Free Bardisms by Barry Edelstein Page A

What about all the fun of those years, the horsing around with friends and siblings, the play and laughter with parents, the thrill of discovery of countless new sights, sounds, sensations, and concepts? Shakespeare overlooks all that—call it the Highlights magazine stuff—and focuses instead on an image of complaint, misery, and reluctance. The Second Age of Man is the Age of Goofus, not Gallant.
    And so a pattern begins to emerge. The baby pukes and screams, the boy whines and creeps. Next, the lover will write idiotic poetry and sigh himself into hyperventilation, then the soldier intemperately will risk life and limb for something as ephemeral as honor, and the Justice will bore everyone silly with his pontifications and pronunciamentos, and on, and on. Life for Jaques, it seems, hasn’t much to do with fun or discovery or even growth or progress. No, life for Jaques—for Shakespeare, for this moment in his writing, anyway—is a series of misadventures, pomposities, and follies. Each misstep is a station on a one-way trip to oblivion, toothlessness, blandness, and blindness.
    But Shakespeare isn’t Schopenhauer. The Bard isn’t Beckett. Shakespeare—well, Jaques; well, both—finds a way to discuss despair with a rather beguiling humor. Jaques’ images are unmistakably sharp-edged, but they’re presented with a twinkle in the eye, coated in candy. That’s the familiar Shakespearean manner. Confront terrible truths, say the hard things, but dip them in sprinkles to make it all go down smoother. The legendary impresario Joseph Papp once described Shakespeare to me as very like an Irish coffee. It’s dark, bitter, strong, and spiked with a splash of spirit that gives it a kick, but before you get to any of that, you must first drink your way through a layer of sweet cream. The cream in Shakespeare’s Irish coffee is his magical way with words, his transformation via language of something that unsettles into something that entices, charms, and wins. I love Papp’s simile because it reminds me that even at his bleakest, Shakespeare remembers beauty, and even at his most scathing, he remembers to laugh.
    The whining schoolboy is a perfect illustration of Shakespeare’s habit of mixing light and dark. The magnetic force that repels boys from school appears elsewhere in the canon, as when Romeo recalls, “Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, / But love from love, toward school with heavy looks,” or when Lord Hastings, having dismissed the soldiers he’d planned to deploy in battle against King Henry IV, observes the speed with which they flee the field in all directions and says that, “like a school broke up, / Each hurries toward his home.” While these are vivid images delivered by two gifted speakers, neither evinces the detailed texture and rhetorical dazzle of the just-washed schoolboy of Jaques’ fancy. Note, for example, how the chipper phrase schoolboy with his satchel introduces alliterative s sounds that continue into face , snail , and school . Listen to the slight condescension jingling beneath the shining morning face , and notice how much information it compresses into three words: They conjure an entire scene of a little boy squirming under washcloth, Ivory soap, and Brylcreem when he’d rather stay in his bedroom fortress playing with his toys and frogs and imaginary pals.
    The image is as euphonious as it is artful: it turns the noun morning into an adjective modifying face , whose -ing resonates nicely alongside the participial adjective shining even as it carries that suffix forward from the earlier puking and mewling into the later creeping and unwillingly . Look at how the placement of unwillingly at the beginning of a new verse line gives special prominence to the adverb, by kicking off the line with the unexpectedly accented syllable un , and then by throttling back the boy’s walk to sub-snail speed: he’s not only creeping, he’s creeping unwillingly . And