I've decided to post the text of the speech I gave at WRA on April 8. It was part of a lecture series named for Keir Marticke, a WRA student who graduated in 2002 and, tragically, died during a trip to Vietnam while she was in college. Her father and brother were in the audience.
PS--I should note (pride, pride, oh fatal pride!) that all the poems I reproduce here are lines I recited from memory during the talk.
So, anyway … I got to love Shakespeare so
much that whenever one of my students said You
seem to know a lot about Shakespeare? I would reply: Not as much as he knows about me.
That’s a lie. Oh, I wish I’d really said that! But I didn’t. I found it on Facebook
about a month ago, on one of the Shakespeare sites I’ve “liked.” I just can’t lie
about it—because my mother will somehow know,
and then I’ll be dealing with some serious
consequences. Daniel Osborn Dyer, you told
a lie? In a chapel?!?
But that Facebook meme is true: Once you hack your way through the thickets of unfamiliar
language, you realize the Bard is talking
to you. About you. I get gooseflesh, thinking about it.
Anyway, in his wonderful mid-career play As You Like It—1599–1600—written just
before Twelfth Night and Hamlet—there is a dark character named
Jaques, the dark dark kind of dark dark dark guy who always has something
dark-dark-dark-dark to say—remember Rachel
Dratch playing Debbie Downer on Saturday
Night Live? (If not, YouTube it.) I’m betting Debbie Downer was based on Jaques!
In Act II, Scene 7, Jaques delivers one of
the most famous speeches in the entire English language … name of it, anyone?
Yep. “All the world’s a stage.” Or “The Seven Ages of Man.” Here’s what he says
… but first a few odd words it will help you to know before I launch into this.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely
players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first
the infant,
Mewling and puking in the
nurse’s arms. Whimpering, crying weakly
And then the whining school-boy,
with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping
like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the
lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a
woeful ballad An enclosed chamber to melt metal
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then
a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded
like the pard, leopard
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick
in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then
the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon
lined, a castrated rooster—for tender
meat
With eyes severe and beard of formal
cut,
Full of wise saws and modern
instances; sayings
And so he plays his part. The sixth
age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d
pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on
side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a
world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big
manly voice,
Turning again toward childish
treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last
scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful
history,
Is second childishness and mere
oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans
taste, sans everything. without
I know, I know: That performance would not have impressed the judges at your recent
Shakespeare contest. I know. I was one
of those judges—and I’m not impressed.
But in that speech, you see how
Shakespeare—more than 400 years ago—recognized that we are babies (sort of) twice in our lives (if we live long
enough): at the beginning, at the end. Our final years. Second childishness, he called it. We
all know that there are some cultures that revere
rather than fear or infantilize the aged. How would you
characterize ours?
Now … speaking of all this—a brief story
about our other grandson, Carson, who just turned seven last Sunday. Not long
ago, I was talking with my family about today—and
Carson told me about a poem he liked, a poem by Shel Silverstein. (Oops, I just
weakened my own argument: I listened to a
kid!) I’ll bet some of you will remember this one from Silverstein’s
book The Light in the Attic—a poem
that in some ways is a kid’s version of that key idea in “All the world’s a
stage ….” Here it is ...
The Little Boy and the Old Man by Shel
Silverstein
Said the little boy, “Sometimes
I drop my spoon.”
Said the old man, “I do that too.”
The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”
“I do that too,” laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, “I often cry.”
The old man nodded, “So do I.”
“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.
Okay, back to As You Like It.
At the end—as is common in Shakespeare’s comedies—there is a wedding. Actually,
there are four weddings, and then, in
a surprise, Hymen—the god of marriage—shows up to solemnize it all ...
Another
mild digression!—sorry—can’t
help it—dotage—a story about a shocking moment in my middle school teaching
career: Back in February 1996, I took a carload of eighth graders to see As You Like It down at the Great Lakes
Theater Festival in Cleveland. The kids loved the performance—especially the
end, when Hymen appears. Here’s why: He was naked
(well, not totally) and covered
entirely in green-and-gold body paint—and glitter,
head to toe. The kids erupted while I
tried to pretend that … well, that everything was, you know, Shakespeare. Not dirty! This is culture! And in the car, on the
way home, the girls—especially—could not stop talking about the end of the
show—about the character they were now calling “The Glitter Guy.”
(By the way, near the end of the play, dark,
dark, dark, dark, dark Jaques, who
can’t stand all this happiness and light and partying and marrying, exits to go
live, he says, in a cave.
