"Knowing
I lov'd my books,
he furnish'd me . . ." (The Tempest 1.2.167)
Are You
Shakespearienced?
Test Your
(Shakespearean) Literacy!
A
Self-Testing Quiz
Previously-Run
Self-Testing Quiz Questions (See Answers Below)
1. The language Shakespeare used, referred to often in this
quiz as Elizabethan English, is more correctly termed
·
(a) Early Modern English
·
(b) Middle English
·
(c) Old English
·
(d) It's Greek to me
2. The truth is that Shakespeare was
·
(a) a scholar and a gentleman
·
(b) anything but a scholar
·
(c) anything but a gentleman
·
(d) the Stephen King of his
day
3. "Yorick" was the name of Hamlet's
·
(a) Rottweiler
·
(b) pet homing skull
·
(c) fool
·
(d) man servant
4. In Elizabethan English, "haggard" means
·
(a) tired and worn out
·
(b) a crusty, country-western
singer
·
(c) a wild falcon
·
(d) an old termigant
5. When Hamlet speaks of his "bare bodkin" (3.1.75) he means
·
(a) a naked dagger
·
(b) a naked bottom
·
(c) a mere dagger
6. When Julius Caesar is stabbed in the Forum (and we all know how painful that
can be), he says, "Et tu, Brute?" (3.1.77). By this he means:
·
(a) Ouch, you brute!
·
(b) You smell like Brut
·
(c) You, too, Brutus?
7. When Lady Macbeth says, "Out damn'd spot! out, I
say!" (5.1.35), she is speaking to
·
(a) her dog
·
(b) where her dog has been on
the carpet
·
(c) imaginary blood on her
hands
8. In Elizabethan terms, when you "clip" someone, you
·
(a) smack him or her across
the face with the flat of your hand
·
(b) embrace him or her
·
(c) tackle him or her below
the knees
9. Pick the words that are terms of endearment in Elizabethan English:
·
(a) nuncle
·
(b) buzzer
·
(c) aunt
·
(d) coz
·
(e) caitiff
·
(f) finch-egg
·
(g) son and heir of a mungril
bitch
·
(h) chuck
·
(i) eater of broken meats
·
(j) bawd
10. When Patroclus calls Thersites a "ruinous butt" in Troilus and
Cresssida (5.1.28), he means:
·
(a) Thersites is like a
broken wine cask
·
(b) Thersites is like an
injurious end of a gun
·
(c) Thersites has diaharrea
11. A "licensed fool" was a
·
(a) lawyer
·
(b) New York taxicab driver
·
(c) official court jester
·
(d) Presidential cabinet
member
12. The fact that Shakespeare always refers to dogs negatively probably means
·
(a) he hated dogs
·
(b) he was a cat lover,
instead
·
(c) nothing
·
(d) he did not write Lassie,
Come Home
Answers to
Previously-Run Self-Testing Quiz Questions Above
1.
The language Shakespeare used, referred to often in this quiz as Elizabethan
English, is more correctly termed .
A mistake often made by the novice is the belief that, because the language is
difficult for us to understand today, Shakespeare's language was therefore
"Old English." Not so! Old English (the Anglo-Saxon langage) was much
more distant in time and form from Shakespeare's English than his language is
from our own Modern English.
If you don't believe me, take a gander at the first lines of The Lord's Prayer
in Old English (c. 9th Century, CE):
Fæder ūre
Þū þe eart
on heafonum,
Sī þīn nama
gehālgod.
Recognize many words there?
Let's look at the same lines in Middle English, the language spoken around
London during roughly the 14th century:
Oure fadir
that art in heuenes,
halewid be thi name.
By Shakespeare's time (the 16th century), the English language had evolved into
very much the form we recognize today, with a few grammatical exceptions and
some vocabulary differences that cause us to call it Early Modern English
(rather than Modern English). In fact, the familiar form of The Lord's Prayer
IS Early Modern English, for the so-called "King James Bible" was
translated into English during the late years of Shakespeare's lifetime. Some
of the exceptions that make his language feel so distant from our own include:
·
Use of the "th"
suffix for present tense verbs in third person singular. This, however, was
changing, and so you will often find the "s" and the "th"
form used interchangeably, sometimes within the same sentence, as in the famous
lines from The Merchant of Venice (note that I will italicize the
endings, so that you can see them more clearly): "The quality of mercy is
not strain'd, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the
place beneath. It is twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives
and him that takes" (4.1.184-87).
·
Free use of the double (and
triple, and quadruple, and on and on) negative, for further intensification of
the negative (which can actually be a very useful form, if you think about it),
as in one of my favorite lines, from Love's Labour's Lost, when the
scholar Holofernes remarks that the bumpkin Dull has not spoken one word during
the interchange between two scholars, and Dull replies, "Nor understood
none neither, sir" (5.1.150)
·
No form of the possessive
singular. "The king's crown" could not yet be said in Early Modern
English. It was still "The king his crown" which later became
shortened with the apostrophe to indicate the contraction of "king
his" into "king's."
