once it’s broken up into smaller chunks. Work through the speech in four short, self-contained sections, divided as follows:

• Lines 1 through 6 set up the central conceit that love endows the human senses with special powers (and feel free to cut but in line 1 so you can start with a forceful and direct declaration).
• Lines 7 through 13 discuss some of these senses and present examples of how love improves them. Think of them as a list: (a) lover’s eye (precious seeing / gaze eagle blind); (b) lover’s ear (softest sound / thief can’t hear); (c) love’s feeling (more sensitive than a snail); (d) lover’s tongue (more refined than Bacchus’).
• Lines 14 through 19 talk about love’s effect on more abstract human qualities. Again, Berowne makes a list: (a) bravery (like Hercules and the Hesperides [pronounced hess-PERR-i-deez]); (b) sophistication (like the Sphinx); (c) musical ability (like Apollo’s); (d) voice (gods join in / lull heavens to sleep).
• Lines 20 through 24 explain love’s importance to poetry and suggest its ability to becalm rage and turn evil to good.

Berowne uses some great verbs, and you should exploit their power. Here are some I think are most useful: Lives; Courses; gives; adds; gaze; hear; proves; Make; touch; write; ravish; plant.*

SHAKESPEARE TO SAY “I LOVE YOU”

Hear my soul speak.

The very instant that I saw you did My heart fly to your service.

—FERDINAND, The Tempest, 3.1.63–65

I love you. Three little words that can move mountains. Shakespeare writes many versions of them, some in more than three words, and the mountains he moves are bigger than the whole wide world. Below is a selection of the Bard’s vows of love. If you don’t know the occasions on which they’re best used, then I’m not going to tell you.

I LOVE YOU

Here’s the basic, no-frills Shakespeare on the Occasion of Saying the L-Word.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee, and when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

—OTHELLO, Othello, 3.3.91–93

In other words:

You superb little devil! I’ll be damned, but I love you. And when I don’t, it will be the end of the world.

 

Some details:

Othello clearly means wretch affectionately, but decorous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeare editors had trouble with the notion that Shakespeare would employ such a coarse word as a term of endearment. Hence they theorized that it must have been an unfortunate misprint. “I make no question but that the poet wrote wench,” argued one expert, “which was not then used in that low and vulgar acceptation as at present.” This is pure supposition, of course, and a later editor offered a commentary on wretch that will more than suffice for anyone who would use these lines as a modern expression of love: “Such words of endearment are resorted to when those implying love, admiration, and delight seem inadequate.”

I REALLY LOVE YOU

It’s an understatement to say that the marriage of Othello and Desdemona doesn’t turn out well. But the spectacular violence in which it goes down in flames does nothing to erase the intense love that set it afire in the first place. Indeed, the depth of the passion that prompted the marriage is precisely what makes its horrible dénouement so tragic. Here’s another of Othello’s oaths of love for his cherished wife.

If it were now to die

’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear

My soul hath her content so absolute

That not another comfort like to this

Succeeds in unknown fate.

—OTHELLO, Othello, 2.1.186–89

In other words:

If it were my fate to die at this very instant, it would be my good fortune. I’m afraid that I am so totally and completely joyous right now, that there’s no way I could ever experience anything as positive again in the future.

 

How to use it:

This is an “I love you” to be saved for one of those rare moments when everything in life lines up perfectly. It’s for a breathtaking sunset on the beach, for an “I’m the king of the world” howl at the prow of an ocean liner, for some intimate pillow talk, for the dessert course at the Michelin three-star restaurant you visit on your honeymoon.

By the way, the soul is always female in Shakespeare, regardless of the gender of the body that contains it.

I ADORE YOU, SO PLEASE LOVE ME IN RETURN

Sometimes we want to say “I love you” to someone we’re not sure loves us back. Or to someone we know for sure doesn’t love us back. Or to someone we once saw across a crowded room, or on a bus, or wearing nothing but underwear on a billboard in Times Square, who would certainly love us back if only they could somehow meet us. On such an occasion, we can turn to this Bardism, one of Shakespeare’s most poignant expressions of hopeless, selfless, stars-in-the-eyes-but-sighs-in-the-heart love.

So holy and so perfect is my love,

And I in such a poverty of grace,

That I shall think it a most plenteous crop

To glean the broken ears after the man

That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then 5

A scattered smile, and that I’ll live upon.

—SILVIUS, As You Like It, 3.5.100–5

In other words:

My love is so sacred and so complete, and I am so lacking in your estimation, that I would consider it a bumper crop to gather up the damaged ears of corn that the farmer leaves behind when he harvests the field. Just flash me an offhand smile once in a while, and that will give me everything I need.

---

LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

The debonair composer and lyricist Cole Porter detailed the glories that can redound to a skilled Shakespeare quoter in one of the great songs from his musical Kiss Me Kate, based on The Taming of the Shrew.

 

Brush up your Shakespeare,

Start quoting him now,

Brush up your Shakespeare

And the women you will wow.

Just declaim a few lines from Othella

And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella,

If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ’er

Tell her what Tony told Cleopaterer,

…

Brush up your Shakespeare,

And they’ll all kowtow.

 

The song goes on for six more verses, and as Porter cites increasingly obscure Shakespeare titles, his rhymes get more and more hilariously rococo. When should you quote The Merchant of Venice? “When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace.” Troilus and Cressida? For “the wife of the British embessida.” And a true stroke of genius: what should you do “when your baby is pleading for pleasure”? Why, “let her sample your Measure for Measure.”

---

YOU’RE SO INCREDIBLE THAT ONLY POETRY CAN EXPRESS YOU

One of the surpassing love poems in the English language, which begins with one of the most famous and widely recognized Shakespearean lines of all, serves as the quintessential profession of amorous devotion. Use it to woo your love, and as you do, tip your hat to a poet who knew his work would have staying power.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 5

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, 10

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

—SONNET 18

In other words:

Should I write a line that says you’re like a day in summer? It wouldn’t really work. You’re more beautiful than a summer day, and more even-tempered. The early part of summer is stormy, and anyway, summer’s over as soon as it begins. What’s more, some summer days are oppressively hot, and others are overcast and gloomy. In fact, every lovely thing loses its loveliness sooner or later, through some accident, or because it’s nature’s way to make things plainer and plainer as they age.

