Shakespeare & Words
I recently read an article where Michael Lukas of “VQR Blog” was correcting a Wall Street analyst for his use of the Shakespeare term “pound of flesh” to describe the decision of the Treasury Department not to bail out Lehman Brothers. The analyst said that the government wanted to take a pound of flesh from Lehman Bros. and send a message to Wall Street, but they ended up taking a ton.
Mr. Lukas pointed out that the term is often misused as being a small price to pay, when in the context of the play, a pound of flesh would cause much suffering. Shylock didn’t plan on taking out the pound of flesh from the rear end of Antonio (the protagonist of The Merchant of Venice), but likely cutting out a pound of his chest (essentially killing the hero).
That’s a solid correction from Michael Lukas, though he’s probably fighting a losing battle. Words, phrases and sayings take on a life of their own in a constantly evolving language. A word or a phrase means what everybody thinks it means, regardless of its origins. Still, that term has bothered me in the past when I’ve heard it before, so I know where Mr. Lukas is coming from.
Shakespeare’s Words
Unfortunately, so many of Shakespeare’s words and phrasings are strange to us these days, that all of us lose the original meaning without massive footnotes. One reason so many young readers stumble over William Shakespeare is they don’t like fighting through footnotes every ten lines (or more), because it’s not something you get used to reading modern fiction, newspapers or magazines. So even famous Shakespeare phrases go misunderstood and misquoted.
The Whys and Wherefores of Shakespeare
A classic example is Juliet’s “Oh, Romeo…” speech from Romeo & Juliet. The speech begins, “Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” That sounds straightforward enough. Juliet is asking where Romeo is, like he’s late for a date or something. Actually, the word “wherefore” is a synonym of “why” – not “where”. So Juliet is asking why Romeo is, not where Romeo is.
Juliet and Romeo are in love, but they are from rival houses who draw swords upon seeing on another in the streets. So Juliet is asking why, of all the men she could fall in love with in the world, why did she have to fall in love with her family’s mortal enemy. The speech sprinkles other phrases familiar to us, such as the “rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. While a reader eventually gets the gist of the speech anyway, it helps to know from the beginning what Juliet’s question is, since that’s why she gives the speech at all. It also avoids the confusion of why Romeo is spying on her while she calls his name, because she is calling for him. In fact, the speech allows Romeo to get inside Juliet’s mind, to know that she loves him too, and that she loves him in spite of her family’s hatred of him, and her familial duty to hate him.
When Nothing Isn’t Nothing
Like our time, Elizabethan England was full of slang terms and phrases. Sometimes, we miss the ribald nature of Shakespeare when these slang words go over our heads (just like modern slang would mean nothing, or something entirely different, to Shakespeare). So much of William Shakespeare’s writing is worldly writing that’s bawdy in nature, but it doesn’t read that way when we’re studying Shakespeare in school. Let’s take “Much Ado About Nothing”, for example.
Reading the title, you think Shakespeare is dismissing his own play as a triviality, which he is, in a way. But his title has a double meaning. In “Much Ado About Nothing”, a pair of young lovers are set to get married. Unfortunately, the villain of the play spreads a rumor that the virginal bride is actually not-so virginal after all. The groom-to-be reacts in an outrageous fashion, apparently driving his erstwhile fiance to suicide. Luckily, Much Ado About Nothing is a Shakespearean comedy and not a tragedy, so Hero’s death is a misdirection. The repentant Claudio agrees to build an epitaph for Hero (the original bride) and make amends by marrying her heretofore unmentioned cousin. Instead, the cousin is unmasked to be Hero herself, alive and well, and the happy couple get married – the groom learning a valuable lesson about trust (both not trusting liars like Don John, as well as trusting his new wife).
So the play ends and we learn that the whole story was a lot of drama about nothing, or false charges. But the word “nothing” had another meaning in the Elizabethan slang. Without being too graphic, “nothing” was a euphamism for the female private parts. You could say that the play was named “Much Ado About Sex”.
Is that too terribly important? Probably not, except knowing Shakespeare’s other meaning gives you an idea of what was in his mind while writing this play.
On His High Horse About Shakespeare
Don’t get me wrong. When I speak about misunderstanding Shakespeare and fighting through footnotes, I’m one of the guilty. I prefer to read a book from cover to cover with a minimal amount of trips to the search engine or footnotes page, because you can enjoy the flow of the prose better. I have been as guilty as anyone of getting lazy and refusing to read the footnotes at the bottom of a Shakespeare play page.
I mainly wrote this post to let the next generation know that reading William Shakespeare and learning something about the culture he lived in is worth the effort. Shakespeare is timeless because he faced the same emotions, personality types and human concerns that we face today.
The challenges and human concerns of Shakespeare’s time might have had a different look or different sensibility, , but Shakespeare wrote about love, lust, family relations, lying, cheating, jealousy, betrayal and the emotional baggage people carried due to those concerns, just like the writers of today do.
In other words, William Shakespeare might have been the greatest writer of English that ever lived, but his mind dwelled on the same exact emotions that your mind does.
Pounds of Flesh
Of course, a middle class American lives a more comfortable existence than even a nobleman or wealthy merchant of those times. Also, Americans (and most westerners) don’t have to worry about our government as a national policy accusing us of a crime and being tortured into a confession (at least not yet). So many of the terms and slang Shakespeare used were more graphic than what we use. So a “pound of flesh”, or any Shakespeare quote, isn’t always as benign as it might sound.