Bardisms by Barry Edelstein Page B

there is a limited number of talented female impersonators in London’s acting pool, so Shakespeare wisely keeps the number of mothers he needs to a minimum. The poetical: He enhances the metaphorical power of his characters by endowing them with an acute version of a very resonant existential problem, the search for a mother’s love. The psychological: He has an Oedipal attraction to his own mother, and his shame over it causes him to erase the mothers in his plays. The psychological, version B: He has abandonment issues with his own mother, so he can’t help but portray motherless children in his plays. (Poor Mary Arden! Forever subject to character assassination by armchair shrinks, simply for having given birth to the Greatest Writer of All Time.)
    We’ll never know the reasons why Shakespeare so scants mothers and motherhood in his works. But whenever I apply the Bardisms below to the mom-related occasions of my life, I sometimes hear King Henry V’s admonition to his outnumbered troops: “The fewer men, the greater share of honor.” That is, the fact that Shakespeare says relatively little about mothers per se simply makes me appreciate those things he does say even more. See if you agree as you survey these bits of Shakespeare for Occasions of the Maternal.
    I LOVE MY MOM

    Here are two short Bardisms for children who love their mothers. The first works great spoken directly to Mom; the second is best suited to a toast, either from a son to his mother or about a particularly loving fellow who sees the phrase “mama’s boy” as a sincere compliment.
    The first:
My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom.

—M ARINA , Pericles , 22.66–67
    Second:
There’s no man in the world / More bound to’s mother.

—V OLUMNIA , Coriolanus , 5.3.159–60
    How to use them:
The first line is great for any son or daughter eager to hug Mom after an absence, or just because.

    Volumnia says the second line to her son while trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. Reminding him how bound he is to her, she guilt-trips him into obeying her. Therefore, some mothers may well wish to emulate Volumnia and use this Bardism to bend their wayward child to their desires. But the line can also be of use on any occasion when a parent wishes to praise a wonderful child, when a child describes his or her devotion to Mom or Dad, or when a third party admires a friend’s filial devotion.

    Transgender the line if necessary with these changes: “There’s no woman in the world / More bound to her mother,” or “There’s no man in the world / More bound to his father.”
    MOTHERS WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN

    Throughout this book we’ll see the Bard turn to the natural world in search of metaphors that might shed light on human predicaments. Bees, flowers, fish, trees, weather formations, and especially animals are endless sources of inspiration to him. Like the sermonizing pastor who mines some nugget of holy writ and explicates its moral content as instruction to his parishioners, Shakespeare observes nature in action, then abstracts some detail from what he sees and develops it into a poetic image for human edification. Here, in Macbeth , Shakespeare looks at the protective parental instincts of the animals, particularly the matriarchs of the ornithological realm:
The poor wren,

The most diminutive of birds, will fight,

Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

—L ADY M ACDUFF , Macbeth , 4.2.9–11
    In other words:
    When her babies are in her nest, even the lowly wren, the tiniest bird of all, will fight hard against predators many times her size.
     

    How to use it:
As a testament to the courage and mettle of mothers, this line is hard to beat. In the playground, at parent-teacher night at school, at the pediatrician’s office, or on the checkout line at Babies“R”Us, quote it whenever you see a mom advocating hard on behalf of her little one.
    SHAKESPEARE ON FATHERS

    To