But you’re different. The summertime of your life will last forever, and you’ll never lose your loveliness. Not even Death will be able to boast of conquering you—because my imperishable poetry will make you one with time itself, and you’ll go on as long as time does. So long as there are human beings, so long as there are eyes that can see letters on paper—that’s how long this poem will live. And this poem will give everlasting life to you.

 

How to say it:

This sonnet requires a good, strong launch. Be sure you make the question in its first line as real as possible, so that you can spend the next five lines working through the answer to your satisfaction. Imagine yourself a poet, in the middle of composing a poem to your lover. You’re about to write something like “You’re as beautiful as a perfect day in July.” Before setting pen to paper, you ask yourself if that’s such a good idea. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The force of the question makes you really think it through, and you talk your answer out, point by point. Well, you’re prettier than summer. You’re more temperate. Summer has storms, it’s too hot, sometimes it’s cloudy. Before you know it, you’re on line 6, simply by making yourself reason out a real answer to a real question.

Note how the sonnet’s argument changes direction with that ever-powerful word But at the beginning of line 9. The answer to your initial question led you to acknowledge that not just summer but all things lose their beauty over time. Now but contradicts that assertion by proposing the one thing whose gorgeousness never fades: your lover. The rest of the poem spells out precisely how he or she pulls off that time-defying trick: by being immortalized in your poetry. By line 14, the answer to Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? turns out to be “No, but I’ll find a way to write a poem about you anyway.” Ask a question, then answer it, and follow that answer in whatever direction it naturally evolves. That’s about as good an approach to Shakespeare as any.

The verbs do yeoman’s service in this sonnet. They are: compare, shake, shines, dimmed, declines, fade, ow’st, brag, wander’st, grow’st, breathe, see, lives. Ow’st at the end of line 10 is the present-tense declension of “owe,” which in Shakespeare’s period was synonymous with “own.” (That fair thou ow’st means the beauty you possess.) In almost every Shakespeare play I’ve directed, I’ve simply substituted own for owe in order to make the sense clear to a modern audience. Doing that here is far trickier, alas, because of the rhyme between ow’st and grow’st. (To time thou groan’st. Yikes!) This is a case where we have to live with an archaic word and rely on the clarity and specificity of our thinking to make its sense emerge.

Perhaps the most important word in the entire poem is this, which appears twice in its final line. It’s clear from the context that both occurrences of the word refer to this poem, or this collection of poems, or poetry in general. In order for the reference to be clear, you’ll need to point to—physically, with a gesture—the paper or book you’re reading from as you really hit each this. That won’t be hard: you already know to take every word in this line slowly and with strong emphasis because it’s entirely monosyllabic. For this reason, both this’s are already nice and juicy, so all you need is to give them just a little extra edge in order to ensure they land.

Some details:

Shakespeare’s plays will forever enshrine him in the pantheon of world literary giants, but they’re not the only distinguished collection of verse he wrote. His series of 154 fourteen-line sonnets, of which the Bardism here is number eighteen, is also astonishingly great. Written over many years beginning in the early 1590s, the sonnets weren’t published until 1609, although versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 first appeared in a volume called The Passionate Pilgrim ten years earlier.

The circumstances surrounding the composition and publication of the sonnets are mysterious. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare never intended the poems to be published at all, because surviving evidence suggests they had been circulated privately to a small group of friends and insiders comprising mostly prominent London literati and connected noblemen. One of these readers might have slipped a manuscript to a publisher without Shakespeare’s authorization. This theory is buttressed by the fact that the author’s name is given an unusual hyphenated spelling—“Shake-Speare”—on the title page of the 1609 text and throughout the volume. Had Will himself been involved in the publication, his name surely would have been spelled correctly.

Another mystery is the dedication that precedes the poems. It’s signed not by Shakespeare but by “T.T.”—the initials of the volume’s publisher, Thomas Thorpe—and it labels “Mr. W.H.” as “the onlie begetter” (literally, sole parent; i.e., inspiration) of the poems. To this day, no one knows who this W.H. was. Literary sleuths adduce all sorts of evidence in support of various candidates (even such luminaries as Oscar Wilde and the philosopher Bertrand Russell turned their considerable minds to the question). Here are a handful of the theories, in increasing order of outlandishness:

W.H. is any of a number of well-known aristocratic patrons of the arts who supported Shakespeare’s early career, including William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (to whom the First Folio was dedicated), or Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron and the dedicatee of both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece), whose initials are here reversed to help preserve his anonymity—and yes, there are some fascinating theories as to why he’d want to be anonymous now when he didn’t care before, and these sound like cloak-and-dagger stuff worthy of a Jacobean John Le Carré.

W.H. is some other individual in Shakespeare’s life: his nephew, the actor William Hart; his friend the playwright William Haughton; the eminent publisher William Hall; or the young socialite William Hughes.

“W.H.” is an unfortunate misprint for either “W.S.” or “W. Sh.”: William Shakespeare. Or “W.H.” is short for “William Himself”: again, Shakespeare. (Those who argue this theory perform some circus-caliber contortions as they attempt to explain why Shakespeare would dedicate a book of his poetry to himself.)

“W.H.” means “Who He,” a formulation commonly used at the time by authors who wished to hide their identities. If this theory is correct, then Thomas Thorpe (and/or Shakespeare) was obfuscating on purpose, encouraging a public guessing game about “W.H.” in order to confer on the sonnets a certain frisson of notoriety or even scandal, and, as a result, to increase book sales. What I love about this argument is that while it’s a 10 on the ludicrous scale, it’s also the only theory of “W.H.” that’s supported by what’s actually happened over the course of four hundred years—an endless and complicated cat-and-mouse pursuit of the elusive W.H.

Despite the rampant silliness of some of the speculation, the true identity of W.H. is not without consequence. This is because the 154 sonnets, read in sequence, tell a very personal story, and W.H., as its “onlie begetter,” may well have been a leading character in the tale. Most of the poems are addressed by their author to a handsome young man (referred to by scholars as the “Fair Youth”). The first seventeen sonnets compliment the Fair Youth on his uncommon beauty and urge him to preserve and perpetuate it in the form of a child who will resemble him. Sonnet 18 suddenly reveals that the poet not only admires the Fair Youth but also has romantic feelings for him, and the next 108 sonnets chronicle a turbulent relationship between the two men. Frequently this relationship is described in the language of erotic love; indeed, by sonnet 126, the poet has been so hurt by unrequited passion for the Fair Youth that he rejects him and has an affair instead with a woman known as the “Dark Lady.” But this affair turns painful when the poet discovers that the Dark Lady is also in love with the Fair Youth and may even have had an affair with him herself! As if all this weren’t byzantine enough, a “Rival Poet” enters the picture and ratchets up the complications by vying for the Fair Youth’s attention with love poems of his own.

