Free How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig Page B

prithee [pray thee]— and I’ll pay thee bounteously—
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke .
    Conceal me what I am
    This could be the rallying cry for virtually all of Shakespeare’s comedies, filled as they are with disguises, ruses, mistaken identities, girls dressed as boys, and identical twins. In this play, everyone is going to conceal himself in one way or another. Malvolio, a pompous servant, is going to conceal his true character to impress his employer. Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are going to conceal themselves behind a bush in order to watch Malvolio make a fool of himself. Sir Andrew is going to try to conceal his cowardice when baited into a duel with Cesario. And Viola, our heroine, is going to conceal her identity— and her sex, and her feelings—from Orsino, with whom she falls in love.
I prithee—and I’ll pay thee bounteously—
Conceal me what I am ,
and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent .
    Become in this sentence means “be suitable to.” So the sentence means “Please, conceal me, and help me put on the kind of disguise that will be suitable to my intention, which is to serve the duke as his servant.” This is a tricky passage to memorize, and the keys are repetition and breaking it into four parts:
and be my aid
for such disguise
as haply shall become
the form of my intent .
and be my aid for such disguise
as haply shall become the form of my intent .
    For this kind of rhythmic passage, your child should repeat the phrases until they become second nature, like the sections of a piano piece before a big recital.
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent .
    I’ll serve this duke .

The Issue of Realism
    At this point in the play, at the end of Scene 2, Shakespeare has set himself up to pull off one of the greatest coups in all of theater: turning Viola into a young man. This brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s comedies, and as you teach your children about these plays, you’ll want to point this out again and again: Shakespeare’s comedies are filled with events and characters and plot twists that are not realistic. Disguises, mistaken identities, twins, cross-dressing, magic, gods and goddesses, coincidence, fairy sprites, concealments, ruses—all these devices abound in Shakespeare’s comedies.
• In no less than five of his fourteen comedies— The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night , and Cymbeline —women disguise themselves as men and fool everyone around them, including the men they love .
• Two of his comedies , Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors , contain identical twins who are so much alike that they confuse other characters .
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest contain magic .
• As You Like It and Cymbeline include visits from gods .
• In two comedies , All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure , the heroines pull the “bed trick”—that is, they spend a night in bed with the men they love while the men themselves believe that they are sleeping with other women .
• The Merry Wives of Windsor involves a fat old knight named Falstaff who dresses up as a woman called the Witch of Brentford in order to fool the neighbors .
• And in The Winter’s Tale , a wife conceals herself from her husband for sixteen years, then poses as a statue that seemingly comes to life .
    Indeed, with only one or two arguable exceptions, all of Shakespeare’s comedies contain nonrealistic elements.
    Why does Shakespeare do this? There is no simple answer. It is the way Shakespeare saw comedy in his mind and in his heart. It is the way he saw life. Interestingly, this extravagant form of comedy, which Shakespeare effectively invented out of whole cloth, has not been much imitated in the history of stage