How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (27 page)

Let’s begin by listening to the following passage. Each of you should take a role and read your parts aloud:
FALSTAFF

An old lord of the council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir, but I marked him not, and yet he talked very wisely, but I regarded him not, and yet he talked wisely, and in the street, too
.

PRINCE HAL

Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it
.

FALSTAFF

…Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.…

PRINCE HAL

I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking
.

FALSTAFF

Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation
.

The exchange comes from Falstaff and Hal’s first scene together in the tavern. Their banter is a form of competition, the kind my brother and I indulged in when we were growing up. The difference is that Falstaff and Hal raise the language of banter to a high art.

An old lord of the council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir
,

Here, Falstaff is saying that he bumped into someone on the street who was a worthy citizen—a lord of the King’s Council—who criticized him for spending time with Prince Hal. In recounting the incident (which he may be making up), Falstaff adopts a kind of mock disapproval. As one legendary Shakespeare commentator, A. C. Bradley, puts it, Falstaff makes “truth appear absurd by solemn statements, which he utters with perfect gravity and which he expects nobody to believe.” His voice is full of pretended self-pity and pity for the wicked world. He is always acting.

Notice also how Falstaff falls into repetition. It is one of his linguistic hallmarks: He takes his time to say things. He circles around a subject so artfully that we hardly notice it at first, but he is creating a work of beauty with his tongue; he is fashioning his sentences the way an oil painter creates a masterpiece, layer after layer:

but I marked him not, and yet he talked very wisely, but I regarded him not, and yet he talked wisely, and in the street, too
.

The Prince replies:

Thou didst well, for wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it
.

And here we have another one of those remarkable epigrams that Shakespeare drops into the dialogue like an extra piece of candy that we didn’t expect. It is an allusion to
Proverbs
, 1:20:

Wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it
.

Falstaff then remarks:

Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked
.

Do we believe Falstaff here, even for an instant? That before he knew Hal he was innocent and knew nothing? Of course not. But we delight in Falstaff blaming Hal in a jocular way for his own state of corruption and dissipation. Have your children commit it to memory:

Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing
,

and now am I, if a man should speak truly
,

little better than one of the wicked
.

Prince Hal answers him sarcastically:

I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking
.

This sentence means, in essence, “Look how you’ve changed. You used to pray, but now you rob people and take their purses.” Which is a perfect setup for Falstaff’s magnificent reply:

Why, Hal, ’tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation
.

Meaning: “But Hal, purse stealing is my life’s work. It’s my job. Surely it’s not a sin for a man to work at his job!”

Use This Line!

In our house, this line has become one of our favorites, and our kids use it whenever we catch them doing something that they know they shouldn’t be doing.

Scenario 1

Our daughter, Olivia, stays up past her bedtime and her mother catches her in bed with her computer.

MOM

Olivia, what do you think you’re doing?

OLIVIA

Why, Mom, ’tis my vocation, Mom. ’Tis no sin for a girl to labor in her vocation.

Scenario 2

Our son, Jack, is horsing around on his cell phone when he should be studying.

DAD

Get off the cell phone or I’ll kill you.

JACK

Why, Dad, ’tis my vocation, Dad. ’Tis no sin for a boy to labor in his vocation.

Go over these scenarios with your children—act them out—and the words will stay with you forever. You do, however, run the risk of hearing this remark more than you’d like.

Falstaff’s Voice

It is difficult to exaggerate Falstaff’s wittiness and sheer intelligence. The critic Harold Bloom believes that Falstaff “speaks what is still the best and most vital prose in the English language,” and I agree with him. Bloom calls Falstaff “the Socrates of Eastcheap,” which is witty in itself; and of the two dozen or so greatest characters in Shakespeare, he remarks that

Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, and Cleopatra are something apart in world literature: through them Shakespeare essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it. Falstaff has priority in this invention.

In order for your children to get some real inkling of the quality of Falstaff’s prose, I want you to have them say aloud all of the following quotations. These are merely twelve of the dozens of wonderful lines spoken by Falstaff throughout the two history plays. You heard some of them in the previous chapter, and here are some more to add to your children’s store of knowledge.

Indeed, you come near me now, Hal, for we that take purses go by the moon
.

Marry then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body
[robbers who steal at night]
be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s foresters
[Diana was goddess of the moon],
gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon
.

I prithee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king?

If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged. It could not be else; I have drunk medicines
. [Notice the repetition.]

The next one is a terrific joke: Hal and Falstaff are waiting for some travelers on the road, and Hal tells Falstaff to lie down and put his ear to the ground to hear if the travelers are coming. Falstaff answers:

Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?

Cut the villains’ throats! Ah, whoreson caterpillars, bacon-fed knaves, they hate us youth
. [Falstaff is an old man but speaks of himself as a youth.]

There lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old
.

I tell thee what, Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse
.

Hal asks Falstaff how long since he was able to see his own knee. Falstaff answers:

My own knee? When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle’s talon
[claw]
in the waist. I could have crept into any alderman’s thumb-ring. A plague of sighing and grief. It blows a man up like a bladder
.

If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet
[a pickled fish].

From
Henry IV, Part 2:

Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me. The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men. I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one
.

And finally, this also from
Henry IV, Part 2
, when Falstaff is visiting a country town in Gloucestershire and reminisces with a doddery old friend of his youth:
SHALLOW

O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the windmill in Saint George’s Field?

FALSTAFF

No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that
.

SHALLOW

Ha, ’twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork alive?

FALSTAFF

She lives, Master Shallow
.

SHALLOW

She never could away with me
[endure me].

FALSTAFF

Never, never. She would always say she could not abide Master Shallow
.

SHALLOW

Nay, she must be old. She cannot choose but be old.…

FALSTAFF

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow
.

Of the twelve passages above, there are three lines that I would like your children to memorize:

There lives not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old
.

I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men
.

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow
.

This final line has become so well known as a kind of philosophical commentary on the passing of time that the great actor Orson Welles used it as the title of his movie about Falstaff,
Chimes at Midnight
.

The more your children repeat these and other quotations, the closer they will get to the essence of Shakespeare’s greatness. There is simply no substitute for Shakespeare’s actual words, either in study or in performance. That’s why this book is based on memorization. Memorization is the key to understanding Shakespeare’s artistry.

The Greatest Shakespeare Game of Them All

As you’ve almost certainly noticed by this time, some of the banter between Falstaff and Hal is based on insults. They insult each other throughout the two history plays, and their mutual wordplay is dazzlingly creative.

You should point this out to your children and have them read aloud the following list of insults. Then give them a subject and have them try to invent insults as good as Shakespeare’s. My children loved doing this, though they found it to be a lot harder than it looked. It’s pretty easy to call somebody a numbskull or an idiot. But it takes real creative spirit to come up with insults like these:
SPOKEN BY HAL

You fat-kidneyed rascal

This sanguine coward

This bed-presser

This horse-back breaker

This huge hill of flesh

That trunk of humors

That bolting-hutch of beastliness

That swollen parcel of dropsies

That huge bombard of sack

That stuffed cloakbag of guts

That Mannington tree ox with the pudding in his belly

Thou claybrained guts

Thou knotty-pated fool

SPOKEN BY FALSTAFF

You gorbellied knaves

You starveling

You elfskin

You dried neat’s tongue

You bull’s pizzle

You stockfish

You tailor’s yard
[yardstick]

You sheath