`Some Overlooked But Bracing Truth'

I’ve been quietly reading Shakespeare again, starting with the history plays, now the tragedies, soon the comedies. What I remember and what I’ve forgotten surprise me. Details of plot, even from familiar plays like Richard III, have slipped from memory, while phrases and passages felt vivid, as though I last read them last week. I sense continuity with earlier generations of readers -- not scholars but common readers, who while reading little else but the Bible and Shakespeare permitted these texts to suffuse their lives. They became wisdom books, a sophisticated form of solace and self-help. In Facsimiles of Time, Eric Ormsby includes “The Place of Shakespeare in a House of Pain,” a memoir of growing up in his grandmother’s house in Coral Gables, Fla., in the nineteen-fifties. The grandmother, the alcoholic aunt and a cast of hapless uncles casually quoted and misquoted Shakespeare the way more recent Americans exchange catchphrases from pop music and sitcoms. They

“…had been raised on Shakespeare, not merely to become literate or cultured or well-read, but principally in order to learn how to live. From Shakespeare they learned thrift as well as eloquence; what they knew of love they gleaned from his pages and what they already knew of hatred they found confirmed and given indelible utterance in his verses. Shakespeare taught them to be circumspect, honourable and dignified; he tutored them in the protocols of mourning as of courtship; he was their master in all the niceties of melodious speech. Later, out of her (by then almost entirely oral) knowledge of Shakespeare my grandmother had stitched together a patchwork of maxims, some of which stifled while other warmed. To me, confusedly, it seemed at times as though Shakespeare had pre-imagined our travails and had, rather officiously, provided the very wisdom by which we were expected to surmount them. I think there was almost no occasion on which my grandmother, abetted by her elder daughter, my aunt, and my mother, could not furnish some pungent apothegm excised from `the Bard.’ Sometimes these dicta, with their aura of unassailable authority, stuck in my throat; at other times, they managed to illumine our darkness, as if his words had split open the obdurate husk of dim reality in order to direct one slight but piercing beam onto some overlooked but bracing truth.”

My reading suggests Shakespeare offers something to please every common reader -- violence, sex, wit, consolation, compelling stories, human drama, peerless language. In short, the world or, as Hamlet puts it, “a rhapsody of words.”



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