Ever heard any of those? This week? Today? I heard one of them in a news broadcast the morning I
started composing this chapter. In my copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Shakespeare takes up
forty-seven pages. I will admit that not every one of the citations is all that familiar, but enough of them
are. In fact, the hardest part of compiling my list of quotations was stopping. I could have gone on all day
expanding the list without getting into anything too obscure. My first guess is that you probably have not
read most of the plays from which these quotations are taken; my second guess is that you know the
phrases anyway. Not where they’re from necessarily, but the quotes themselves (or the popular versions
of them).
All right, so the Bard is always with us. What does it mean?
He means something to us as readers in part because he means so much to our writers. So let’s consider
why writers turn to our man.
It makes them sound smarter?
Smarter than what?
Than quoting Rocky and Bullwinkle, for instance.
p. 42Careful, I’m a big fan of Moose and Squirrel. Still, I take your point. There are lots of sources that
don’t sound as good as Shakespeare. Almost all of them, in fact.
Plus, it indicates that you’ve read him, right? You’ve come across this wonderful phrase in the
course of your reading, so clearly you’re an educated person.
Not inevitably. I could have given you Richard III’s famous request for a horse from the time I was nine.
My father was a great fan of that play and loved to recount the desperation of that scene, so I began
hearing it in the early grades. He was a factory worker with a high school education and not particularly
interested in impressing anybody with his fancy learning. He was pleased, however, to be able to talk
about these great stories, these plays he had read and loved. I think that’s a big part of the motivation.
We love the plays, the great characters, the fabulous speeches, the witty repartee even in times of duress.
I hope never to be mortally stabbed, but if I am, I’d sure like to have the self-possession, when asked if
it’s bad, to answer, “No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough, ’twill
serve,” as Mercutio does in Romeo and Juliet. I mean, to be dying and clever at the same time, how can
you not love that? Rather than saying it proves you’re well read, I think what happens is that writers
quote what they’ve read or heard, and more of them have Shakespeare stuck in their heads than anything
else. Except Bugs Bunny, of course.
And it gives what you’re saying a kind of authority.
As a sacred text confers authority? Or as something exquisitely said confers authority? Yes, there is
definitely a sacred-text quality at work here. When pioneer families went west in their prairie schooners,
space was at a premium, so they generally carried only two books: the Bible and Shakespeare. Name
another writer to whom high schoolers are subjected in each of four years. If you live in a medium-sized
theater market, there is precisely one writer you can count on being in prop. 43duction somewhere in
your area every year, and it is neither August Wilson nor Aristophanes. So there is a ubiquity to
Shakespeare’s work that makes it rather like a sacred text: at some very deep level he is ingrained in our
psyches. But he’s there because of the beauty of those lines, those scenes, and those plays. There is a
kind of authority lent by something being almost universally known, where one has only to utter certain
lines and people nod their heads in recognition.