How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (22 page)

Hamlet
comes from about the same time as
Twelfth Night
, and your children will hear in it a similar voice, but one that perhaps foreshadows the depths to come.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god…

In
King Lear
and
Antony and Cleopatra
, which are later than
Hamlet
, the language is more gnarled and complex, like the deep pedal tones of an organ mixing with the treble sounds of the keyboard above. Here, for example, is a famous passage from
King Lear
where the King is confronting one storm on a barren heath and another storm in his disintegrating mind:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires
,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts
,

Singe my white head
.

Finally, when we come to the dramatic romances at the end of Shakespeare’s life, the tone moves seamlessly, at will, from the richly poetic to the sardonic to the nostalgic and valedictory. This is Prospero’s speech in
The Tempest
as magic spirits that he has conjured up return to nothingness:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors
,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

… We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep
.

Shakespeare to the End

In addition to the plays, Shakespeare wrote two long narrative poems,
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, both of which were published during his early years in London. While
Venus and Adonis
was the more amusing and popular of the two, together they put Shakespeare on the literary map. His other principal nondramatic poetry consists of 154 sonnets, which circulated privately until they were published in 1609. They are generally more difficult to understand than the dramatic verse, and they address highly personal matters to do with love, marriage, mistresses, and heirs. Whether Shakespeare intended the authorial voice of the sonnets to be himself or a fictional poet with no relationship to Shakespeare’s own life is a continual subject of scholarly debate.

The conclusion of Shakespeare’s story takes him back to his hometown
of Stratford. About 1613 he retired there and wrote little else, and it was there he died on April 23, 1616. In 1623, thirty-six of his plays were published in a single volume, known as the First Folio, eighteen of them for the first time. The publishing of Shakespeare’s plays is a fascinating subject, and we’ll discuss it in a later chapter. For now, when your children are rested and eager, we’ll turn to one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies,
Macbeth
.

Passage 13
Macbeth’s Conscience

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!

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
.

(
Macbeth
, Act V, Scene 5, lines 18–28)

A
fter
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night
, and
Romeo and Juliet
, I thought the best way to keep my children excited about Shakespeare was to expose them to something entirely different. No more Mr. Nice Guy. It was time to get bloody. (My daughter liked the idea as much as my son did.)

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
,

This is the first line of a soliloquy spoken by Macbeth at the end of the play that bears his name. When the play begins, Macbeth, a lord of ancient Scotland, is fighting to protect his country from a rebellion. Just after
the final, bloody battle, Macbeth encounters three witches who prophesy that he will one day become King of Scotland.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
,

Macbeth: Act I, Scene V
, painted by Richard Westall, R.A.
(photo credit 22.1)

As you tell your children the story, keep repeating these opening lines of the soliloquy until they become second nature.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

The witches’ prophecy ignites ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, and soon, with the help of his wildly ambitious, ruthless wife, Macbeth has murdered Scotland’s rightful king, Duncan, and seized the throne for himself. Once Macbeth becomes king, Duncan’s heirs begin to suspect that Macbeth was the murderer. In response, Macbeth begins a reign of terror, murdering everyone he considers a threat to his position. This includes Macbeth’s fellow soldier Banquo (who the witches prophesied would found a line of kings and is therefore a threat to Macbeth’s future), as well as the wives and children of Macbeth’s political enemies.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

From the beginning, Macbeth is harrowed by his conscience. His mounting sense of remorse causes him to become delusional. First he sees a dagger floating in the air, leading him to Duncan’s bedchamber; then he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting at a feast. Are these visions real, or are they products of Macbeth’s fevered mind? Is there a difference? What is the dividing line between imagination and reality? Does it matter if something is real to the senses as long as we perceive it to be real?

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
.

Shakespeare raises these issues of reality versus imagination throughout the play. For example, when Macbeth sees the knife in the air, he asks:

Is this a dagger that I see before me
,

…Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?

By the time Macbeth delivers his last soliloquy, his enemies have his castle surrounded, and the odds against Macbeth’s survival are overwhelming. Still, he insists on donning his armor one last time.

I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked
.

Give me my armor
.

Just as Macbeth is about to fight, a woman’s cry is heard in the distance. A moment later he is told that his wife is dead. Earlier we had seen Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, imagining that she could see Duncan’s blood on her hands. In that distracted state, haunted by the horrific deeds that she had committed, she tried desperately to wash the blood away. (
Out, damned spot, out, I say!
) Now, on the eve of battle, Lady Macbeth dies with a cry of despair.

SEYTON

The Queen, my lord, is dead
.

MACBETH

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word
.

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
.

Surrounded by his enemies and having heard the cry of his wife’s untimely end, Macbeth could logically do a number of things from a dramatic standpoint. He could bewail his fate; he could blame his enemies; or he could turn his sword on himself. Instead, Shakespeare has him step back and pause for a moment to contemplate the pointlessness of life itself. In Western literature, this soliloquy has come to epitomize the meaninglessness and despair that lurk at the center of the human condition. It is short, profound, and terrifying.

The first line of the soliloquy is simplicity itself. Because the line is in iambic pentameter, which has five beats, the word
and
is necessarily emphasized, both times, at least a little bit. This gives the line a heavy, plodding rhythm, as if the word
tomorrow
was trudging along to its destruction.

Tomorrow
and
tomorrow
and
tomorrow
,

The word
tomorrow
in this case has a single, strong beat:
toMORrow
.

ToMORrow
and
toMORrow
and
toMORrow
,