“An old man is twice a child,” Rosencrantz tells Prince Hamlet, who moments earlier mocked the elderly Lord Polonius as a “great baby” who is “not yet out of his swaddling-clouts.” The maxim “old men are twice children” was a commonplace in the Renaissance, but I like to think that Rosencrantz alludes not to the conventional wisdom but instead to Jaques’ Seventh Age.

Of course, I can’t prove that As You Like It was on the Masterpieces of World Drama syllabus at the Danish school Rosencrantz and his sidekick Guildenstern attended. But one of the things that happens when you spend as much time with these characters as I do is that they become very real people in your imagination. And as real people, they can go and read the same plays, even Shakespeare plays, that other real people read. To my mind, Hamlet’s read Richard II and Henry V, Coriolanus knows All’s Well That Ends Well, and Desdemona could ace an exam on Much Ado About Nothing. The characters may not be able to read ahead to the ends of their own plays, but I see no reason to deny them the glories of all the others. Besides, I can support this unorthodox theory on postmodern grounds: Shakespeare’s company employed a small number of actors—a core group of sixteen, who played all the principal roles in any given play. Thus Laertes “is” Macduff “is” Hotspur, because the same fellow played all three. And Hermia “is” Celia “is” Hero for the same reason. In this sense, Rosencrantz may not literally know Jaques or have ever heard him speak, but “Rosencrantz”—in the form of the actor who played him—certainly heard “Jaques”—in the form of the actor who played him—list the Seven Ages on that great day in theater history when As You Like It premiered. Jaques was likely played by Richard Burbage, who also played Hamlet—apparently he was especially convincing as a melancholy cynic with an ironic bent. Shakespeare’s company, unlike most of today’s thespians, performed a different play every day, so it was theoretically possible that Burbage-as-Jaques could tell his cast-mates about how life tends toward second childishness on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, as Hamlet, he could listen to one of them tell him about how an old man is twice a child. Such was the funhouse mirror existence of a Shakespearean actor in the English Renaissance.

My twenty-year run in the contemporary Shakespearean theater has given me the chance to watch our era’s Burbages at work, and although I’ve seen them give performances of jaw-dropping excellence and stirring emotional truthfulness, I don’t know if it’s even possible for them to inhabit Shakespeare’s words, to live them, in quite the same manner Burbage and company did. For those artists—the Founders, if you will—“all the world’s a stage” wasn’t just a line in a speech, it was a way of life. In Shakespeare’s theater, the boundary between onstage and off was permeable and the frontier line separating these realms, ever changing. Not all the sophistication of our modern theater can conjure such a reality. Our culture—scientific, rational, accountable—is ineluctably different from that of the English Renaissance, and it simply won’t allow for such contingent and elusive constructs.

In the English Renaissance, world and stage were two shifting points on a single continuum, and experts on the period show us how deeply this notion penetrated the entire worldview of Shakespeare’s day. Theater historians and archaeologists argue that the very architecture of the Globe Theatre itself encoded the idea. There, the audience and the actors occupied the same space, under the same open roof, lit by the same gray afternoon light of the overcast London sky. Above the theater’s main entrance gate, custom holds, was a crest showing Hercules bearing the earth on his shoulders, and the Latin motto “Totus mundus agit histrionem,” or “The entire world is a playhouse.” This striking assertion helps make clear why Jaques’ last scene of all ends a strange, eventful history: the word was not merely a synonym for “story.” Like shifts in Jaques’ Sixth Age, history also carried with it a theatrical undertone, because during the English Renaissance, chronicle plays—works that depicted human lives unfolding against epic tapestries of large national themes—were labeled by that generic term (as in Shakespeare’s The History of King Lear, The History of Henry IV, and The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice). “History” the recorded facts and “history” their dramatization are interchangeable. All the world’s a stage, all people are actors, and all of life is a play. If that’s true, then a playhouse is a stage upon a stage, an actor is a person playing the part of a person playing a part, and a drama is an artistically crafted version of a life that’s already artistically crafted. The theater of the English Renaissance was a kind of Dreamland, a Coney Island fantasy palace populated by exotics and attended by people whose real life was, at least according to the sign above the theater door, as fictional as the story they were watching. When the play ended, both groups—actors and audience—simply went away, and ended, too. The players disappeared into some unseen backstage nowhere, and the audience returned to its world, which was—fasten your seatbelts—a stage!

To be sure, man’s Seventh Age is not about the endless feedback loop of life and theater. Instead, it’s about the end of this strange, eventful tale. The Seventh Age is death. But to Jaques—all right already, to Shakespeare—death and the end of a play are two ways of looking at the exact same phenomenon. In his last play the Bard makes the connection clear. “Our revels now are ended,” The Tempest’s Prospero announces when the play he presents at the wedding party of his daughter and son-in-law concludes. “These our actors,” he continues, “were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” Jaques was written nearly a dozen years earlier, and so he doesn’t have Prospero’s poetic precision on the subject. But what Prospero spells out is what Jaques implies in describing the last scene of all as mere oblivion. Mere is Elizabethan for “utter, total, absolute.” Death is in this sense a process of annihilation, or, more accurately, sublimation: the direct transformation of solid into gas, the melting of what we are, into air. Into thin air.

