Bardisms by Barry Edelstein Page A

listeners know he’s referring to how long such a day is (as opposed to how hot or bright or any of the other things summer days are). Good parallel construction would require him to contrast a long July’s day to, say, a day as short as one in December . He doesn’t say anything like that, but instead collapses this latter image into the name of the month itself. Yet we understand full well what he means. This kind of poetic density, in which meanings are implied rather than spelled out, and in which language is imprecise on its surface yet exquisitely concrete in the thoughts behind it, is characteristic of late Shakespeare, and of The Winter’s Tale in particular. It’s Shakespearean writing at its most sophisticated.
    Also typical of late Shakespeare is his ability to convey a person’s entire life through one short phrase. Polixenes says that the best thing about his son’s mercurial boyishness is that it eliminates thoughts that would thick [his] blood . In this provocative phrase we get a glimpse of a whole person, with moods, heartbreaks, dark moments, a past that’s led to all these, and a life that extends beyond the boundaries of this moment, this scene’s dramatic circumstances, and even this play itself. But what makes the phrase noteworthy is how unnecessary it is. The story of the play doesn’t require it; Polixenes needn’t have a history of struggles with depression in order for The Winter’s Tale to make sense, and all that’s really required of the character is that he do things that move the plot forward. Still, details such as this one make the whole play more believable, more lifelike, and more real. It’s just good writing, and it’s also gold for an actor: What kind of thoughts are thickening Polixenes’ blood? What’s preoccupying him? Is he worried about his cholesterol, perhaps, or something more metaphysical? For our purposes, such queries are irrelevant—when I sent the passage to my buddy, I wasn’t suggesting that he was in need of antidepressants—but they do help us understand why Shakespeare is for all occasions: because his characters seem to be real people with real lives, to reflect life as we know it to be lived, and, through their extraordinary turns of phrase, to give voice to our own experiences in all their varieties and complexities.
    SHAKESPEARE ON MOTHERS

    Nature makes them partial.

—P OLONIUS , Hamlet , 3.3.33

    Given the strength of the bond between mother and child, it’s remarkable how little Shakespeare actually wrote about it. He dramatizes mother-son (and, to a much lesser extent, mother-daughter) relationships in a number of plays, but he doesn’t exactly anatomize them. His preference is less to talk in the abstract about how mothers and their children relate than simply to show them in action and let these relationships speak for themselves.
    Sometimes he chooses not to address the subject at all. Many of the mothers in the plays are conspicuous by their absence: Prince Hal’s mother, the mother of Lear’s three daughters, the mother of Shylock’s beloved daughter Jessica, the mothers of Miranda, Rosalind, Desdemona, Portia, Ophelia, Viola—we hear a resounding silence from these women, who are dead before the curtain rises on the plays in which their children feature. And interestingly, in the case of the character who is arguably the most complex, vividly drawn, and loquacious mother in the plays, Coriolanus’ mother, Volumnia, the most emotional moment her son shares with her has in it no language at all, as this simple stage direction from the play demands: “He holds her by the hand, silent.”
    What accounts for this strange lacuna in Shakespeare’s output? What do these absent mothers mean? Four hundred years’ worth of critics have had a field day essaying these questions. The political: Shakespeare is a misogynist, so he marginalizes mothers in his works. The practical: In his period, women on stage are played by men in drag, and