The poet who narrates this melodramatic love story is a middle-aged man confused by the power of his sexual urges, and frustrated and heartbroken over a dashing young man with ice in his veins. By turns jealous, vengeful, desperate, apologetic, abashed, gracious, and finally philosophical and resigned, the poet experiences and describes the whole wide gamut of human emotion. Many of the sonnets seem to revel in the resemblances between this poet and Shakespeare himself, such as number 135, which puns incessantly on the word will and all but announces that Will Shakespeare is not only the author of the verses but also their star. Therefore, if W.H. was indeed an actual person, and if he was in fact the Fair Youth of the Sonnets, and if the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet were also real figures from the Elizabethan world, then these 154 sonnets reveal an enormous amount about Shakespeare’s personality, emotional and psychological wiring, and private life.

But whether or not we choose to read these 154 poems as a kind of Shakespearean crypto-autobiography, we cannot deny their scope, beauty, and power. Even as they chronicle the vexed romantic interactions of four Elizabethans, the sonnets address countless broader themes: the corrosive powers of time; the enduring beauty of poetry; the disappointments and dissatisfactions of day-to-day existence; the paradoxical ability of sexual passion to generate new life even as it often leaves dejection and humiliation in its wake. The sonnets may well be a glimpse into the heart, mind, and soul of one the greatest geniuses in human history, but they are also one of the most sublime collections of verse ever composed.

SHAKESPEARE ON LOVEMAKING

Kiss me, Doll.

—FALSTAFF, Henry IV, Part II, 2.4.236

In my life as a Shakespeare teacher, I now and then work with high-school-age students. I’ve learned to look forward to a moment that usually comes while I’m talking about one of the Kate-Petruchio scenes in The Taming of the Shrew, or one of the Olivia-Sebastian scenes in Twelfth Night, or one of the Rosalind-Orlando scenes in As You Like It. Maybe it will be when we get to Petruchio’s line about putting his tongue in Kate’s tail. Maybe it will be when Rosalind threatens Orlando to be careful about marrying her, because she plans to be the kind of wife who dallies with the pool boy. Maybe it will be when Olivia sees her lover boy’s identical twin and, imagining double her fun, exclaims, “O wonderful!” At one of these points, or at any of a million others, I see a light snap on in my students’ eyes. “Hey!” it says, in lurid red neon. “This is Shakespeare. And it’s got sex!”

“It sure does,” I tell them. “And why not? Shakespeare writes about every other aspect of the human experience. Why would he skip this one that’s so very, very central to it?”

It disappoints me that the average high schooler doesn’t know how much sex there is in Shakespeare—they’d read a lot more of him if they knew—but it doesn’t surprise me. The American curriculum typically introduces Shakespeare with plays that seem to me rather bizarre choices for teenagers. Macbeth is one, that wholesome study of unhinged ambition, marital perfidy, and violence more brutal than that found in the latest release of Grand Theft Auto. Julius Caesar is another, that all-singing, all-dancing journey into political assassination, betrayed friendships, and—a favorite of teenage girls everywhere—self-mutilation as an attention-getting ploy. Even Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s hottest play, when taught to kids somehow lurches toward the morality tale and becomes a finger-wagging lecture on the perils of connubial precociousness.

That young people meet a Shakespeare bleached of his throbbing, sweaty, erotic urges is one of the lasting legacies of our English forebears still at the center of American culture: the mutually reinforcing prudishness of Victorian shame and old-school Puritanism. Shakespeare would’ve burst a blood vessel if he’d known, because animus toward all such restrictive, pleasure-canceling ideologies was one of the driving forces of his dramaturgy.

I say, if we’re to presume ourselves worthy of working on this great writer’s plays, the least we can do is honor his memory by resuscitating the horny heart that pounds them hormonally to life. Let’s put the shagging back in Shakespeare! Let’s give some Cialis to Cymbeline! Time to cop a feel off sweet Ophelia! Time to coriol-spank a little Coriolanus!

To kick things off, then, here’s Shakespeare on the Occasion of the Dirty Deed.

MAY I SMOOCH YOU?

We’ll start slowly, with gentlemanly refinement.

May I, sweet lady, beg a kiss of you?

—ULYSSES, Troilus and Cressida, 4.5.48

How to say it:

You sweet ladies should feel free to swap in sirrah for lady—and you sweet boys, too, if you’re so inclined!

KISS ME NOW, NOT LATER

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow” might work in other areas of your life, but when it comes to your heart, procrastination is obliteration, and when it comes to kissing, a lip-lock lost never returns. In Twelfth Night, the clown Feste (FESS-tee) sings a song that instructs us to open the door when love rings the bell.

What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,

Present mirth hath present laughter.

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

—FESTE, Twelfth Night, 2.3.43–48

In other words:

What about love? It’s not later on. Laughter comes the moment something’s amusing. The future is always uncertain. There’s no profit in waiting around, so come and kiss me, my twenty-times sweet one. We won’t stay young forever.

 

How to use it:

We’ll hear Shakespeare tell us “there’s no time like the present” in Chapter Four. This lyric says something along those lines, but in the specific context of love. As such, wheel it out for a friend who can’t decide whether or not to approach the guy she has a crush on, or say it to yourself when you’re wondering if you should flash your devilish smile at that cute guy you see on the subway platform each morning.

The rhyme scheme will point you to the operative words here. Simply say the last word in each line, and you’ll understand exactly what Feste is trying to communicate: hereafter, laughter, unsure, plenty, twenty, endure.

Some details:

These lines are the second verse of a ditty called “O Mistress Mine,” one of the best known of Shakespeare’s songs. The first verse:

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,

That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting.

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man’s son doth know.

In other words: “Hey, girlfriend, where are you going? Stay and listen: your lover’s coming, and he’s got a great voice. Don’t take another step, cutie-pie. Everybody knows that voyages end in lovers getting together.” Like the second verse above, this one admonishes us to seize love when it comes, not to run away from it or come up with some excuse as to why we can’t wait around.