Jaques’ last line is chilling enough when read as a literal description of the final moments of life; we die toothless, blind, and incapable of discernment of any kind. But if we read his four repeats of sans, that series of bass notes that toll this magnificent speech to a close, as forerunners of Prospero’s vision of the nothingness that follows the final curtain’s fall, then sans everything leaps beyond the literal. Jaques’ last word—ev-ry-thing—with its intimation of infinity, tells us that the Seventh Age may be a time of physical decay, but it is also, stunningly, a time of metaphysical transformation and limitless possibility.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on. That is, our origins are the material of fictions. Life is evanescent and ephemeral, and after all its sevenfold dramas, and all the turmoil, and all the pomposity and self-importance, and all the foolishness, it ends where it began. In the dark, on a bare stage, our story over, yet somehow ready to begin again, thanks to some impossible-to-name power: magic or art or God or “Shakespeare” or faith or the essence of theater itself, that cascades over the edge of the stage with Niagara force.

Here, then, Bardisms for the Seventh Age. Shakespeare on the Occasions of Oblivion, and for that spark whose flicker kindles new light.

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LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, longtime boss of New York’s notorious Genovese crime family, was sentenced to twelve years in prison after a long trial on charges of conspiracy to murder, extortion, and racketeering. His family objected that Gigante was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and therefore incompetent to stand trial; after all, he was famous for shuffling down the streets of Greenwich Village in a ratty blue bathrobe and jabbering to himself like a madman. Prosecutors countered that it was all an act, and U.S. district judge Jack Weinstein agreed, saying “the Chin” was faking his illness in order to escape justice. “One man in his time plays many parts,” wrote Weinstein in his opinion, quoting Jaques in support of his view that Gigante’s second childishness and mere oblivion were simply second-rate theatrics. “The Chin” died in prison in 2005, sans everything.

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SHAKESPEARE ON DEATH

Thou know’st ’tis common—all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

—GERTRUDE, Hamlet, 1.2.72–73

Love and death: for sheer quantity, these two subjects top the Bardisms list, although it can be a challenge to specify which comes in first and which second. Ranked by line count, love probably wins, but only by a nose. Ranked by potency—by poetry’s power to stun, to clobber, to stop all motion cold—death gets the edge, but that’s perhaps more a reflection of death’s frightful and tenacious hold on the imagination than it is a comment on the relative weakness of Shakespeare’s love poetry. One of art’s great subjects is the intersection between humanity’s terror in the face of death and its ecstasy in the face of romance—where would Italian grand opera, the nineteenth-century English novel, Bosch and Breughel, or all of Greek tragedy be without this theme?—and art often concludes that death is the more overwhelming force.

This, I think, is the reason King Lear and Hamlet are reckoned the greater Shakespearean efforts than, say, As You Like It or Twelfth Night, despite those two hardly being chopped liver, as my grandmother would have put it. (And it’s also why the life-affirming comedies are way, way more fun to watch.) I laugh myself to joyous tears at the multiple wedding that concludes As You Like It, and my heart leaps when the twins Viola and Sebastian appear together in the final scene of Twelfth Night. But as intense as those reactions always are, something of another magnitude happens when Lear howls over his daughter Cordelia, dead in his arms. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,” the king wails, “and thou no breath at all?” and the agony is so profound that I can barely look at it. When Fortinbras enters at the very end of Hamlet and gapes at the carnage strewn about the marble halls of Elsinore, I share his disbelief at the devastation. When I staged the murder of Desdemona in a production of Othello, I left every rehearsal feeling shaken and drained—the violence in the scene is too mighty, the airless, Stygian darkness in Desdemona’s bedroom too real. Shakespeare knows the force of death, understands its workings, comprehends its annihilating power, and, as always, finds words to express all this in surprising, even shocking, detail—detail so vivid and material that we, like Lear, want to wash our hands before we go on. “Let me wipe it first,” he tells Gloucester, who has asked to kiss the royal palm, “it smells of mortality.” The Bardisms below render in verse various aspects of that cataclysmic scent. I’ve found that they provide some comfort when the ugly whiff wafts across one’s path.

DEATH IS PART OF THE NATURAL COURSE OF LIFE

Gertrude, quoted above, labels death common. She means something like “typical,” or perhaps “widespread,” “experienced by everyone,” and hence “ordinary.” Gertrude’s notion—that all living things die—is, in a word, common in Shakespeare: “But kings and mightiest potentates must die, / For that’s the end of human misery,” says the heroic general Talbot, nearly rhyming (Henry VI, Part I, 3.6.22–23); doddering Justice Shallow expresses the notion in the comically repetitious phrases of a nutty old man: “Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure. Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die” (Henry IV, Part II, 3.2.33–34). And in a little-known late play, written in collaboration with dramatist John Fletcher, Shakespeare articulates “everybody dies” in a lyric that combines cartography, urbanism, and commerce in a remarkable and vivid metaphor:

FIRST QUEEN             Heavens lend A thousand differing ways to one sure end.

THIRD QUEEN             This world’s a city full of straying streets, And death’s the market-place, where each one meets.

—The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1.5.13–16

Here’s another iteration of the “death is common” idea, a Bardism that puts a quite terrible thought into moving and even beautiful poetic form.

This is the state of man. Today he puts forth

The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,

And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,

And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 5

His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,

And then he falls.

—WOLSEY, Henry VIII, 3.2.353–59

In other words:

Here’s how a person’s life runs. Today he cautiously indulges his hopes, those fragile things that are like the newest buds on a branch. Tomorrow he flourishes, and collects all sorts of splendid successes and tributes that he displays proudly. On the third day it suddenly gets cold, deadly cold, and at the very moment when this trusting person is convinced that glory is upon him, that’s when he’s cut down and crashes to the ground.

 

How to say it:

Wolsey is a cardinal, and his years of Sunday mornings in the pulpit have taught him a thing or two about crafting a good speech. This one deploys a marvelously artful three-part build: (1) today this happens, (2) tomorrow that happens, and (3) the third day something else takes over. Try to let the speech intensify as it moves forward, and let this three-step process carry you through.

