Shakespeare's Style Page 9

  Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at

  By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

  Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. (1.2.195–200)

  The reasoning in the soliloquy is logical, and it already anticipates an optimistic future:

  So when this loose behavior I throw off

  And pay the debt I never promisèd,

  By how much better than my word I am,

  By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes. (1.2.205–8)

  Hal is already determined on his future conduct, which will be brilliantly rewarded because it is unanticipated. The story of the Prodigal Son clearly lies behind this soliloquy.

  Hal knows exactly how it will all end:

  And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,

  My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,

  Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes

  Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (1.2.209–12)

  His reformation is imagined as a jewel set off by the foil of his scapegrace days. The soliloquy ends with a resounding couplet: “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will” (1.2.213–14). The idea that Hal has his redemption already in hand while he plays out his madcap days makes him seem like an awfully deliberate and purposive character. Redeeming time is an elaborate allusion to Ephesians 5:7, which refers to making amends for evil-doing.

  Act 2, scene 4 of 1 Henry IV goes over the same preoccupations as act 1, scene 2. Falstaff is still worried about being banished. When he plays the king in his mock-play with the prince, he praises himself as “A goodly portly man, i’ faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage” (2.4.427–29). He emphasizes the fact that “there is virtue in that Falstaff. Him keep with, the rest banish” (2.4.435–36). When Hal plays the king, he calls the fat knight “That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan” (2.4.467–68). Falstaff defends himself, but there is an unusual pleading tone in his repetitions of the word “banish”:

  No, my good lord: banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the world! (2.4.479–85)

  Prince Hal answers Falstaff’s plaintive request with an ominous, monosyllabic declaration: “I do, I will” (2.4.486). Presumably, this seals Falstaff’s fate because Hal is determined to banish him—he will banish him—as he has already more or less asserted in his soliloquy at the end of act 1, scene 2. Nothing has changed. In his conversation with the king, his father, in act 3, scene 2, Hal again declares his coming reformation: “I will redeem all this on Percy’s [Hotspur’s] head” (3.2.132).

  The issues remain the same in the 2 Henry IV. Hal’s reformation is explicitly predicted by Warwick in act 4, scene 4. The ailing King Henry, who is near death at this point, grieves over his wastrel son: “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them” (4.4.54–56). But Warwick is optimistic about Hal’s coming change:

  The prince but studies his companions

  Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,

  ‘Tis needful that the most immodest word

  Be looked upon and learned, which once attained,

  Your highness knows, comes to no further use

  But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms,

  The prince will in the perfectness of time

  Cast off his followers. (4.4.68–75)

  Warwick is arguing, as Hal himself does, that the Eastcheap episodes are only an essential learning experience.

  This theme reaches its climax in the next scene (4.5) after the prince has put on his father’s crown, believing him to be already dead. In eloquent and moving speeches, he assures his father of his “noble change” (4.5.154) and convinces him of his sincerity:

  My gracious liege,

  You won it [the crown], wore it, kept it, gave it me.

  Then plain and right must my possession be,

  Which I with more than with a common pain

  ‘Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain. (4.5.220–24)

  Hal’s ringing couplets effectively declare his commitment to being a strong and devoted king.

  The scene with the Lord Chief Justice in 5.2, when Hal is already crowned as King Henry V, confirms Harry’s moving reconciliation with his dying father in act 4, scene 5. He assures the Lord Chief Justice of his fealty:

  You shall be as a father to my youth.

  My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear,

  And I will stoop and humble my intents

  To your well-practiced wise directions. (5.2.118–21)

  These speeches assure us of the rejection of Falstaff and his companions that follows in act 5, scene 5.

  The king’s speech echoes words he had used earlier; for example, “I know thee not, old man” (5.5.47) recalls his soliloquy at the end of act 1, scene 2 of 1 Henry IV: “I know you all” (1.2.192) and Falstaff’s frequent reiteration of his youthfulness. In 2 Henry IV, King Henry V no longer has any use for Falstaff in his role as “a fool and jester” (5.5.48); he forbids him to reply “with a fool-born jest” (5.5.55). He now despises his idleness and fatness, and he deals with him as a bad dream from a long-forgotten time:

  So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane,

  But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

  Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace.

  Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape

  For thee thrice wider than for other men. (5.5.50–54)

  It is odd to hear Hal using religious words like “profane” and “grace.” He literally tries to redeem time: “ Presume not that I am the thing I was, / For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, / That I have turned away my former self” (5.5.56–58).

  So Hal presumes that he can affect his own transformation, his own redemption. There is a calculated purposiveness in all these assertions that does not make him into a warm and lovable character like Hotspur.

  There is one further echo of Hal’s former self in the opinions of the French in Henry V. The French ambassador who comes to the king to declare the Dauphin’s defiance presents images of the madcap Hal that no longer apply to the heroic King Henry V: “There’s naught in France / That can be with a nimble galliard won; / You cannot revel into dukedoms there” (1.2.251–53). Therefore, the Dauphin sends the king the insulting gift of a cask of tennis balls. King Henry issues his defiance of the foolish and misguided Dauphin, who “comes o’er us with our wilder days, / Not measuring what use we made of them” (1.2.267–68).