·
No possessive singular neuter
pronoun. "Its" was not yet a word in the language, so that you will
find Horatio telling Hamlet how the Ghost acted, saying, "It lifted up it
head" (1.2.216).
For more differences between Early Modern English and Modern
English, read Shakespeare's plays and find some on your own!
2. Although he may well have been a gentle man (who knows?),
he was not a gentleman by birth. His grammar-school education was excellent by
modern standards, but by his own age's standards, he could not be considered a
scholar, because (so far as we know) he did not attend university. The REAL
truth is that Shakespeare was .
Okay, maybe it's a little bit of a stretch to say he was exactly like
Stephen King. After all, the novel wasn't yet even invented. But in terms of
Shakespeare's popularity, it's actually pretty accurate to say that Shakespeare
was like Stephen King. His plays were wildly popular, and many playgoers
apparently returned to subsequent performances to see their favorite bits
reenacted, to catch the delight of laughter at jokes, or to recapture the
thrill of a spooky scene or bloody spectacle. And, indeed, humble Will
Shakespeare from little Stratford-upon-Avon became an incredibly wealthy
man during the course of his stage career.
Although we tend to think of Shakespeare's works today as material for the
high-brow and the scholar, nothing could have been further from the truth in
his own day. His plays were enjoyed by the common people, who loved to take an
afternoon off (the plays were performed in the outdoor theatre, so there were
no night performances!) and grab some cheap entertainment. A place in the
standing room around the skirt of the stage could be bought for a penny. And
the so- called "penny knaves" loved to be spattered with pig's blood
from the staged swordfights.
In fact, Elizabethan tastes were so different from our own
that I'll bet you'll never guess which of Shakespeare's plays was the most popular
during his own lifetime? Was it Hamlet? King Lear? Or maybe even Macbeth?
Nope. The Elizabethan audiences apparently thought those plays to be rather
ho-hum compared with Titus Andronicus, a play that is seldom produced
nowadays because its blood-and- guts spectacle is thought to be unworthy of
what we have come to expect from the bard's high tragedy. Atrocities abound,
and within its span we find limbs lopped off (arms, legs, hands, tongues),
rapes, even cannibalism. One scholar recently quipped that a perusal of this
play would show that it contains an average of 5.2 atrocities per act. And
THAT, my friends, is what his contemporary audiences thought of when they
thought of William Shakespeare.
But, hey, now that I think of things like Pulp Fiction, maybe the
Elizabethans' tastes weren't really so far from our own, now were they?
3.
Hamlet (Alex
Jennings) and Yorick at the RSC Barbican, 1998
Yes, indeedee! "Yorick" was the name of Hamlet's .
Sir John
Gielgud and Yorick at the Haymarket Theatre, 1944
The scene in the graveyard (Act 5, scene 1) is one of the Bard's most brilliant
and most poignant creations, for it is filled to the brim with ironies. The
Gravedigger is preparing a grave for a recently deceased person (whom Hamlet
finds out later to be, ironically, his own love Ophelia), and Hamlet finds, as
he begins chatting with the Gravedigger and as the old bones come flying out of
the hole while he digs, that this common laborer ironically has an unusually
merry attitude toward his profession. This sense of humor about death no doubt
appeals to Hamlet, whose life ironically has been altogether too filled with
the darker side of death lately. So, Hamlet begins to ask somewhat more pointed
questions about the Gravedigger's profession; he wants to know "How long
will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?", for example (to which the
Gravedigger answers immediately "some eight or nine year"). Clearly,
Hamlet is not just musing on death as some philosophical exercise; he asks such
a question because he knows that soon he, too, will be lying in the earth rotting.
Very soon. And he'd like to know how long it may be before his bones come
flying out of the grave like this.
Now for the greatest irony of the scene and the part that is the mark of
Shakespeare's brilliance as a playwright! Many other playwrights of his day
built scenes in tragedies around skulls, for it was fashionable to bring a
skull on stage and to speak of death in such a way that the audience would be
reminded of the old admonition from the Book of Common Prayer, "Remember,
O Man, dust thou art and to dust thou returnest." This dramatic device is
known as the memento mori, the "remembrance of death" brought
visually to the stage before an audience. So, in one sense, Shakespeare crafts
this scene after the common fashion, and the Gravedigger picks up a skull that
has just come out via his shovel, hands it to Hamlet, and says, "Here's a
skull now hath lien you i' th' earth three and twenty years." He plays a
guessing game, trying to get Hamlet to take a guess as to whose skull it was.