The music for this song survives from Shakespeare’s day. It’s a lovely English madrigal, and if you’re interested in hearing it (or, for that matter, singing it at the next wedding you attend), it’s been recorded by a number of famous classical singers, male and female, over the years. Many eminent composers have also turned their hands to this lyric and written memorable tunes, either for specific productions of the play or just for the sake of it. The great singer Cleo Laine has a gorgeous jazz cover (on her early 1960s album Shakespeare and All That Jazz—a minor classic), but my current favorites are a dark rendition by rocker extraordinaire Elvis Costello and a ravishing, guaranteed tearjerker by the cult performer/singer/ violinist Emilie Autumn. They demonstrate the magic that can happen when a brilliant contemporary artist turns to the past for inspiration and creates something that fuses old and new, yesterday and today.

SOMETIMES KINKY IS GOOD

Earlier I said that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s hottest play. The statement merits clarification. It’s his hottest play about teenagers. For love between grown-ups, nothing—and I mean no work in world dramatic literature—beats Antony and Cleopatra. That’s a bold claim, I know. But this is a play which opens with a speech about the heat generated by “a gypsy’s lust” and goes on to include drunken orgies, lots of groping, some quite exotic descriptions of the female anatomy, and even eunuchs who fantasize about what sex might be like if only they had the equipment to experience it. There’s also a tiny detour into…er…shall we say, the rougher side of town…when Cleopatra mentions,

A lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desired.

—CLEOPATRA, Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.286–87

DOING IT

My high school students who delight in the discovery that Shakespeare is a mirror of their randy, gametically supercharged selves also thrill to find that he, like them, loves to talk about sex in the most inventively euphemistic terms. Whole books have been written on the subject of eroticism in the plays, so I’ll offer only these few Bardisms, Shakespeare for the Occasion of Getting It On.

First, the Bardism that Don Juan would have pledged, had Shakespeare written him:

I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure.

—GIACOMO, Cymbeline, 1.6.137

Next, the Bardism the Marquis de Sade would have spoken, in Shakespearean language:

Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite.

—ANGELO, Measure for Measure, 2.4.161

Finally, what both Don Juan and the Marquis de Sade got busy doing, had Shakespeare written their stories:

Making the beast with two backs.

—IAGO, Othello, 1.1.118

In other words:

This is a family-friendly book, so I’ll skip this part.

 

How to use it:

If you don’t know, you need more than a book on Shakespeare quotations.

Some details:

Those will remain private, thank you very much.

SHAKESPEARE ON GETTING ENGAGED

We are betrothed. Nay more, our marriage hour…

Determined of.

—VALENTINE, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.4.172–74

Betrothals in Renaissance England were largely contractual matters, arranged by parents, announced publicly in special church services, and accompanied by elaborate financial negotiations. Thus it can be tricky to find a good Shakespearean version of those four earth-shattering words, “Will you marry me?” Fortunately, early modern lovers—although not necessarily those intending to marry—shared with their counterparts in our era an affection for a certain special token of mutual love: the ring. And it’s in the rhetoric of ring giving and ring taking that our search for Shakespeare for the Occasion of the Marriage Proposal yields results.

PLEASE HAVE THIS RING

All right, so this particular ring presentation is from a homicidal maniac to the vehemently opposed, still-grieving widow of one of his victims. So what? Your lover needn’t know the dramatic circumstances. The sentiment is what counts.

Look how my ring encompasseth thy finger;

Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart.

Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.

—GLOUCESTER, Richard III, 1.2.191–93

In other words:

Look how my ring wraps around your finger. In just that same way, your body wraps around my heart. Have both my heart and my ring. They’re yours.

 

How to say it:

Technically, this isn’t really Shakespeare for “Will you marry me?” because the text makes sense only after the ring has been slipped onto your sweetie’s finger. If for any reason you don’t get that far, bail out of this speech and look for Shakespeare for Drowning Your Sorrows in Booze, to be included in the sequel to this volume!

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is nothing if not a capable wordsmith. One of his favorite tools is antithesis (“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York”), and he puts it to good use here. Lines 1 and 2 are all antithesis: Look how versus even so; my ring versus thy breast; encompasseth versus encloseth; and thy finger versus my heart. Rely on those contrasts to help you, but be sure to let each line flow smoothly. Don’t let individual antitheses become more important than the larger idea you’re trying to express.

Some details:

The image of Richard’s heart beating in Lady Anne’s chest has Shakespeare all over it. This trope—call it cardiac swap—appears a few times in the plays and gets developed at length in a handful of the sonnets. What’s marvelous about it is that at the same time as being ravishingly romantic, it’s also quite grotesque. My heart is in your chest? Then what’s keeping me alive? And what’s happened to your heart? And how did this transplant happen? Did some Elizabethan Dr. Jarvik come along and hack you open while you weren’t looking? It must have been painful. It must have been bloody. Richard’s facility with bizarre and surprising images like this one is part of his charm, and is central to his audacity and inexhaustible self-confidence. Shakespeare’s facility with such images is what makes him so hair-raisingly brilliant and so thoroughly indelible.

SHAKESPEARE ON WEDDINGS

As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.

—TOUCHSTONE, As You Like It, 3.3.66–68

If there’s one occasion for which Shakespeare is truly well suited, it’s a wedding. Nearly a third of his plays include one, or at least end with the coming together of a couple or two who will soon be headed for one. Here are three pieces of Shakespeare all eminently suitable for reading during the marriage ceremony, or for accompanying a raised glass at the reception, plus one excerpt to ensure the party is a properly raucous affair.*

A WEDDING TOAST

The standard Bardism for a wedding is this well-known poem that confers a lush and romantic blessing on the couple exchanging vows by exalting their love as true, devoted, and everlasting.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 5

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come: 10

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

—SONNET 116

In other words:

I don’t want to consider even for a moment that anything whatsoever might somehow block the union of two true-minded people. Love isn’t really love if it changes when circumstances change, or if it yields to some attractive temptation. No way!

Love is a permanent beacon, a lighthouse erected forever, that withstands storms without suffering any damage. Love is the North Star that helps every lost little boat navigate its way. (We might be able to determine precisely where in the sky that star is located, but we can’t begin to measure its value or the full force of its astrological influence.)*

Love’s not susceptible to time’s ravages, although Father Time can indeed undo a person’s youthful beauty. Love isn’t changed by such little things as hours and weeks; love endures until doomsday itself.

If I’m wrong about all this and you can prove it, then I’m no writer, and no person has ever truly been in love.

