Continual plodders

The Bard constantly colors my world

So Jamie's first trip to America was a series of milestones in both of our lives. It's all been so joyous that our hearts, notwithstanding their capacity, receiveth as the sea, and we can barely comprehend our own happiness. Long story short, by the time we actually finally recited that Romeo and Juliet sonnet together (live and in person!), we were engaged.

*SQUEE*

I immediately conjured Shakespearean lines in my mind for use in my future wedding vows:

What worthy blessing can be

but our imaginations may make it ours?

And being here thus together, 

we are an endless mine to one another...

Context alert: Ok, sure it's from The Two Noble Kinsmen and it's a dude talking to his male cousin about being together in prison for the remainder of their lives only seconds before a woman walks onto the stage and causes them to quarrel like rutting stags, but it sounds romantic lifted out of the speech, ALRIGHT?

Anyhoo...

Our parting was sickly sweet sorrow (how intimately I understand that line now!). So, I decided to mark the countdown until our next reunion on Christmas Eve by rehashing my current list of 47 speeches every day. Well, nearly every day, since the countdown began with 64 days, so I've taken some weekends off. However, I'm right on target to do some serious recitations on a consistent basis. 

In plodding away, I've found that I've reached a new plateau with the memory skills. Most every line I practice comes out faster and with more confidence than ever before. It feels almost effortless, but that's what over 17 months of constant exposure will do for you! 

I concentrate on one speech every night, reciting it to myself just before bed, then several times in the car on the way to work. Any given speech trips off my lips at least ten times in 24 hours. I also double back whenever I'm in an especially good mood, and practice that week's past speeches. 

The effect it's had on my understanding of rhythm and language is beyond my measure, and the familiarity truly brings new insight into the written and spoken word. I encounter prose, lyrics, and poetry so differently now. I notice the structure and nuance of everything I read and hear far more clearly, and it shapes my personal compositions in definitive ways. 

It has been most rewarding to continue this project. Though I don't post as often as I used to, I promise that these words and images have profoundly colored my daily mindscape. It's always folding around my thoughts, always making me grateful that I pushed myself to start this journey, as it has enriched my life in ways I never could have imagined.

Continual plodders ever won...

You kiss by the book

Sonnets are a girl's best friend

My dear lover, body and soul, has of late importuned me with love in Shakespearean fashion... meaning, he's sent me emails full of poetry. Appropriately, a few of them have been Elizabethan sonnets, which, as all the boys should know, are still a surefire means of winning any girl's heart. Or at least a girl whose hobby is memorizing Hamlet and King Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing and what-not.

But he has also been bugging me (in the most delicate and nerdy ways possible) to join him in memorizing some more Romeo and Juliet. The first fourteen lines the titular characters speak to each other form a sonnet, and represent a most romantic (if not ultimately auspicious) meeting of souls. It's a semi-cheeky dance of phrasing and it speaks to both of these kids' abilities to charm and evade with nought but words. Comparing Juliet to a holy shrine, Romeo implores she grace his "unworthy" lips with a touch of hers, so that he, the pilgrim, be blessed. She is convinced, eventually, and sin is purged by their pure kisses.

So yeah, OF COURSE I'd love to add this to my repertoire! If only because it would be our repertoire in the end, which will probably grow as time progresses. Given our mutual adoration of all things Shakespeare (and many other beautifully geeky things), I anticipate the day we recite this to each other will be exciting enough that it will inspire us to continue the tradition. Possibly with some Macbeth, and definitely some Benedick and Beatrice banter. Oh, the possibilities.



Romeo and Juliet, Act I Sc. V

ROMEO	[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
	This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
	My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
	To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET	Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
	Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
	For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
	And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
ROMEO	Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET	Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO	O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
	They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET	Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
ROMEO	Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take. (kisses her)
	Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
JULIET	Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO	Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
	Give me my sin again. (they kiss)
JULIET	You kiss by the book.

Sassy Shakespeare: My favorite one-liners

There's a lot of these "Shakespearean insult generator" memes out there, where you choose one item from each column to create a sufficiently archaic-sounding verbal poo-fling. Gems such as "gleeking knotty-pated harpy" or "puking beef-witted apple-john" or "yeasty tardy-gaited moldwarp." Most of these sound more like Harry Potter incantations than insults.