As you do, take care to emphasize the verbs in the passage: puts forth; blossoms; bears; comes; killing; thinks; is a-ripening; nips; falls. Note how they chart the speech’s sobering message of promise turning to decay. In particular, observe how the verbs associated with the frost that descends in the deadly third step of the speech are stark, sharp, and haunting. Nips is especially powerful. It’s such a small word, the action of a gardener’s pruning shears, and yet it carries with it enough force to take down greatness. And can there be a verb more devastating in context than falls? It knots my stomach every time I read it.

Certainly applicable on any occasion calling for some insight into death and its ways, this Bardism is also perfect whenever arrogance meets comeuppance. That showboating baseball player who at the crucial moment chokes like Mighty Casey knows what Cardinal Wolsey’s talking about, as does that politician who believes his own polls and veers too close to the boundaries of ethical conduct, as does that yahoo in your office whose last month’s sales results make him certain that he can coast to this month’s gold star status.

Change the gender-specific words as necessary: woman, she, and her allow this Bardism to speak to the Gertrudes who need to hear it.

Some details:

Repeating frost in line 4, Cardinal Wolsey employs one of Shakespeare’s favorite playwright’s tricks. When a word appears twice, or even more times, in close proximity or in a row, Shakespeare is instructing his actors to intensify. That’s the theater equivalent of the musician’s crescendo: an increase in volume, force, and size. Leontes has a great repeat in The Winter’s Tale when he sees what he’s sure is open flirtation between his wife and his best friend: “Too hot, too hot,” he says. Every actor who’s ever played the role has taken Shakespeare’s advice about repeats and increased in intensity between the first and second iteration of the phrase. The heat between Leontes’ wife and his best friend is not just hot, it’s “too hot…too HOT!” In Richard II, the über-patriot John of Gaunt calls his beloved England “this dear, dear land.” Again, every actor I’ve ever seen give the line has said, “This dear, dear land.” Most good Macbeths say “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” and I can’t remember a Lear who didn’t say “Never, never, never, never, NEVER!” Repeats mean build in intensity. After all, Cardinal Wolsey’s not describing a crisp December morning in Vermont, nor the inside of his Sub-Zero freezer. He’s talking about an icy blast that wipes out the crop: “The third day comes a frost, a killing frost.”

LIFE IS A SLOW MARCH TOWARD DEATH

Shakespeare’s greatest formulation of death’s pervasiveness and life’s status as merely a preamble to its inevitable end is this entry in the Shakespeare Top Ten, familiar to most of us from when Miss Baxter forced us to memorize it in eighth-grade English class.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. 5

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. 10

—MACBETH, Macbeth, 5.5.18–27

In other words:

One after another after another, our days crawl slowly along, until the very last moment of human history. And all the events of our pasts are merely signposts that guide us—silly us—toward our deaths. End already, you short, shining life. You’re nothing but a phantom, a zombie, a bad actor that shouts and hams it up while he’s onstage and, when he exits, disappears forever. Life’s a story told by a moron. It’s noisy and eventful, but it doesn’t mean a thing.

How to say it:

I could teach a semester-long verse-speaking class using only these ten lines. There’s a three-part build (line 1) and a pair of two-part repeats (lines 2 and 5). There are great verbs (creeps, lighted, out, struts, frets, is heard, told, full). The thoughts emerge beautifully one line at a time (cover the page with a paper, read each line one by one, and see for yourself how clearly the speech unfolds). There are complex puns and locutions (tomorrow and yesterday are named outright, while today is glanced at in another form at the end of line 2). The language leaps to and fro from pedestrian to heightened and back again. It’s really got everything that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. The best way to speak this speech and allow all its poetic detail to resonate is to take it slowly, deliberately, and as simply as possible.
    Do take note, though, of how the language here has an aspect that moves it beyond its simple function of conveying meaning: the words operate in an almost physical manner. Their sounds, their shapes, their existence in three dimensions lifts them beyond the level of mere semantic or lexical communication and into a realm of material presence. The very vowels and consonants in the passage knit together to communicate as much information as the meanings of the words they constitute.
    Okay, okay. This is getting a little ethereal, a bit touchy-feely, and awfully hard to quantify. But the phenomenon I’m discussing—the way a word’s sound seems to embody its sense—is widely recognized in literature and even has its own very impressive name: onomatopoeia. Most of us think of that term as applying to words such as buzz or clang that sound exactly like what they are. Grammarians, and for that matter poets, use it in a wider sense. For them, onomatopoeia refers to those aspects of a word that give it a life of its own, an aural presence that transcends meaning. This is Shakespeare’s understanding of the term, and since he’s interested in the ways a word’s physical dimension generates a sense beyond sense, so must his interpreters be.
    Say only the vowel sounds in the speech, and then say only the consonant sounds (both are common rehearsal exercises). The long vowels in creeps, day, time, player, stage, tale, told; the pained oo in fools and poor; the injured ow in out, hour, and sound—these form a kind of tone poem of grief and loss. The mass of alliteration (what grammarians term repeated consonant sounds), including the initial letters p in poor and player and the t’s in tale told, are also worth noting. But the three occurrences of the consonant pattern s-f, in struts and frets, sound and fury, and signifying truly blow my mind. In those three paired s’s and f ’s can be found everything anyone might need to know about what Macbeth is going through at this, his lowest moment. Sss. Fff. Sss. Fff. Sss. Fff. It’s a symphony of suffering, a susurrus of futile finality. And it happens on a level totally apart from the meaning of what Macbeth is saying. When you try the speech again, this time re-integrating the consonants and vowels, the taste of sss fff will remain in your mouth, adding richness to the metaphors, deepening your empathy with Macbeth, and amping up the power of this language to move an audience.