  The Dauphin is still convinced that England is “idly kinged, / Her scepter so fantastically borne, / By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth” (2.4.26–28). The Constable tries to persuade him that he is utterly mistaken:

  And you shall find his vanities forespent

  Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,

  Covering discretion with a coat of folly;

  As gardeners do with ordure hide those roots

  That shall first spring and be most delicate. (2.4.36–40)

  The message is enforced by Exeter, the English ambassador:

  And be assured, you’ll find a difference,

  As we his subjects have in wonder found,

  Between the promise of his greener days

  And these he masters now. Now he weighs time

  Even to the utmost grain. (4.1.134–38)

  This is the ultimate reiteration of Prince Hal’s aim in 1 Henry IV of “Redeeming time” (1.2.214).

  Chapter 14

  Shakespeare’s Illiterates

  Illiteracy was common in early modern England. Perhaps half of Shakespeare’s audience was not functionally literate
(some might have been able to sign their name). Under the benefit of clergy rule in law, convicted felons would sometimes be freed if they could prove that they could read and write. In any case, I would like to look at several characters who are presumably illiterate. The most obvious is Dame Quickly in the Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor. There is also the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. The way they deal with the spoken language is purely phonetic. This is also true of the way Princess Katherine learns English in Henry V. Many of Shakespeare’s servants and clowns are also illiterate, but I shall only speak about Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. The illiterate characters in Shakespeare not only stumble over words and their pronunciation; they also tend to be garrulous and circumlocutious.

  Let us begin with Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor, particularly with William’s Latin lesson administered by Parson Evans. Admittedly, we are dealing with Latin rather than English, but Mistress Quickly’s responses are completely phonetic, without regard for how the language is written. The emphasis is on sexual meanings, since Mistress Quickly can only see inappropriately dirty words that she imagines the Welsh parson is teaching the naïve boy William. For example, when Evans asks William the word for “fair,” he replies accurately “pulcher,” but Mistress Quickly is scandalized: “Polecats! There are fairer things than polecats, sure” (4.1.26–27). “Polecat” is a word for a prostitute, as in Ford’s exclamations against Falstaff, disguised as the witch of Brainford: “Out of my door, you witch, you rag, you baggage, you polecat, you rennion!” (4.2.178–80).

  Evans’s “focative case” is correctly glossed by William as “O—vocativo, O” (4.1.51), but Mistress Quickly hears the word as “fuckative,” and “case” is, of course, a word for the female genitalia. When the parson asks for the genitive case plural, William replies: “horum, harum, horum” (4.1.59), which puts Dame Quickly beside herself with indignation: “Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore” (4.1.60–61). She is in a perfect tizzy about Parson Evans’s instruction: “You do ill to teach the child such words. He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they’ll do fast enough of themselves, and to call “horum.” Fie upon you!” (4.1.63–66). The Latin declension “hic, haec, hoc” is endowed with sexual implications.

  The language lesson in Henry V has a surprisingly close relation to the scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Princess Katherine is, of course, not an illiterate like Mistress Quickly, but she deals with her newly acquired words in English strictly phonetically, with a similar sexual misunderstanding. Her instructor is Alice, an old gentlewoman, who is not an expert in the English language. When she gets to the words for “le pied et le count”—the foot and the gown—she stumbles upon classic dirty words in French (“foutre” = fuck, and “con” = cunt).

  Alice, of course, doesn’t pronounce “count” as a native English speaker would, but she gives Katherine the phonetic cues she needs to fuel her indignation:

  Le foot and le count! O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user: je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh, le foot et le count. (3.4.49–55)

  (The foot and the count [gown]! O dear Lord! They are words that sound bad, wicked, gross, and indecent, and not for respectable ladies to use: I do not wish to pronounce these words before the gentlemen of France for all the world. Foh, the foot and the count).

  Katherine is preparing for the wooing scene with King Harry, but it is already pervaded with the sense that English is a sexual language.

  To return to Mistress Quickly, who has a prominent role in both parts of the Henry IV plays. In a scene with Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, she mistakes in her anger a common English word:

  Falstaff. Go to, you are a woman, go!

  Hostess. Who, I? No; I defy thee! God’s light, I was never called so in mine own house before!

  Falstaff. Go to, I know you well enough.

  Hostess. No, Sir John; you do not know me, Sir John. I know you, Sir John. You owe me money, Sir John, and now you pick a quarrel to beguile me of it. (3.3.65–71)

  Mistress Quickly seems flustered by the English language, and she engages in endless repetition.