As giggle-inducing as some of them are, they aren't genuine, actual lines from the plays. And after you'e heard some of the more pointed and exotic barbs, you begin to find it a tragedy that these colorful words and phrases aren't used more today. For example, I was irrationally tickled that the word "clotpole" is often utilized in one of my favorite BBC series: Merlin. Lear used it, as did Guderius in Cymbeline. Having encountered it before, and read about its very bawdy origins, I gasped when I heard it uttered in such a family-friendly TV show. Of course, no one outside an English Lit professor would normally pick up on it.

But it's not just the bawdy stuff I love. It's the clever throw-away lines and the chronically taken-out-of-context quotes that I've highlighted throughout my Complete Works that I feel could be useful in everyday conversation. Enjoy!

"I like this place, And willingly could waste my time in it."
--Celia, "As You Like It," Act II, Sc. IV

"You do assist the storm."
--Boatswain, "The Tempest," Act I, Sc. I

"In nature, there's no blemish but the mind; None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind."
--Antonio, "Twelfth Night," Act III, Sc. IV

"Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall..."
--Escalus, "Measure for Measure," Act II, Sc. I

"Scratching could not make it worse and 'twere such a face as yours were."
--Beatrice, "Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Sc. I

"This is the fruit of rashness!"
--Gloster, "King Richard III," Act II, Sc. II

"He that loves to be flattered is worthy of the flatterer."
--Apemantus, "Timon of Athens," Act I, Sc. I

"For defect of judgment Is oft the cure of fear." 
--Belarius, "Cymbeline," Act. IV, Sc. II

"O, pardon me; For when no friends are by, men praise themselves."
--Lucius, "Titus Andronicus," Act V, Sc. III

"Where's hourly trouble for a minute's ease."
--Helicanus, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," Act II, Sc. IV

"No sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir; but I do bite my thumb, sir."
--Sampson, "Romeo and Juliet," Act. I, Sc. I

"Most spend their mouths when what they seem Runs far before them."
--Dauphin, "King Henry V," Act II, Sc. IV

"Unquiet meals make ill digestions."
--Abbess, "The Comedy of Errors," Act V, Sc. I

"More matter with less art."
--Queen, "Hamlet," Act II, Sc. II

"Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmation strong As proofs of holy writ."
--Iago, "Othello," Act III, Sc. III

"...didst thou ever hear that things ill got had ever bad success?"
--King Henry VI, "3 King Henry VI," Act II, Sc. II

"'Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation."
--Falstaff, "1 King Henry IV," Act I, Sc. II

The Fig of Spain and other possible Shakespearean cocktails

A Joe Peretore creation

Several evenings last summer, while I was on yet another trip to the cocktail capital of the world, my self-styled bartender friend Joe enthusiastically presented me with a series of new spirited concoctions. It's always like an episode of Iron Chef with Joe--just give him a suggestion for an ingredient and he'll go to work, shaking or stirring up a fine potable for your enjoyment. One night, he ran out of raspberry preserves for something resembling a Clover Club, so he used a spoonful of fig preserves instead. He presented it to me with a slightly crestfallen aura; he was a father whose child had no name. So I took a sip and the first thing that tripped off my tongue was "Fig of Spain." It's an gonads-inspired hand gesture/ insult from Pistol in Henry V. I explained to Joe the term's bawdy origin and a new drink was born. 

While riding city busses and trains and planes that summer, I was always browsing through a Kindle book on my iPod called "Shakespeare's Bawdy" by Eric Partridge, which explains where my brain was at the time. I've always loved colorful turns of phrase, especially ones with clever, tasteful innuendo. Shakespeare is a master of the craft of penis and fart jokes. It's something I wish we could teach kids in high school so they wouldn't be so bored or put off by his plays. If they knew how truly foul-mouthed Mercutio was, or how often Romeo and his buddies talked about snatch, teenagers would relate to Shakespeare so much better. Alas, teaching them what Hamlet meant by telling Ophelia it would "cost a groaning" to take off his edge would be frowned upon in our pretends-to-be-Puritan society. But them's the breaks. 