Some details:

The literary excellence of this most famous of Macbeth’s utterances has earned it pride of place in many books about Shakespeare, but the speech has also, oddly enough, found its way into a rather less likely body of literature: studies about the American presidency.

No commander in chief was more of a Bardophile than the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe’s devotion to Shakespeare and his works surpassed that of even the noted presidential Shakespeareans John Adams, his son John Quincy, Thomas Jefferson, and John F. Kennedy, all of whom are on record declaiming iambic pentameter in the Oval Office.

Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare was Macbeth, and his obsession with the play is well documented. He is known to have carried a worn copy of the drama with him in the years he traveled up and down Illinois practicing law, and witnesses attest to many spontaneous White House references to and recitations from the play so passionate that they sometimes moved the great man to tears. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” gripped Lincoln’s imagination in a particularly strong—and, given what the speech talks about, a particularly odd—manner. One contemporary recalled in his memoir that he visited Lincoln late one night during the terrible summer of 1864, one of the most violent periods in the Civil War. Lincoln was asleep at his desk, “ghastly pale, rings under his caverened eyes.” His Shakespeare lay open beside him. Lincoln started awake and immediately read aloud Macbeth’s remarkable speech, with its imagery of life as bad acting and of human endeavor as mere empty sound that punctuates our inevitable march toward death. When he finished, Lincoln said of this extreme nihilism and utter hopelessness that “it comes to me tonight like a consolation.” It’s hard to think of a more revealing, or chilling, insight into the terrible psychic burdens borne by a president in wartime.

Some of Lincoln’s successors shared his fixation on this speech. Ronald Reagan cited Shakespeare frequently during his presidency, quoting everything from the ever-popular “There is a tide in the affairs of men” and the pro-democracy catchphrase “the people are the city” from Coriolanus to the title of one play in a witty blast at Jimmy Carter, whose economic policies Reagan found to be “a tragic comedy of errors.” Reagan’s most detailed remarks about Shakespeare, however, centered on Macbeth. At an appearance at a Tennessee school, the president recited the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from memory when a teacher asked him his favorite line in the canon. Unlike Lincoln, who was rattled to the point of despair by the bleakness of Macbeth’s vision, Reagan construed the lines as a reinforcement of his trademark “Morning in America” optimism. “I hope that none of you ever get that pessimistic or that cynical about life,” he told the students assembled to hear him. “I think that humankind is very important, and their lives are not as futile as he [i.e., Macbeth, or perhaps Shakespeare] would have us believe.”

Another president who gravitated toward Macbeth’s great soliloquy of wretchedness: Bill Clinton. At a White House poetry event, the president recalled the lines—flawlessly—and commented wittily that Macbeth, which is, after all, about murdering your way to power and then getting murdered once you have it—was “hardly designed to entice me to a public career,” but added that through the play, “I learned about the dangers of blind ambition, the fleeting nature of fame, the ultimate emptiness of power disconnected from higher purpose.” He returned to the passage in his autobiography, noting that he’d looked it up while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. He found it still “full of power for me, a dreadful message.” But there were no Lincolnesque caverened eyes for Bill Clinton; instead, his sparkled with a Reagan-like commitment to seeing the bright side: “I was always determined [that Macbeth’s bleakness] would not be the measure of my life.” Bill Clinton was perhaps the one president who understood the playwright as fully as Lincoln did before him. “Old Will had it right,” he discovered. “Life is comedy and tragedy.” He added, “Mr. Shakespeare made me a better president.” It’s a sentiment that a select few of the men in this most exclusive of clubs would share.

SHAKESPEARE ON THE LOSS OF LOVED ONES

O you gods!

Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,

And snatch them straight away?

—PERICLES, Pericles, 3.1.22–24

The Bard’s philosophical meditations on death expertly take the measure of a phenomenon that obsesses us all but that few of us can comprehend in any concrete way. That’s one of the great favors Shakespeare the poet does us: he “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name,” as Duke Theseus puts it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; that is, he renders in accessible human scale things that in themselves are simply too large for everyday understanding. But Shakespeare the dramatist does us favors, too. He knows that the most effective plays revolve around how the outsized, ineffable forces at work in the universe—the forces to which poets give labels and addresses—impact private, individual lives. His history plays provoke us when they consider war in the abstract, but they move us when they dramatize war separating parent from child. His romantic plays tickle us with some memorable phrase about a lover’s eyes glowing bright, but they swoop our hearts to heaven when they put those bright eyes on stage in front of us, radiating a passion intense enough to power an urban electrical grid. And so it is with his tragedies. They tell us much about what death is, how it works, why it comes, and how inescapable is its grip, and we learn from these passages. Yet when the plays dramatize death, when they show it walking into a home and taking a family member away, then our response moves into another zone. Then we feel, then we remember, then we grieve, then we mourn.

Here are some Bardisms about the personal nature of death. They’re to be consulted at those painful times when death takes that terrible step from literary conceit to palpable presence.

THE DEATH OF A HUSBAND

Widows wander through Shakespeare’s canon bearing witness to the human follies that summon death to curtail the world’s supply of husbands and fathers. Many of these widows declaim their stirring jeremiads about the Angel of Death long after their spouses’ demise. However, one very notable woman watches life ebb from her beloved while cradling him in her arms. Cleopatra’s in-the-moment narration of Antony’s death is as moving a piece of dramatic poetry as any I know, and it’s the Bardism I recommend, quietly and respectfully, to anyone who’s lost a husband, father, or revered mentor.