 

How to say it:

The presence of the word marriage in this sonnet’s first line is not the only reason it’s so frequently read at weddings. Another is its opening idea, Let me not…admit impediments. Many commentators note that this is a direct reference to the part of the marriage service when the officiant asks, in that line so familiar from a million movies, if anyone present knows any reason why this couple should not be joined in matrimony. The speaker of this sonnet answers by saying, “May I never even acknowledge the possibility that two such well-matched people might have some reason not to be married!” Keep that in mind when you speak this Bardism. Imagine that the minister or rabbi or justice of the peace has just this minute asked that familiar question. You know this couple well, and you think that the notion of an impediment to this marriage is simply outrageous. This couple’s minds are too true and their love is too deep to be affected by any obstacle. After all, you know something not only about these two people, but about love itself. You’re a writer—a poet, to be exact—and you’ve been around. You’ve traveled (specifically, by boat), you’ve lived a while, you’ve observed others in love, and you’ve loved, too. You therefore know that true love is constant. And you believe this so firmly that you’re willing to announce it to the entire world.

The verbs, as always, are crucial. Let, admit, alters, finds, bends, remove, fixèd, looks, shaken, wand’ring, taken, come, alters, bears, proved, writ, loved, and, of course, many occurrences of is. Try the sonnet one time through, concentrating in particular on the expressive power of these vivid words.

Next, take a look at the words that come at the end of each line. Read them aloud: minds, love, finds, remove, mark, shaken, bark, taken, cheeks, come, weeks, doom, proved, loved. Now read the sonnet again, emphasizing this list. You’ll find that the sense of the sonnet starts to emerge much more clearly, because, as a general rule, the energy of each line of Shakespearean verse drives toward the idea at its end.

What’s more, you’ll now hear very clearly that there’s a rhyme scheme in this sonnet. The first and third lines of each quatrain, or set of four lines, rhyme with each other, as do the second and fourth lines of each quatrain, and the sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet. (Each of Shakespeare’s sonnets follows this scheme.) Try to let your audience hear the rhymes, but don’t hit them so hard that the sense of the words disappears. (The sonnet has two almost-but-not-quite rhymes: love and remove, and come and doom. These are called near rhymes. Don’t worry about forcing them to rhyme perfectly; just say them as they naturally sound.)

Remember to stress the contrasting terms: alters versus bends; finds versus remove; worth versus height; Love’s versus time’s; alters versus bears; I never writ versus no man ever loved; and, in line 2, oddly enough, Love versus love!

Finally, really dig into some of the sounds of the words themselves:

• Impediments is, with its four consonant-filled syllables, a long and hefty word. Make each syllable count, letting the weight of the word help infuse it with a sense of irony: as forbidding and formidable as they may sound, im-ped-i-ments have no standing in the face of this glorious union of true minds.
• Let the rich and soothing -ar sounds in mark, star, and bark be nice and luxurious, suggesting how reassuring and permanent love is, particularly in contrast with the skimpy and tumultuous sounds of tempests and worth’s unknown.
• Allow those s sounds in rosy lips, cheeks, sickle’s compass, hours, and weeks, which so vividly describe the sharp swipe of time’s cutting scythe, to contrast as fully as possible with the long, melodic vowels of bears, out, doom, and of course, love.
• Finish strong by giving each word in line 14, most of which are monosyllables, as much weight as you can: I. Never. Writ. Nor. No. Man. Ever. Loved.

This sonnet works just fine spoken on its own. But if you want to give it a bit of context or make a few brief introductory remarks, here are some approaches:

• You might comment on how your friends are ideally matched, and in that sense are indeed a “marriage of true minds,” and on how you’re certain that theirs will be an everlasting love.
• You could talk about how every marriage is like an ocean voyage. There are thrills and also challenges, exciting times as well as routine ones, many ups and plenty of downs. But when true love is the star by which the ship navigates, then the challenges, doldrums, and difficulties are far less significant.
• You could present yourself as an expert on love who’s been asked to comment on today’s marriage, and you could joke that these are some of your jottings on the matter.

ANOTHER WEDDING TOAST

Sonnet 116, above, works great prior to or during the marriage service, and is best spoken by one person. This Bardism is better suited to the reception, after the marriage has been consecrated, and it’s a good one for a couple to say together to the newlyweds.

JUNO Honor, riches, marriage-blessing,

Long continuance and increasing,

Hourly joys be still upon you!

Juno sings her blessings on you.

CERES Earth’s increase, and foison plenty, 5

Barns and garners never empty,

Vines and clust’ring bunches growing,

Plants with goodly burthen bowing;

Spring come to you at the farthest,

In the very end of harvest. 10

Scarcity and want shall shun you,

Ceres’ blessing so is on you.

—The Tempest, 4.1.106–17

In other words:

JUNO May you have honor, wealth, marriage blessings, long lives, and a growing family. Hour by hour, may you always have happiness! Juno, queen of all the gods, sings her blessings to you.

CERES May you have the bounty of all that grows on earth, and may you have every abundance. May your barns and granaries never be empty; may your vines sprout bunches of rich, ripe grapes; may all your crops bend with the weight of the good fruits growing on them. May spring always come immediately after autumn, so that your years never suffer winter’s chill. Poverty and need will have nothing to do with you. With all this, Ceres, goddess of agriculture, blesses you.

 

How to say it:

First, even though in The Tempest the goddesses sing these lines, you should feel free simply to speak them!

Two speakers can work together (one as Juno, the other as Ceres), or one person can combine the speeches together into one presentation. In either case, you may wish to omit the goddesses’ names and substitute slight rewrites that allow you to speak on behalf of all the wedding guests as you bless the newlyweds. The lines could go like this:
    Line 4: We all sing our blessings on you.
    Line 12: All our blessings so are on you.
While you’ve got your red pencil out, you may even consider substituting “produce” or “portions” for line 5’s archaic and obscure foison. (You wouldn’t want anyone to think you’re wishing “poison” on the newlyweds!)

Whether or not you make these minor changes in the text, keep in mind that in offering this Bardism you’re giving a priestly benediction. Be as generous of spirit and genuine of heart as you can be. All the wishes you express are positive, happy, hopeful, and warm. Let your real affection for the couple you’re addressing infuse the way you speak. The language will be filled with emotion, and your remarks will be moving and quite memorable.