Flipping through Joe's cocktail recipe books and noting the witty and often risqué names most of them were given, I quickly realized that Shakespeare was an endless mine of beverage monikers. Next time I'm in Brooklyn, I'll have to get Joe to make something called a "Carnal Sting" or perhaps a "Bed Presser." I'd love to try whatever might be called "Fortune's Favours," "Country Matters," or even "Beast with Two Backs." I'll be sure to share whenever we figure one out.

So in the tradition of my dear friend Elissa's Game of Thrones craft blog (which is really awesomesauce, so if you're into it check it out), I give you the recipe for one of my most favorite cocktails ever:

The Fig Of Spain (courtesy of Joe Peretore)

2 oz Beefeater Gin

3/4 oz lemon juice

1/2 oz simple syrup

1 egg white

1 teaspoon fig preserves

Shake all ingredients until your arms fall off.

Add ice until shaker is 3/4 full.

Shake until your heart gives out.

Strain into a saucer champagne glass. 

Sip and recite Shakespeare.

Word, vows, gifts, tears

Elizabethan audiences knew the story of Troilus & Cressida about as well as we know Romeo & Juliet today. It's a star-cross'd love tragedy that just happens to be set during the Trojan War. Way ahead of time, people knew the idiom "True as Troilus, false as Cressid," and while many arguments can be made about Cressida's level of free will regarding her chastity amongst the suffocating haze of testosterone that was ancient Greece and Troy, she does end up at least being false to herself. 

This speech being one case in point. After her uncle Pandarus waxes poetic about how manly and honorable Troilus is, even to the point of degrading the great sexpot Achilles as "a camel," Cressida soliloquizes about being a wise enough woman to resist temptations. Of course, later, when she's with Troilus, she admits to him that she was playing hard to get and wishes she "had men's privilege of speaking first." 

But that's not even the betrayal that makes her eponymous saying true. She is forced to be traded to the Greeks for a prisoner to be released. She really has no choice, but in order for that damned idiom to hold true, this must happen, and the character has no chance of redeeming herself. Thus, she is "False" for going along with the trade that she had no say in whatsoever.

Feminism fail. 

However, this speech still rings true for anyone who ever had ownership of ovaries. Enjoy!

Troilus & Cressida, Act I, Sc. II

Cressida: Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love's full sacrifice,

He offers in another's enterprise;

But more in Troilus thousand fold I see

Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be;

Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:

Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.

That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:

Men prize the thing ungain'd more than it is:

That she was never yet that ever knew

Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.

Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:

Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech:

Then though my heart's content firm love doth bear,

Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night

Friar Lawrence: priest, gardener, apothecary, trouble-maker.

I knew from the start that I didn't want to learn anything too obvious from Romeo & Juliet. Like Hamlet, this play has so much of it infused in the zeitgeist, but each has dark corners that are as remarkable as they are uncelebrated. As gorgeous as the lovers' exchanges are (their first lines spoken to one another forms a sonnet, for Jebus' sake), I wanted something more personal.

Enter the good friar and his garden of good intentions. The man has a lot of choice words for Romeo and his love life, but ultimately backs the hasty teenager to a degree that borders on unwise. In the Baz Luhrmann film, Friar Lawrence nurses this most infamous of star-cross'd relationships with the same zeal as he has for growing his questionable botanicals. He later employs one of his concoctions to help Juliet fake her death, but his secret letter to Romeo explaining the ruse doesn't quite make its way into the lover's hands.

In this speech, the hapless gardener waxes about the overlapping attributes of men and plants, and how each is often host to antithetical qualities. Life in fair Verona has made him quite the expert on such things, as everyone is so equally loyal and loving to their families and so resentful and hateful toward their neighbor.

Every Saturday, I go out on my patio and water and fertilize my collection of orchids. I spend a fair amount of time documenting their growth, taking pictures and making notes on what seems to make each one happy and healthy. Ever since I learned this speech, I recite it to my plants as go about my work. After a long week, these words serve as a reminder that not all things are as they appear, but we must keep tending our lives with diligence, for even the bad can be distilled and made useful.


Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Sc. III
Friar Lawrence: The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.