Noblest of men, woot die?

Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty? O see, my women,

The crown o’ the earth doth melt. My lord! 5

O, withered is the garland of the war.

The soldier’s pole is fall’n. Young boys and girls

Are level now with men. The odds is gone,

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon. 10

—CLEOPATRA, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.16.61–70

In other words:

Will you die, you finest of men? Don’t you even care about me? Do you want me to live in this boring world, which, without you, is about as glamorous as a barnyard? Look, my companions: the world’s most glorious ornament is ruined. My man! The laurel leaves of victory have dried and cracked, the flags have drooped. With the only real man gone, there’s no difference between those who remain and children. Nothing distinguishes between greatness and mediocrity anymore. Nothing special is left on the entire face of the earth.

 

How to say it:

This Bardism can serve as a tribute to any great person, and not only a husband. It can also with a few changes memorialize a woman: substitute women for men in line 1, and lady for lord in line 5. Feel free to change O see, my women to O see, my friends, or my colleagues, or my family, or my people.

Cleopatra begins by speaking to Antony, draped in her arms like a secular Pietà. She asks him three questions, which he of course does not answer, so midway through line 4 she turns her attention elsewhere: to her women, telling them that the world’s crown has melted. The exclamation “My lord!” at the end of line 5 might also be addressed to the women, but I’ve seen it work more effectively as an intimacy that connects Cleopatra one last time to her love.
All this is to say that a key to speaking this speech is to consider carefully just whom you are addressing. You must do as Cleopatra does and address first the late hero for whom you grieve—by speaking to his spirit in the air, perhaps—then address your listeners, then return briefly to your lord, and then speak again to those around you, telling them all the leveling depredations his absence imposes on the world.

Cleopatra’s three questions in the first section of the speech should build in intensity, as all three-part groupings in Shakespeare should. The next section of the speech, addressed to the women, is composed of a list. It has more than three parts, but it too must build in intensity: (1) the crown melts, (2) the garland withers, (3) the flagpole falls, (4) children are the same as men, (5) difference is erased, and (6) nothing remarkable remains. As you work through these six images, note that the first five are brief and rendered in quite simple language. Allow them their simplicity. The last image is longer and much more complex in vocabulary, syntax, and poetic texture. Allow it scope and space to express the grief and emotion of the moment.

These are some of the key ideas whose richness and imagistic power can help you through this speech: noblest, dull, sty, remarkable, moon. And here are some verbs that will also lend a hand: doth melt, withered, fall’n, are level, gone, is nothing left.

THE DEATH OF A WIFE

While fewer in number than widows, widowers also populate Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Their pain is captured vividly in a quiet corner near the close of a muted and minor-key play, All’s Well That Ends Well. It’s a Bardism suffused with sympathy and condolence.

He lost a wife

Whose beauty did astonish the survey

Of richest eyes, whose words all ears took captive,

Whose dear perfection hearts that scorned to serve

Humbly called mistress. 5

—LAFEU, All’s Well That Ends Well, 5.3.15–19

In other words:

His wife is gone. Her beauty dazzled the sight of even the most sophisticated eyes. Her speech beguiled every listener. Her utter perfection made worshippers out of people who resolutely refused to bow down to anything.

 

How to use it:

This Bardism is a powerful third-person observation on the passing of anyone’s beloved wife, but it can be a moving first-person expression of loss with the simple substitution of I for its first word, He.

THE DEATH OF A CHILD

Death’s icy touch always devastates, but when his cold hand snatches away a child, a special and profound sorrow plunges everything into a terrible bleakness. Perhaps because he knew personally the awful woe of losing a child, Shakespeare writes about it with surpassing power. In Macbeth, Richard III, and King John, children’s deaths shatter not only their loved ones but the very plays in which they once lived: the plots of these works swerve into unremitting darkness with, respectively, the murders of Macduff’s children, the princes in the tower, and young Arthur. In King John, the missing Arthur’s mother, Constance, goes mad with grief, and declaims an eloquent Bardism on the loss of a little one.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief.

—CONSTANCE, King John, 3.4.93–98

In other words:

Grief, personified, has literally replaced my missing child. Grief sleeps in his bed. It goes on walks with me. It’s cute in the same way he was; it says the things he said. It reminds me of all his wonderful features. It wears his clothes in an image of him. For bringing my child back to me in this strange manner, I’ve actually grown to like grief.

 

How to say it:

I wish no one would ever experience what Constance does in King John, but I have seen her words bring solace to mourners in her sad situation. I’ve also heard at least one person—it was a speaker at a funeral—substitute another noun (brother, in this case) for child at the end of line 1, a rewrite that transformed Constance’s lament for her young son into words of comfort for a grieving sibling.

SHAKESPEARE ON MEMORIALS AND ELEGIES

This was the noblest Roman of them all.

—MARK ANTONY, Julius Caesar, 5.5.67

If you’re scanning through this section of Bardisms, it’s probably because you’ve been asked to deliver a eulogy at a funeral. That the request came to you means that you had some special connection to the deceased, and this connection ensures that every word of your memorial will perforce be suffused with the very pain and loss on which your remarks hope to shed comfort. Private grief is hard enough to bear, but grieving in public is of another order of magnitude altogether. Public grief taxes our every emotional resource, challenges our ability to control our own faculties, and demands dignity and composure in measures well beyond those required of us on any other occasion. Put another way, every funeral we attend is one too many, but funerals at which we are called upon to speak are particularly difficult.