Lines 1, 2, and 3 comprise a long list of things Juno wishes for the marrying couple, and each new item in the list is somehow bigger or grander or more forceful than the one before. That is, the list builds in intensity as it continues, starting with honor and climaxing with hourly joys, a phrase so emphatic it’s even marked with an exclamation point. (A build is precisely what a theater artist would call these lines; a musician would call them a crescendo.) A good trick to help find the build is to think the phrase “and not only that but also” between each idea: Honor (and not only that but also) riches, (and not only that but also) marriage-blessing, (and not only that but also) long continuance (and not only that but also) AND INCREASING, (and not only that but also) HOURLY JOYS BE STILL UPON YOU! Ceres also gives a list with a build, though it develops more slowly than Juno’s. Try the “not only this but also” trick at the end of each line of verse and you’ll get a sense of how it works.

Among the many expressive words in these lines, blessing is of course the most important. Give it real weight every time you say it. Still (meaning “always”) in line 3, never empty in line 6, and shall shun you in line 11 are also crucial ideas.

AND ANOTHER WEDDING TOAST

In Chapter One, we heard Hermione ask the gods to pour their graces on her daughter’s head, and we discussed Shakespeare’s obsession with the notion of heavenly precipitation falling on us mortals below. Here’s another instance. These three simple and gracious lines will provide a nice finishing touch at the end of the ceremony or reception. (They’ll also serve nicely as a toast to a long-married couple, as I know well from saying this Bardism to my parents on their golden anniversary.)

The benediction of these covering heavens

Fall on their heads like dew, for they are worthy

To inlay heaven with stars.

—BELARIUS, Cymbeline, 5.5.351–53

THEY’RE MARRIED; LET’S START THE PARTY!

Part of what makes Shakespeare so apt for serving at weddings is that his material on the subject strikes the right balance between joy and solemnity. Just like the occasion itself, the passages above combine a good measure of uplift, a dollop of sentimentality, plenty of wit to keep the whole soufflé from collapsing outright, and, sprinkled atop it all tableside, a healthy pinch of wistfulness.

It’s the expert deployment of this last ingredient that’s so impressive to anyone who’s ever experienced the singular emotional complexion of the wedding ceremony. If things get too serious, the whole day melts down faster than the ice sculpture adorning the buffet table. But without some sense of the gravity of the commitment being sworn by bride and groom, the thing starts to feel phony, saccharine, and cloying. Casting a shadow over the altar with such phrases as Sonnet 116’s the edge of doom and no man ever loved, Shakespeare reminds us that “till death do us part” means business. He provides the literary equivalent of the smashed glass that ends every Jewish wedding, the symbolic acknowledgment that loss and endings are no less a part of lives lived in partnership than ecstasy and new creation.

But lest sobering reality do too much damage, Shakespeare comes in again with language that turns us back around. Like the traditional Yiddish shout of Mazel tov! (“Good luck!”) that banishes from the synagogue the ominous sound of shattering crystal, these lines snap us back from the brink, swing us into happiness, and get us ready for the big celebration still to come.

Meantime, forget this new-fallen dignity

And fall into our rustic revelry.

Play, music, and you brides and bridegrooms all,

With measure heap’d in joy to th’ measures fall.

—DUKE SENIOR, As You Like It, 5.4.165–68

In other words:

Meanwhile, let’s get rid of this sudden seriousness, and dive into some good old-fashioned partying! Strike up the band! And all you brides and bridegrooms, pile on the happiness, and start dancing!

 

How to say it:

The father of the bride can use this Bardism to help make the transition from the de rigueur remarks about “all those whom we wish were still with us to celebrate this day” to the first rousing chorus of “Hava Nagila.” Alternatively, the DJ, bandleader, or best man can use it as a way of getting all the guests up on their feet and boogeying.

Whoever says these lines must remember that they demand real energy in order to work. Circle the words at the end of each line—two rhyming pairs—and drive through toward them as powerfully as possible. Here’s a hint of how it should sound: “Cel-e-brate good times, COME ON!”

Antitheses: forget versus fall, new-fallen versus rustic, dignity versus revelry, brides versus bridegrooms. Forget and fall are also verbs, and they call for some heavy juice.

SHAKESPEARE ON WEDDING VOWS

My heart unto yours is knit

So that but one heart we can make of it;

Two bosoms interchainèd with an oath;

So then two bosoms and a single troth.

—LYSANDER, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2. 53–56

It’s hard to think of a single wedding I’ve attended in which the vows taken by bride and groom conformed to the standard formula of “to have and to hold until death do us part.” Most couples whose unions I’ve been fortunate to witness have preferred to depart from the tried and true and have incorporated into their vows music, poetry, their own writings and observations, and in one memorable case interpretive dance.

As always, Shakespeare’s at the ready with a rich vein of material for the most special moment of your most special day.

WITH THIS RING, I THEE WED

Here’s a simple Shakespearean statement for bride and groom to repeat to each other at the big moment when the gold bands make their appearance.

When this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence.

—BASSANIO, The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.183–84

Some details:

Should anyone at your wedding be churlish enough to mention that this line in The Merchant of Venice foreshadows the horrible moment when Portia’s ring does indeed part from Bassanio’s finger, precipitating one of the nastiest spats between any couple in Shakespeare, simply remind them that (a) it works out fine in the end, and (b) nobody likes a smarty-pants.

FROM THIS TIME FORTH AND FOREVERMORE

Two of my friends offered this Bardism to each other at their gorgeous wedding in a small chapel in the woods of Martha’s Vineyard. I include it here in tribute to their long and happy marriage.

To you I give myself, for I am yours.

—ROSALIND, ORLANDO, As You Like It, 5.4.106

How to say it:

Some editions of As You Like It separate myself into two words: my self. Though a little pedantic for my taste, this choice at least points to the wonderful doubleness of so much Shakespearean poetry. Rosalind and Orlando give themselves to each other—that is, all of what they have, everything they are—but they also give their selves—their inmost parts, their secret hearts, the essences that make them who they are. Either way you say the line, it expresses the magnificent idea that takes both Rosalind and Orlando five acts of Shakespeare and all sorts of extraordinary challenges to learn: that love is above all an act of profound generosity, unparalleled self-revelation, and trusting surrender.

ENDLESS LOVE

Here is a Bardism I consider one of Shakespeare’s finest hyperbolic hours, a perfect image of wedding-day love, a love so great it’s infinite.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep. The more I give to thee

The more I have, for both are infinite.