I have to say that in some specific, limited
ways we do listen to the young
nowadays far more than when I was a kid. Let me give you a little For Instance:
In my boyhood—long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away—there was a handbook on
manners called
Etiquette written by Emily Post. This
is my mother’s actual copy, published in 1939, five years before I was born. (She
was getting ready for me!) There are
chapters called “Manners for Motorists,” “Popularity, Fraternity House Party,
and Commencement” (seniors, you should check that out), and “The Fundamentals
of Good Behavior.”
Here’s one little bit of advice for parents
concerning a child’s behavior in a little subsection called “Talking at Table”:
When
older people are present at table and a child wants to say something, he must
be taught to stop eating momentarily and look at his mother, who at the first
pause in the conversation will say, “What is it, dear?” And the child then has
his say. If he wants simply to launch forth on a long subject of his own
conversation, his mother says, “Not now, darling!” or “Don’t you see that
mother is talking to Aunt Mary?” (748).
Is it too obvious to say, “Times have
changed”?
Here’s another change—at the movies. On the
screen, young people—girls and boys—are
doing things that never occurred in the movies of my
childhood. Like smoking, drinking, drugging, swearing, … Glitter Guy stuff. And
kicking butt. When I was growing up, the only characters who kicked butt were full-grown
white men. For example, in The Lone Ranger TV series (1949–1957),
the Ranger’s sidekick, Tonto (a Native American), was constantly losing fights
to white men; the Ranger had to rescue him.
Nowadays, anyone
can be an butt-kicker. Back in 2010, for example, I saw the film Kick-Ass, which features a young girl (she’s
eleven!) who’s a martial arts expert
and has little trouble dispatching the Big Bad Guys. Sometimes, too, as you
know, teenagers in films even save the
world. The earliest film I remember showing that was War Games in 1983.
And in other sorts of films—family dramas—the
young nowadays are sometimes the Wise Ones; it’s the adults who are clueless and messed-up. How many times have you seen
this? Messed-Up Dad or Messed-Up Mom hearing, if not welcoming, advice from
Wise Teen about how the parent ought
to be handling things.
That’s the exact opposite of the films and TV shows when I was a kid. Then, the kids were messed up or confused, and in highly
popular TV shows like Father Knows Best,
the wise parents/adults helped the young navigate the torrents of their
childhood and teenage years.
Wise young people do appear in “serious” literature now
and then. When I was teaching English III here in my most recent stint, I
always used to assign Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. There’s a very quiet moment early in that novel, a moment
that I love. Huck has run away from his violent, drunken, even homicidal father
and is hiding out on a Mississippi River island near his hometown. While Huck’s
there, he discovers he’s not alone. Jim is there too. Jim—an adult black slave Huck
knows very well. Huck learns that Jim has also
run away and is hoping to find and rescue his wife and children, who were sold elsewhere.
[Pause:
While I was typing this, auto-correct changed Huck to Yuck.]
[Play]:
Both these runaways—a young white boy, an
adult African American—realize they should join forces, and literary scholars
now rank the story of their subsequent journey on a raft down the Mississippi River
among the very best in all of American literature.
But, as I said, on that island there’s a
quiet moment of immense significance that, if you’re not careful, can slip
right by you (as it did me the first dozen times or so I read the novel). Huck
and Jim, on the island, decide that Huck will slip into town to try to discover
what’s going on. Do people know where they are? Or are people believing their cover stories?
Jim and Huck have found some old clothing
from a house washed away in a Mississippi flood, and Jim suggests that when Huck
goes into town, he should dress as a girl.
So he puts on a dress and practices walking and talking like a girl. Observing,
Jim tells him a couple of things he ought to do differently. And Huck says, I took notice, and done better (67).
When we looked at that passage in class, I
always asked my English III-ers if they saw anything remarkable going on.
Silence. Silence. Silence. (Teacher waits, waits, waits.) Then—pretty soon—someone
would see it and say: “A white boy’s listening to a black man.” You betcha. But
not just any white boy—a white boy in
a border state some twenty years or
so before the Civil War, a white boy
who thinks black slavery is normal, a
white boy who’s nonetheless taking advice from a runaway slave!
I
took notice, and done better.
I love that sentence, for it shows the true
wisdom of the young, the inexperienced—the rest
of us, really—all of us—discovering
someone worth listening to, then doing
it. Listening. Learning. Changing. This, I’m suggesting, is a
trait you want to keep alive throughout your life. When you start thinking that
you have nothing more to learn from anyone else, well, that’s when you’re now a
tree that’s stopped growing and is rapidly turning into firewood.