From my own experiences ordering my thoughts at times of mourning, I can report that recourse to wisdom beyond my own has made the difference between paralyzed murmuring unworthy of the occasion and a momentary eloquence not my own that somehow served up a modicum of solace for myself and others. The wisdom to which I had recourse was of course Shakespeare’s. After all, for every Bardism appropriate to happy life occasions, there is an equal and opposite Bardism appropriate to life’s more challenging moments. For every Sonnet 116 paying tribute to the marriage of true minds, for example, there is a Sonnet 65 pointing out that there are no forces in the world strong enough to resist when “sad mortality o’ersways their power.” Chapter Three showed how nuptials are the serial Shakespeare quoter’s finest hour; below is ample proof that funerals are the equal and opposite occasions on which the Bard so magnificently articulates all that we feel in our hearts.

MAY YOU REST IN PEACE

I’ve read this immensely moving text across a casket, heard it read at memorial services both grand and intimate, included it in notes of condolence, even sent it to a dear friend sitting vigil at a parent’s deathbed. It is the greatest Shakespeare on Occasions Funereal.

GUIDERIUS Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:

Golden lads and girls all must, 5

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

ARVIRAGUS Fear no more the frown o’ the great;

Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;

Care no more to clothe and eat;

To thee the reed is as the oak: 10

The sceptre, learning, physic, must

All follow this, and come to dust.

GUIDERIUS Fear no more the lightning flash,

ARVIRAGUS Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;

GUIDERIUS Fear not slander, censure rash; 15

ARVIRAGUS Thou hast finish’d joy and moan:

BOTH All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee, and come to dust.

GUIDERIUS No exorciser harm thee!

ARVIRAGUS Nor no witchcraft charm thee! 20

GUIDERIUS Ghost unlaid forbear thee!

ARVIRAGUS Nothing ill come near thee!

BOTH Quiet consummation have;

And renownèd be thy grave

—Cymbeline, 4.2.259–82

In other words:

GUIDERIUS Don’t worry about the sun’s heat anymore. Don’t worry about angry winter storms. You’ve done your work on this earth. You’ve gone home now, and you’ve been paid for your efforts. Gorgeous boys and girls all return to dust, covered in it like chimney sweeps.

ARVIRAGUS Don’t worry anymore about the disapproval of your superiors. No tyrant can hurt you now. Don’t worry about food and clothes. As far as you’re concerned, material things have no sway: a tiny blade of grass is no different from a mighty tree. People with political power, educated people, even doctors whose job is to defy death—no one can avoid the process of decay; everything and everyone comes to naught in the end.

GUIDERIUS Don’t let lightning scare you,

ARVIRAGUS Thunder either, which frightens everyone;

GUIDERIUS Don’t worry over people saying nasty stuff about you, or harshly judging you;

ARVIRAGUS You’re done with both happiness and misery.

BOTH All young lovers—in fact, all lovers—have no choice but to sign the same contract you have, and return to dust.

GUIDERIUS May no mystic try to raise you from the grave!

ARVIRAGUS May no one try to cast a spell on your soul!

GUIDERIUS May no unsettled spirits trouble you!

ARVIRAGUS May nothing bad come near you!

BOTH May you finish your life in peace, and may your burial place be marked with due respect.

 

How to say it:

Don’t feel obliged to read the entire passage. The first stanza is quite beautiful and stands on its own, as does the third (shared) stanza and the five short lines that follow it. Should you wish to refer to the characters who speak this passage (actually, they sing it in the context of the play), they’re two Welsh brothers whose names are pronounced gwih-DEER-ee-us and ahr-vih-RAH-gus.

Take special note of the rhyme scheme of each stanza, which is ABABCC. That is, the first and third lines rhyme, as do the second and fourth lines, and lines 5 and 6 make a rhymed couplet. Try as you read the passage to work toward those rhyming words, which fall, of course, at the ends of lines—the position in the line where Shakespeare likes to place important words. He sometimes places key ideas at the start of verse lines, too, as he does here with Fear no more and Fear not.

Simple is the watchword with this rich and highly poetic passage. Just say the words evenly and easily, as a comfort and reassurance to your departed friend or loved one, as though he or she could hear you. Your view is that the afterlife is a better place than the temporal world, a place free of what Hamlet terms “the whips and scorns of time.” The person you’re eulogizing has returned home, where he or she can at long last rest after a lifetime of labor and struggle.

HE WAS AN ASTONISHING PERSON

Their somber tone notwithstanding, eulogies are celebrations. They recall what was inspiring and lovable about the deceased, and they don’t have much room for any mention of the flaws, imperfections, disappointments, and shortcomings that made the person only human when he or she lived. Rarely content with sanitizing simplifications, Shakespeare writes a famous eulogy that manages to be extraordinarily loving and respectful, yet at the same time refuses to gloss over some hard truths about the person being memorialized. That eulogy is Hamlet’s for his late father, and its justly famous phrases combine the positive and the negative in the same thought—a Shakespearean trademark: “He was a man, take him for all in all / I shall not look upon his like again.” In other words, he was human, and even reckoned in toto, good and bad together, he was still pretty memorable.

I’ve researched this Hamletian Bardism’s appearance in countless memorials, funeral remarks, and posthumous tributes, and, interestingly, I’ve found that almost every time it’s quoted, only the second line survives. Take him for all in all, Hamlet’s admission of his father’s frailties, is nowhere to be found. I fully understand what motivates this omission, yet I also lament the dilution it represents. After all, if it’s unadulterated praise you’re after, Shakespeare offer plenty, particularly in his Roman plays, chock-full of formal tributes to great ones who’ve left the world too soon. Here are two that make for stirring and reverential memorials, and that speak for themselves without any need for editing or watering down.