—JULIET, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.175–77

How to say it:

Try to wring all you can out of the important antithesis between give and have.

This speech shows how Shakespeare uses the sound of his language to help communicate meaning. First, the vowels. Listen to the echoing ow sounds in boundless and bounty, the repeated ee in bounty, sea, deep, and thee, and the recurring diphthong eye in my, my, I, and I. Next, the consonants. Watch how the v bounces from love to give to have and how the b migrates from bounty to boundless to both. Finally, the alternation between mono- and polysyllables. The final line employs one of Shakespeare’s favorite rhythmic tricks: a monosyllabic line with a polysyllabic word at the end. The. More. I. Have. For. Both. Are. go along slowly and emphatically, until Infinite springs into the ether, made special not only by its placement at the end of the line, but also by the bold relief that pops out its cluster of three syllables from what comes before. This is Shakespeare at his Mozartian best, a composer of word music as virtuosic as any set out in notes and staves.

Some details:

A crucial aspect of this speech is that it’s built on paradox. Juliet feels a love that’s not only infinite but also continues to grow: the more she gives away, the more she has. Shakespeare loves stuff like this. He’s addicted to riddles. You can’t get through a dozen lines in Macbeth without finding weather that’s “both foul and fair,” or a prediction that “cannot be ill, cannot be good”; Troilus puzzles at his girlfriend’s behavior and concludes that she simultaneously “is and is not Cressid”; Hamlet and Ophelia engage in a long debate about the paradoxical relationship of beauty and honesty; and all those cross-dressing heroines can’t take so much as a step in pants without someone making a crack about hermaphrodism. These are just the tip of the iceberg of Shakespeare’s obsession with impossibility, indeterminacy, simultaneity, and oxymoron.

He wasn’t alone in loving such dizzying intellectual puzzles. Shakespeare’s period, for all its social upheavals, political and religious turmoil, and military crises, was distinguished by its great capacity for giddy awe and a real sense of wonder. It’s not called the English Renaissance for nothing; the pace of innovation in science, economics, geographical discovery, and art was extraordinary, and as each new idea arrived in Britain, it met with its share of curiosity, amusement, or astonishment. Early modern Englishmen were addicted to optical illusions, astronomical prodigies, and biological oddities, and Shakespeare writes about them all. Twelfth Night dwells at length on the distorting effects of mirrors and lenses; Henry VI, Part I opens with a comet, and meteor storms break out at least a half dozen times in the tragedies; there are no fewer than three sets of identical twins in Shakespeare’s canon, and the mysteries of birth are a constant preoccupation.

Indeed, Shakespeare’s contribution to the English attraction to paradox is so prolific that it’s hard to know if he was reflecting public taste or shaping it. What’s clear is that he brings something new to the table, which we see in the Juliet speech above. Shakespeare finds paradox in human situations, in relationships between people, in emotions. After all, he seems to ask, what’s more of a curiosity: a newly discovered species of snake that often, when it eats, devours its own tail, or a person whose own appetites prove his horrible undoing? The latter, of course. That’s Shakespeare’s subject: the wonders, both joyous and terrifying, of being human. And love, the most wondrous of all human experiences, is the ultimate puzzle, the most dizzying trick of the light, and the greatest paradox of all.

BOTTOMLESS LOVE

Juliet’s reference to oceanic love isn’t the only deep-water moment in Shakespeare. Here’s another, perhaps even better suited to the wedding vow.

My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.

—ROSALIND, As You Like It, 4.1.177–78

How to use it:

This nuptial Bardism helped establish my reputation among my circle of friends as the go-to guy for occasion-appropriate Bardophilic quotations. I offered it at the warm and splendid Beverly Hills wedding of my dear friends Karen and Ben, who asked some of their closest pals to read passages on certain themes during their marriage ceremony. My assigned topic was love, so I knew Shakespeare would figure in somehow.
The Bay of Portugal was the body of water believed in Shakespeare’s day to be the deepest on earth. Bridegroom Ben had just published a novel whose hero was a records verifier for a Guinness Book of World Records–type volume, so I thought he’d appreciate a way to think about married love in terms of what is (to my knowledge) the only world record in the Bard’s canon. Introducing the line, I explained that a modern paraphrase might read, “My love is as deep as the Marianas Trench,” the location off Japan now known to be the deepest in any ocean, but that the Bay of Portugal sounded much more romantic and exotic, and besides, bottomless is a far more mysterious and enticing description of love than “36,201 feet deep.” I went on to talk about how surprising and specific details like this one are what make Shakespeare’s writing so unique, and, similarly, how the idiosyncratic, day-to-day details we learn about each other are what make us love as deeply as we do. The assembled crowd, and Ben and Karen, were moved. Feel free to borrow my introductory gambit if you decide to use the line in describing a marrying couple, or explain the line in retrospect at a toast during the reception if you incorporate it into your vows.

Some details:

One of the ways of studying Shakespeare I find most rewarding is what literary critics call his canonicity, the aspects of his writing that allow us to draw together his many individual efforts into a single, unified body of work. Approaching the canon as a whole, you begin to see echoes and correspondences you can’t see when you look at any individual work in isolation. You can watch Shakespeare’s craft develop over time. You can identify a set of his core interests running through every work and getting teased out and tried again and again. You can see early false starts and failed ideas developed further and solved better as the canon evolves. The canon has a life of its own—a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Juliet’s my love is as deep as the ocean and Rosalind’s my love is like the Bay of Portugal provide one interesting example of the insights into Shakespeare that can be found through his canonicity. Both lines employ an identical simile comparing love with the sea. Juliet’s use of it is simpler and more general; love is compared to no specific body of water, and the sea is just plain deep. Rosalind is more detailed in both nautical location—the waters off Lisbon—and measurement: bottomless, although not a finite number, is a more evocative adjective. Now consider both these lines in the context of Shakespeare’s entire output. Romeo and Juliet dates from around 1594, and As You Like It from about 1599. Watching Shakespeare develop this single image from generality to specificity over that five-year period provides a glimpse into his growth as an imaginative artist, illuminates his method as a writer, and perhaps even opens a door onto him rereading and responding to his own previous work. To consider any products of Shakespeare’s mind within the context of all the products of his mind is to glean more than can be gathered from any single line on its own. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s what canonicity is all about.

