Bardisms (22 page)

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.

—R
OSALIND
,
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.

—L
YSANDER
,
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.

—I
AGO
,
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.