  When she comes with officers to arrest Falstaff for debt in 2 Henry IV, we see her, in her struggle with the right words, engaging in endless repetition and circumlocution:

  I pray you, since my exion is ent’red and my case so openly known to the world, let him be brought in to his answer. A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear, and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on. (2.1.28–35)

  This is colloquial. She uses “exion” for “action” to indicate her pronunciation, “borne” and “fubbed off” are repeated to drive her point home, and “case” makes for a double entendre (“case” = “vagina”).

  In her next speech, Dame Quickly grows more impatient and unable to control her discourse:

  Throw me in the channel [gutter]! I’ll throw thee in the channel. Wilt thou? Wilt thou? Thou bastardly rogue! Murder, murder! Ah, thou honeysuckle villain! Wilt thou kill God’s officers and the king’s? Ah, thou honeyseed rogue! Thou art a honeyseed, a man-queller, and a woman-queller. (2.1.47–52)

  “Honeysuckle” and “honeyseed” are Mistress Quickly’s endearing substitutions for the big, latinate word “homicidal,” and the repetition of words in the whole speech indicates how disturbed she is. She seems hardly to know what she is saying because she is so confusedly devoted to Sir John Falstaff.

  There are innumerable examples of Dame Quickly’s vigorous and salty speech in this play, but I shall restrict myself to one further passage in act 2, scene 4. In the scene with Pistol, whom Dame Quickly calls “Captain Pizzle” (meaning the penis of an animal, such as a bull), he speaks in his characteristic mock-heroic style with bits and mangled pieces of classical and playhouse rodomontade. To indicate that he will not restrain his choler, he offers an heroic but essentially meaningless oration:

  Shall packhorses

  And hollow pampered jades of Asia,

  Which cannot go but thirty mile a day,

  Compare with Caesars, and with Cannibals,

  And Trojan Greeks? Nay, rather damn them with

  King Cerberus, and let the welkin roar.

  Shall we fall foul for toys? (2.4.166–72)

  Dame Quickly, who cannot understand a word of Pistol’s speech, has, nevertheless, the perfect reply: “By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words” (2.4.173–74). Of course, there is nothing bitter about Pistol’s nonsensical oration, but Dame Quickly catches the tone of it, and its seriousness and gravity are what she understands as “bitter words.”

  The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet is a character similarly conceived as Mistress Quickly in the Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor. She is in the servant class, and she speaks with striking colloquialisms, notable errors in grammar and diction, and an expansiveness and repetition that verge on circumlocution. In her long, rambling speech in act 1, scene 3 establishing the age of Juliet, she wanders from topic to topic with great facility and wit:

  But, as I said,

  On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen;

  That shall she, marry; I remember it well.

  ‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;

  And she was weaned (I never shall forget it),

  Of all the days of the year, upon that day;

  For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,

  Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.

  My lord and you were then at Mantua.

  Nay, I do bear a brain. (1.3.20–29)

  There are many interruptions in the Nurse’s speech as her mind wanders over her ostensible topic. There are also many repetitions and seemingly unnecessary specifications. Why does one need to know that she wa
s “Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall”? What has the fact that “My lord and you were then at Mantua” got to do with Juliet’s age? But the Nurse is proud of her strong memory (“Nay, I do bear a brain”), and she doesn’t intend to spare us any detail that she can remember. There is, of course, no mention in the play that the Nurse is illiterate, but her speech (like Mistress Quickly’s) suggests that she is speaking without any reference to English as it is written.

  She also relates at great length and with suitable repetitions her husband’s witty remarks at the time when Juliet fell down and cut her brow:

  And then my husband (God be with his soul!

  ‘A was a merry man) took up the child.

  “Yea,” quoth he, “dost thou fall upon thy face?

  Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;

  Wilt thou not, Jule?” and, by my holidam,

  The pretty wretch left crying and said, “Ay.” (1.3.39–44)

  “‘A” is the colloquial contraction for “he.” This is such a good joke that the Nurse repeats it twice in the next few lines.

  The Nurse uses some odd colloquialisms; for example, when she is speaking to Romeo about Juliet after the ball, she assures him that “he that can lay hold of her / Shall have the chinks” (1.5.118–19). In other words, he shall have plenty of money. This is the only use of this odd word in Shakespeare, although “chink” figures importantly in Wall’s part in the Pyramus and Thisby play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1).

  There is a similar vigorous slang in the Nurse’s heated response to what she imagines as Mercutio’s insults: “And ‘a speak anything against me, I’ll take him down, and ‘a were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks; and if I cannot, I’ll find those that shall. Scurvy knave! I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skainsmates” (2.4.156–60). This is the only time that “flirt-gills” and “skainsmates” are used in Shakespeare (they therefore qualify as hapaxlegomena). There is still no adequate explanation of “skainsmates,” although the Arden editor informs us that a “skain” was a long Irish knife. The Nurse also berates her servant, Peter, in terms with lively sexual innuendo: “And thou must stand by too, and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure!” (2.4.160–61). Peter can only protest innocently: “I saw no man use you at his pleasure” (2.4.162).