SHAKESPEARE ON RELATIONSHIP TROUBLES

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

—ROSALIND, As You Like It, 4.1.124–26

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,” Duke Senior counsels in As You Like It, but the advice might be aimed at the lovers in all the plays who travel bumpy roads toward eventual bliss. Love in Shakespeare meets with crises of every kind: misapprehensions, misunderstandings, slanders, jealousies, and betrayals. And when they’re swept away in the delirium of yet another Act 5 series of unlikely reversals, uncanny revelations, and lessons learned, these adversities do indeed serve to render the happiness all the more sweet in comparison.

Yet while Shakespeare knows that shadows make brightness seem even brighter, he also knows that the darkness itself stays dark. The pain is real while it lasts, and it lingers on in the memory. And, of course, sometimes the happy ending never comes. When love founders on life’s jagged rocks, it hurts. Truly and deeply, it hurts. Here’s a Shakespearean sampler for those Occasions When Love Goes Wrong.

LOVIN’ AIN’T EASY

This famous observation is either a balm to those convinced that their own redemptive Act 5 is just around the corner or a confirmation that what’s hard is hard, and nothing’s going to change it.

Ay me, for aught that I could ever read,

Could ever hear by tale or history,

The course of true love never did run smooth.

—LYSANDER, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.132–34

JEALOUSY IS POWERFUL

Shakespeare’s lovers pursue their amours beneath a whole constellation of ill stars. Cranky fathers-in-law abound, and social strictures impose frequently on love’s free will, be they based on differences of class, race, or religion. The weather separates lovers in a couple of plays, and villainous lotharios driven by lust or greed or both do their share of damage. In a handful of plays, war stamps its violent boot on Cupid’s gossamer wings. Still, no outside force in Shakespeare wreaks more havoc on love than a destructive gale that roars through Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and King Lear, and that percolates hot beneath the surface of Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Troilus and Cressida. That devastating storm: jealousy.

Iago, who seems to know everything there is to know on the subject (“Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ”), describes it in an image whose vivid originality always shocks.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy.

It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock

The meat it feeds on.

—IAGO, Othello, 3.3.169–71

How to use it:

Keep this excerpt handy the next time a friend, or your lover, veers into that terrible territory of suspicion, insecurity, and mistrust. One friend swears that a girlfriend who’d grown exhausted with his constant quizzes about her comings and goings once went to the trouble of buying a stuffed monster from a toy store, painting its eyes green, and setting it at the kitchen table with a half-eaten burger in front of it. I’ve never been able to confirm the story, but I like it a lot.

Change my lord to my lady if the girl’s the jealous one in your relationship.

Some details:

Like the primrose path, the dead doornail, and the milk of human kindness, the green-eyed monster is one of those Shakespearean phrases that’s seeped into the lexicon of everyday English. At some time or another, we’ve all heard it or said it, whether or not we were aware that the Bard wrote it. This strikes me as curious, because unlike Ophelia’s path, Pistol’s doornail, and Lady Macbeth’s milk, Iago’s monster isn’t exactly the easiest image to understand. Why, for example, are its eyes green? And what exactly does it do when it mocks the meat it eats? Does it sneer, “HA-ha! What a stupid steak you are”?

One magnificent nineteenth-century edition of the play offer some answers. The Variorum Shakespeare was the brainchild of Philadelphia scholar Horace Howard Furness, and was completed after his death by his son of the same name. Father and son’s mad project was to try to cram into a series of single volumes every conceivable textual variant, and zillions of other bits of arcane information, that had ever been thought about each of Shakespeare’s plays. It was a scheme typical of the Victorian era, a time when thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic hatched schemes of gigantic ambition and unfaltering self-confidence, and often created achievements to match both. The Variorum is a treasure trove of information about Shakespeare—some stupendously valuable, some simply crackpot—and is an indispensable resource to any serious student of the Bard, in the study or on the stage.

The Variorum Othello includes no fewer than five full pages of commentary on the “green-eyed” passage. Regarding jealousy’s eyes: Shakespeare usually associates jealousy with the color yellow, but the monster’s green eyes get support from Portia, who, Furness reminds us, mentions them in The Merchant of Venice. One scholar argues that by saying the green-eyed monster instead of a green-eyed monster, Iago refers to some specific creature widely known to have green eyes and to mock its victim. That monster? Why, “the tyger,” of course. Another scholar concurs, but floats the idea that the mocking tiger’s not green-eyed at all, but agreinied, an archaic word meaning “sportive” or “frolicsome.” (That scholar is named Becket, and we’ll return to him in a moment.) Regarding mock / The meat it feeds on, most scholars agree that a serviceable paraphrase might be, “Jealousy feeds on love, a food it plays with like a child with its pureed veggies.” Since Iago uses both the monster and its meat metaphorically, the line therefore really means, “Jealousy laughingly torments the soul of the person who suffers from it.” That seems pretty right to me, although Furness recalls an explanation from Lewis Theobald that introduces a very different perspective. The granddaddy of all Shakespeare scholars conjectures that mock was a mistaken reading for make and that, corrected, the phrase means, “Jealous souls create their own suspicions, and these become a kind of sustaining nourishment for their own paranoia.” This brings us back to our agreinied friend Professor Becket. He believes that neither mock nor make is correct, but that Shakespeare obviously wrote muck, meaning befoul. A scholar named Jackson supports Becket but argues that if muck is correct, then the monster is not a tiger but a mouse, known colloquially as the “little monster.” A mouse, Jackson delicately explains, “after it has glutted on a piece of nice meat, leaves as much defilement on the residue as it possibly can.”

Mouse droppings? In Shakespeare? Furness won’t have it. “Some years ago I announced the exhaustion of my patience with Andrew Becket and Zachary Jackson,” he snaps, then proclaims that by presenting to the world the self-evident absurdity of their mucking mouse, “my vindication is complete.” His bile flowing, Furness moves on to the wonderfully named Lord Chedworth, who holds that Iago’s green-eyed monster is “a sort of large dragon-fly, that voids a greenish foam from its mouth, and then gradually sucks it in again.” For Furness, this is too much. He petulantly labels this “the last note that I will ever take” from Chedworth, “the sight of whose volume [of Shakespeare commentary] starts a shudder.”

At his death, Furness left his books and papers to the University of Pennsylvania, where the Horace Howard Furness Shakespeare Library remains one of the great collections of its kind. I’ve never been there, but one day I will make a pilgrimage and pay my respects to the professor, whose inability to suffer fools makes him one of the most appealing of the giants in my field.