This has been one of the most astonishing discoveries
for me on Facebook. I am friends with former students all the way back to the beginning
of my career. My first seventh graders—back when I was a BOY— are now in their early sixties.
And some of those “kids” have spent the last fifty years growing; others seem
really unchanged in any fundamental way since I first knew them at age 12. They
are like that Copper Age man found in a glacier in the Alps in 1991. Frozen in
the past. And the scary part? Some of these “frozen kids” were among the most
talented youngsters I ever taught.
So … when
we’re little, we listen to the Big People (family, adults), mostly because we
don’t know what else to do—and we kind of have
to: They’re big, you know? And the
Big People? They teach us pretty much everything. Along the way, of course, we
get better at educating ourselves. We
create and engage our sifting mechanism.
Good from bad. Useful from useless. Sensible from nonsensical.
And later on,
in school, we find some new Big People to listen to (teachers, coaches), but we
also begin listening to one another. I remember going home and quoting things
my friends had said as if those words had come from Aristotle or had descended
from Mount Sinai with Moses. (My parents
were not generally all that impressed
with my cafeteria and locker room wisdom.)
Years later, I
realized that there actually were
some Big People among my boyhood friends—the ones who somehow had wise hearts, a wonderful phrase I
learned from my wife. Yes, I’d had friends whose young, wise hearts somehow knew what was kind, what
was cruel, what was helpful, hurtful.
Wrong. Keir Marticke was like that—a young woman with a wise heart.
Huck Finn was
such a person too. Though when the novel first came out in the 1880s—and even
much later—many adults were horrified by Huck’s rough ungrammatical language,
his smoking, his truancy, his stealing (“borrowing,” he called it), his ragged
clothing and the like—Horrible examples
for children! But Huck’s wise heart has endured.
Sometimes,
though (as we all know), the young can
be a bit … slow … to begin their pursuit of wisdom? Sometimes (I'll use myself
as an example) it’s because I thought I really got pretty much what was going on. I was thinking about this point
a few weeks ago when I happened to see a newspaper cartoon—Zits. Do you know it? A cartoon about a high schooler named
Jeremy—his family his friends, his girlfriend, Sara. Anyway, in the one I'm
thinking of, Jeremy and his mom are sitting at the opposite ends of the couch.
Both of them are thinking. Above her head it says This world is becoming such a complex and confusing place! And he’s thinking: I pretty much have everything figured out.
And have you
noticed how commonly films show how, well, how immature young men can be? Those films most commonly are comedies,
comedies that generally end with the young man moving toward a hard-won
maturity. A decade ago, Judd Apatow made a fortune
with that formula—The 40-Year-Old Virgin,
Knocked Up, Superbad, and others. Films full
of hilariously immature young men. More recently, there’s been 21 and 22 Jump Street. Horrible Bosses 1 and 2. You could probably name a score of others.
But things
must have ever been thus, for that plot has been around for a long, long time. One of my favorite
Shakespeare plays is Love’s Labour’s Lost
(mid-1590s). (Gonna see it again next Friday!) It tells about the young King of
Navarre (southwest France/northern Spain). The young King and three of his young
buddies decide they will hang out in the King’s castle and focus on their
studies, avoiding the company of women for
three years. They swear a vow to
one another. Then they sign it—with
great ceremony. In fact, it’s the very first thing to happen in the play. Bros
forever!
Well, no
sooner have they done all this vowing and swearing and signing than a princess
of France arrives (her entourage includes some beautiful followers and friends).
She’s come to collect an old debt for her father. True to his oath, the King of
Navarre forces the women to set up camp outside
the castle.
But then—of course—the young men see these women, and, of course, all bets are off. And of course the young men don’t want their buddies to know what they’re
up to, so, of course, they all go
sneaking around to be with their latest passion. Later, realizing sheepishly that
all of them have broken the vow, they
join forces to invade the women’s camp. They disguise themselves as visiting
Russians, dancing into the camp of
the young women, who are not fooled a bit.
But they play along for fun. Soon, they pair off, and it looks as if Love
has arrived—as if it’s time for The Glitter Guy!
But at this moment
of brightness—of hope—Shakespeare—sneaky,
sneaky Will Shakespeare!—turns out the lights.
A messenger arrives from France. The princess’ father, the French King, has
died. The women quickly prepare to head for home. While the men urge them to
marry first. And the women say, basically: Hey,
you guys all broke your vows to one another—almost immediately!
How can we possibly trust you? (Oh, snap!) The guys try to assure them (Hey, baby, come on now—chill!), but the women aren’t buying it.
They say: Go away and help make the world
a better place. Grow up. We’ll check in on you next year. Curtain!