First, Mark Antony’s tribute over the corpse of Brutus:

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world “This was a man.”

—MARK ANTONY, Julius Caesar, 5.5.72–74

In other words:

He lived a fine-mannered life. The things of which human beings are made were balanced so perfectly in him that Mother Nature, maker of all men, could point to him and proclaim that he was the perfect example of humanity.

 

Some details:

This Bardism provides some insight into Renaissance notions of psychology. It was believed that four elements composed all matter: earth, air, water, and fire, which, when mixed together in various proportions (the verb used in the period was tempered), gave every substance in nature its particular character. In the human body, the four elements took the form of fluids called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. In proper temper these fluids composed a happy person—a person with a good temperament. Too much of any of the four, or too little, or some defect with one of them, would cause problems and throw a person into distemper, like a stray animal in need of an inoculation. Too much yellow bile, also known as choler, made you choleric: snappish, short-tempered, quick to anger. Too much black bile, also called melancholy, made you a depressive. Too much phlegm made you phlegmatic, or emotionless and dull. One way to restore the balance was to eat or drink things that had properties opposite the overabundant humor. Another was that medieval cure-all, bloodletting, because the humors were thought to circulate with the blood. Antony notes of Brutus that the great Roman required no such treatments, because the humors flowing through him were mixed in such perfect proportion that he was a showpiece of nature’s craftsmanship.

 

Another eulogy. Antony dies, too, in Cleopatra’s arms, as we saw above. This is how she memorializes him a short time later:

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

Crested the world. His voice was propertied

As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, 5

There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas,

That grew the more by reaping. His delights

Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above

The element they lived in. In his livery

Walk’d crowns and crownets. Realms and islands were 10

As plates dropped from his pocket.

—CLEOPATRA, Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.81–92

In other words:

His stance straddled the ocean, like the legendary Colossus of Rhodes. His raised arm was like a heraldic emblem on the world’s coat of arms. When he spoke to friends, his voice had the same qualities as the celestial spheres, the makers of heavenly music. But when he felt like subduing and terrifying the earth, he sounded like claps of thunder. As for his generosity, it was everlasting; it was like a perpetual harvest season that yielded more produce as more was gathered from it. The pleasures that delighted him made him stand out from the masses as a dolphin arcs above the water with each leap. Kings and princes were as servants to him. Nations and territories were like loose change that fell from his pockets.

 

How to say it:

This richly poetic excerpt appears at first glance to be a lot more complicated than it actually is. At its heart is a simple list in which Cleopatra talks about various of Antony’s features, in this order: (1) his legs, (2) his reared arm, (3) his voice, (4) his bounty, (5) his delights, and (6) his livery. Each aspect of Antony gets its own description. Some are brief (his legs spanned the ocean), some longer (his voice sounded like celestial music to his friends, but to his enemies it sounded like an earth-shaking thunderclap). Try to work your way through the speech according to its six parts, and you’ll find it flows easily and naturally.

Another helpful approach to this speech is to phrase it one line at a time: cover the speech with a piece of paper and reveal each verse line one by one. At the end of each line, ask yourself for the next thought, the next piece of language, the next detail, then say it. For example, at the end of line 1, his reared arm, ask something like did what? You could answer in a zillion ways: “was muscular,” “flexed with stunning strength,” “frightened his enemies into submission.” But Cleopatra answers with the beginning of line 2, Crested the world. Or, at the end of line 7, His delights, ask something like what about them? You could answer, “transported me to heavenly bliss,” or “numbered too many to count,” or “stirred love in every heart that knew them.” But Cleopatra answers, Were dolphin-like. She—you—think about the next right image. She—and simultaneously, you—conjure the poetry to describe a man blessed with copious and wondrous personal gifts. And she—and you—render that description in surprising and unforgettable marine mammal imagery.

Feel free to lift out only those features that apply to the person you’re eulogizing, and to substitute feminine pronouns for masculine if it’s a woman who’s passed away.

Some details:

Throughout Bardisms I’ve offered paraphrases—equivalents in modern English—for Shakespeare’s knottier poetic utterances. This speech shows the limits of that technique, and in doing so, it demonstrates something essential about Shakespeare’s writing. Consider my phrase “As for his generosity, it was everlasting.” That’s how I render Cleopatra’s For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t. To say it loses something in translation is the understatement of the century. Yes, my version communicates the basic sense of Cleopatra’s thought, but it misses completely the dimension of her speech that makes it more than just simple communication. We might label that dimension, that quality of language that delivers more than meaning, “poetry.” Paraphrases are lousy at capturing that. “Regular” language, the stuff of my modern translations, just isn’t up to expressing high-octane metaphor such as that Cleopatra summons while eulogizing the hero who was the great passion of her life. She needs special language: the charged, idiosyncratic, spellbinding language of a great poet.

Students and friends often ask me to describe what it is about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it so unique. I like to answer with a rather abstract concept: “Shakespeare” is a measure of the distance between everyday language and poetry, between For his bounty, / There was no winter in’t and “As for his generosity, it was everlasting.” Shakespeare is the X factor that transforms a simple idea into a metaphor, and that X factor is the very thing that makes us turn to him when our own expressive capacity isn’t enough to give voice to what we feel. We know how grateful we were that our late loved ones were kind to us; Shakespeare memorializes their kindness by imagining it as an autumn without winter, as an endless harvest that yielded more, the more we gleaned from it. We need Shakespeare’s help at our most emotionally charged moments, and we’re grateful to his artistic prowess for helping us to know not just what to say but also what we feel.

