Shakespeare warms up
The French call it the wit of the staircase. It’s the sublime retort that comes to you when it’s too late. You’re already going down the stairs, far from where the outrage took place, and you hit your forehead as you realise what you should have said.
As Malta becomes increasingly outrageous, out on the streets and in the corridors of power, many of us feel speechless, although we hanker to administer some tough verbal medicine to the ubiquitous offenders.
In this age of continual education, is there no course that can teach us how to lash the hacks? Do we need to keep repeating the tired insults which have long lost their cathartic power?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you William Shakespeare, master of the full-throated, tonsil-vibrating, chest-clearing, bowel-purging insult. His works are a trove of prêt-â-porter wit. And, with just a little practice, Shakespeare demonstrates how you can do what he did: invent new words and expressions fit for every occasion.
You may be one of the unfortunates whose schooldays left you with the impression that Shakespearean language boils down to thee and thou, methinks and forsooth. But Shakespeare used 20,000 words in his collected works and he invented 1,700 of them.
The chances are you’ve been speaking Shakespeare for as long as you’ve been speaking English. If you refer to your “bedroom”, enjoy a bit of “gossip”, take “skim milk” with your coffee, which you describe as an “addiction”… then you’re using words that Shakespeare invented.
If your “eyeball” is glued to the screen as each scandal leaves the government in a state of “undress”, if you find the politicians’ excuses “laughable” and the “swagger” makes you want to “rant”, if bureaucracy sent you on a “wild goose chase”, if you think the country is becoming a “laughing stock”, then Shakespeare got there before you.
If you think “the isle is full of noises”, if you sometimes feel “lonely” because you’re not sure how many others see the madness, if it all seems “unreal”, then it’s Shakespeare you need to thank for giving a name to your pain.
Was Shakespeare ever at a loss for words? Perhaps he always was. It’s because he saw the gaps between language and feeling that he was creative, never settling for the cliché or the hackneyed curse or imprecation.
Much of our homespun wisdom comes from him. If you believe that all that glitters is not gold, that clothes make the man, that it’s wrong to insist on one’s pound of flesh, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (or corruption as fetid, even if not mentioned in a court sentence), then you’ve been quoting Shakespeare, even if you have never got within a mile of The Merchant of Venice or Romeo and Juliet.
You may never have approached Shakespeare but he has approached yours.
One way to learn from Shakespeare is simply to broaden your repertoire. Yes, in a land of usurpers and backstabbers, Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger I see before me?” and Julius Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” will remain evergreens.
But who of us has not met the person who deserves to be told “Out of my sight! You infect my eyes!” (adapted from Richard III) or “I wish you were clean enough to spit upon!” (from Timon of Athens)?
In this age of politicians excusing their venality as accidental mistakes, we find in Measure for Measure the perfect retort: “Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade!”
I’ll leave it up to you to decide who deserves to be called a “subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man” (Two Gentlemen of Verona) and who a “poisonous bunch-backed toad” (Richard III).
A second way to use Shakespeare is to adapt him. Mutter
“be bloody, bold and resolute” (Macbeth) while navigating through Aldo Moro Road during the rush hour before rolling down your window to reply to a two-finger salute with a “thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!” (Richard III, a source of many gems).
The third way is to use Shakespeare as a springboard to create your own expressions. The popularity of the 1980s classic Blackadder series was due to its ingenious insults. The writers were close readers of Shakespeare.
Do you laugh when you hear Blackadder say “Your brain, for example, is so minute, Baldrick, that if a hungry cannibal cracked your head open, there wouldn’t be enough to cover a small water biscuit”?
It’s a clever update of the cutting remark in As You Like It: “Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.”
Blackadder dismisses Dr Johnson as a “fat dullard or wobblebottom; a pompous ass with sweatly dewflaps”. Compare it with this outpouring from Henry IV Part I, where someone is referred to as a “huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly”.
The Blackadder writers regarded Shakespeare as their contemporary. They learned from the pattern of his creativity — no easy expletives; transform a noun into a verb or adverb; deploy comic combinations of animal imagery with vices and human organs.
Above all, they didn’t copy Shakespeare. They made him their own.
Shakespeare is at home among us. So should we be with him.
“William Shakespeare demonstrates how you can do what he did: invent new words and expressions fit for every occasion