He who reads this log—if any man doth—reads my heart; or at least ever so much of it as I shall for the moment willingly show. And this day, the last of May, my heart is full of words.
Words.
Words.
And who shall help us find our words in this, our beloved English tongue, better than Shakespeare? No other man so well showed us how words could be used to dig out the deepest regions of our hearts and pour them forth in a paroxysm of poetry. I have of late—and wherefore I know, but shall not say—been immersing myself in the works and words of this man, and my verdict is this: I highly recommend it, on a regular basis.
Imagine what regular exposure to such linguistic genius would do for us. Just think of it. Imagine if our politicians could speak as spoke Mark Antony, or even Titus Andronicus, for that matter, putting power and poetry into their pontifications, if nothing else (if you must speak nonsense, at least make it beautiful). Instead, we get the simpering and stuttering sounds of men and women so afeared of offending some hypothetical person—which person will soon no doubt talk himself into existing, for as Harold Bloom noted, it was Shakespeare who taught us to talk ourselves into being what we say—that they can say nothing with conviction. Or when conviction speak, it speaks only in the blustering bellowing of a buffoon, or the shrill shriek of those so intolerant of what they consider intolerance (an irony lost on people who seem to have forgotten all humor and humility, so essential to irony) that they are reduced to expressing their hatred in forms of speech so inarticulate as to be little better than a serpent’s hiss. In Shakespeare, by contrast, even the idiots could do better, so that even Conrad could curse a constable with:
“You are an ass!”
At least that was a clear accusation to which one could respond (and so the constable did, with, “Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years?”—still more persuasive than 90% of our political discussions in recent years.). How do you respond to an accusation when it is framed as a negative implication, in the rhetorical question, spoken from the perspective of the perpetually offended: “How can you say that!?”? The only logical answer that might reveal the vacuity of such language and open the way to further discussion is: “I open my mouth and let the words come out.” But by then, the audience has already awarded the victory to the one playing the victim. Such an abuse of rhetoric undercuts all our canons of argument, since it implies that merely claiming offense, without even having to name the offense, nor the grounds thereof, is sufficient to prove the offender in the wrong.
The previous president aside, this is not intended as a criticism of any particular person or persons, least of all is it intended to mock anyone who might have an actual speech impediment. The stutterings of which I speak are not the impediments of nature, but of character, born from corrupting, rather than nurturing, the faculties of both speech and reason that a steady diet of words like Shakespeare’s could help us develop. After all, it was reading the likes of Shakespeare and the Bible commissioned by his patron, King James, that gave Abraham Lincoln the eloquence for which he is so justly praised. What a falling off is this, from “Four score and seven years ago” to “winning bigly.” And the Democrats are, so far as I can see, little better.
I say, “A plague on both your houses!”
And a plague on us, if we not only allow all our thinking to be absorbed into the political, but allow all our speech to so decay, that we can do no better than we of late have done. Let us soak ourselves in the works of Shakespeare, that we might learn from him what it is to both feel greatly and to think highly, with language fit to convey them both, and both at once.
Oh, how I wish I could set down the thoughts that passed through my mind earlier today, when yet the Bard’s words were still ringing in mine ears—they could show what I mean better than any I write now, in my cooler blood. Yet, it is better, perhaps, that it should be so, for a man’s prayers are not meet for publication.
Words are important, and indeed, necessary. We all must perforce use them on a regular basis. Therefore, anything that helps us to improve our use of them is to be commended and recommended as oft as is prudent. Right now, what we in the Anglophonic sphere, this English-speaking world—which, make no mistake, is essentially now that world we call Earth; though the use of all the globe’s many languages is another thing to be much commended—what we English speakers need, say I, now more than ever, is inspiration, and direction, in how best to use this language with which God has blessed us. And, if I might quote one of my heroes, Patrick Stewart (as the trĂ©s Shakespearean Jean-Luc Picard), “there is no better way of doing that than by embracing Shakespeare.”
C’est si vrai, n’est-ce pas?