GOODBYE

Here are two brief Bardisms that eloquently put a period on an exemplary life. Use them at the conclusion of your eulogy, or in the closing of your condolence note. The first is yet another Roman encomium to masculine excellence: Brutus’ stoic tribute to his dear friend Cassius:

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well.

It is impossible that ever Rome

Should breed thy fellow.

—BRUTUS, Julius Caesar, 5.3.98–100

In other words:

Goodbye, the last true Roman. Rome will never again have anyone like you.

 

Second, Horatio’s celebrated farewell to his dear friend Hamlet:

Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

—HORATIO, Hamlet, 5.2.302–3

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LET’S FURTHER THINK ON THIS…

The 1964 Democratic National Convention came to a teary standstill when RFK recited this Bardism in memory of JFK. It’s superb Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Memorial to a Loved One.

 

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

—JULIET, Romeo and Juliet, 3.2.21–25

(The lines sound sublime when spoken with that Kennedy Boston Brahmin accent.)

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SHAKESPEARE ON GOD, SPIRITUALITY, AND FAITH

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 1.4.20

“Still remember what the Lord hath done,” advises King Henry in Henry VI, Part II, and in giving this counsel, he articulates something central to Shakespeare’s worldview that can escape detection in our secular, postmodern world. The Bard, and his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries, were devoutly religious. Sacred concepts were real and omnipresent in English Renaissance lives, and mentions in literature of the devil, the soul, angels, good, and evil referred not to intellectual constructs or belletristic abstractions, but to concrete things. God’s hand was discernible everywhere, and the supernatural—ineffable forces beyond human comprehension—not only existed but held sway in day-to-day life. Birth, love, loss, and death, all the chapters of the human story, resonated with mystical overtones. These proved irrefutably that the plane of human existence was but one point on a spiritual spectrum that reached into realms knowable only by the Divine…and by poets, such as Shakespeare, who were touched by a spark of it.

This chapter’s Bardisms on death are moving and powerful. But without their necessary Renaissance context, Bardisms on matters spiritual, they illuminate only partially. Here, then, the rest of the tale: Shakespeare on Occasions That Bear Witness to a Higher Power.

IN GOD WE TRUST

These are two Bardisms that state simply and clearly the bedrock principle of Shakespearean religiosity: God exists, and in His perfection He guides and protects human lives.

God shall be my hope, / My stay, my guide and lantern to my feet.

—KING HENRY, Henry VI, Part II, 2.3.24–25

Heaven is above all yet—there sits a judge

That no king can corrupt.

—QUEEN KATHERINE, Henry VIII, 3.1.98–99

Some details:

These two Bardisms come from opposite ends of Shakespeare’s career. Henry VI, Part II was one of his first plays, Henry VIII one of his last. Although twenty-two years separate the two works, they each include passages that praise God as an ever-present source of reassurance, guidance, and hope.* I’ve spoken elsewhere in this book of how attractive it is to view the body of Shakespeare’s work as a single unit with a beginning, middle, and end, and the juxtaposition of these two passages testifies to the appeal of this idea. In them, we can see a constant in Shakespeare’s thinking, a central principle that endured unchanged through all the vicissitudes of a long career, and turbulent life, in the hardscrabble environment of professional London theater.

A HIGHER POWER IS IN CONTROL

Replete with unadorned and starkly simple statements of God’s omnipotence and goodness, the canon also adduces some metaphorical testimonials to the divine presence. My favorite is a quiet stunner from Hamlet whose wisdom and calm earn it a permanent place on my Shakespeare Top Ten.

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

—HAMLET, Hamlet, 5.2.10–11

In other words:

God creates an orderly outcome for our lives regardless of the mess we make of them.

 

Some details:

I cherish this Bardism not only for what it says about God but also for what it says about Shakespeare. (See? I know there’s a difference.) In it, Shakespeare does one of the characteristic things that make him the towering genius he is. The sentiment expressed in the passage is lushly poetic, but the language that expresses that sentiment is plain and straightforward. It’s a kind of anti-poetry, a metaphor made from the decidedly non-metaphoric. Indeed, the imagery derives from one of the most banal features of everyday life in the English Renaissance: thatched roofs. Ends refers to the tidy eaves on a thatched roof line; end thatches are chopped roughly from their stalks, then shaped neatly by the roofer who installs them. Thatching as a metaphor for our destinies: only Shakespeare—and perhaps cable television junkies addicted to home makeover shows—would talk about divine providence in terms of roofing materials. The originality, the wit, the quality of surprise are what make this passage so arresting, and what make Shakespeare my go-to guy.

SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH

Religious or secular, devout or agnostic, all of us can admit that there are certain mysteries in life that defy rational explanation. A full moon strikes us as heart-stoppingly beautiful; November’s bare branches are somehow green by May; our baby daughter’s giggle erases a day’s worth of workplace stress. What accounts for such things? There’s no way to answer. Yet such things happen. They just do, they just are. Finally there’s less point in asking why they move us than in simply surrendering to how moving they are in the first place. We can believe in them without knowing entirely what they are; we don’t need proof to know that they are real. Belief in the absence of proof—this is the very definition of a concept that underpins all of Shakespeare’s spiritual musings, a concept called faith. There are powers at work in our lives that we don’t understand, and on those occasions when they tap us on the shoulder, our best course is to allow them to work their magic. Here’s a Bardism that tells us how:

It is required / You do awake your faith.

—PAULINA, The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.94–95

This Bardism needs no other words, no advice on how to say or use it, and no further details. “Believe,” it tells us. “You must only believe.” A fitting conclusion to this survey of Shakespeare for All Occasions.