The Gravedigger finally confesses, "This same skull, sir, was, sir,
Yorick's skull, the King's jester." Hamlet's famous response is chilling:
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of
most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how
abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it." That is to say,
Hamlet has suddenly encountered an incredible coincidence that might be
laughable if it weren't so wrenching. He is standing there joking with the
Gravedigger and holding in his hand the actual skull of a man he knew when he
was a child (for if Yorick had died twenty-three years before, Hamlet could not
have been more than seven years old at the time of his death). And, as Hamlet
says, it turns his stomach, or makes his "gorge" rise.
This, friends, is Shakespeare at his best. He takes a well-worn device for the
stage (the appearance of a skull during talk of death), and he marks it with
brilliance and innovation by making this particular skull no ordinary skull but
rather the bones of someone the hero knew personally. And not only that, but
the skull belonged to someone beloved to the hero. And not only that, but he
was beloved to the hero when he was a child.
Nobody else did that on the stage.
And, while other playwrights tried afterwards to copy Shakespeare's brilliance
here (by showing their heroes to carry around all manner of skulls of friends
and lovers), they only managed to seem outrageous if not silly.
4. With all due reverence for Merle (hey, I didn't grow up in
Texas fur nuthin'!), in Elizabethan English, "haggard" means .
Indeed, falconry was wildly popular (pardon the pun) during Shakespeare's day,
though it fell into disuse within about a century thereafter, probably due to
the wide-availability of the gun and the general proficiency in shooting that
the eighteenth century saw.
Marilyn Jansen's term paper for my ENG 513 class in 1992 reports that there
were several specific classifications of falcons reported by Elizabethan writer
George Turbeville, including, among the long-winged hawks, eyasses, ramages,
soar hawks, marzaroli, entermewers, and haggards, and, among the short-winged
hawks, goshawks, sparrow-hawks and muskets (Gerald Lascelles, "Sports and
Pastimes: Falconry," in Shakespeare's England, volume 2, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1916: 351-66).
While eyasses were hawks that had been taken directly from the nest as
babies and tamed while young, haggards were fully-molted, adult falcons
taken for taming after already reaching adulthood. There was great disagreement
as to whether the haggard was the best of the hunting falcons: because a
haggard already knew how to hunt before she was tamed, she was unbeatable in
the sky, but as an adult that already knew how to hunt, she was thus more
difficult to tame and more unreliable to stay tamed. (By the way, male falcons
were smaller, so more often females were used for their greater wing-power and
speed.)
How does all this fit into Shakespeare? Allusions to falconry abound in his
plays, but perhaps the most interesting (and controversial) is Petruchio's
"falcon" speech in The Taming of the Shrew:
My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And, till she stoop, she must not be full-gorg'd,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper's call,
That is, to watch her,, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient. (4.1.190-96)
Clearly, Petruchio is likening his establishment of a relationship with his new
wife to that of a falconer taming a falcon. In critical circles, this speech is
highly controversial, since one can argue that he is treating her with
bestiality, turning a human being into a tamed animal, or one can argue that,
metaphorically, he is releasing the socialized falcon within her to kill the
shrew that has debilitated her social relationships. Either way, we could note
that Shakespeare's use of the specific term haggard adds an interesting
subtext to the metaphor. First, Katherina's age and the length of time she has
been "shrewish" and "curst" in Padua might tend to lend
credence to the skeptics who would argue that she is not changed during the
play or, at least, will not remain so for long; for example, Lucentio at the
end of the play states cryptically, "'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she
will be tam'd so" (5.2.189), reinforcing the notion for some readers and
critics that Katherina is not, in fact, changed by the end of the play. Second,
since it was an accepted Elizabethan idea that, while it may be more difficult
to achieve a relationship with one, a haggard is potentially more valuable a
hunter than any other falcon, this notion might lend force to those readers who
argue that Petruchio admires Katherina's wildness and spirit. Such readers note
that, unlike the typical sportsman who is "manning a haggard" by
starving her and depriving her of sleep, Petruchio himself foregoes food and
sleep in the process.
5. When Hamlet speaks of his "bare bodkin" (3.1.75) he means . (Although I will grant you that in most stagings of this
speech--see photo later on "Are You Shakespearienced?" page-- the
actor brings out a mere dagger that is a naked dagger, but no more o'
that. Nakedness on stage is too controversial a topic.)
Actually, this entire passage in the famous "To be, or not to be"
speech is a rather complex and somewhat ingenious metaphor, given its context
in this particular play.
Hamlet marvels that it is only the fear of death and the taboo against suicide
that makes us all bear such calamities in life, when the truth is that anyone
"himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin" (3.1.74-75).
Literally, a "quietus" is a receipt for a paid debt, or an acquittal
of one's debts with a mark of "paid" that is written across the ledger.
Hence, the "bare bodkin" becomes an image packed with meaning, for it
is at once the pen with which one writes "paid" on one's
account on the literal level, and the dagger with which one takes one's
own life at the metaphorical level. When you have paid your debt to life
itself, there is no more life.
Pens write words. In Hamlet, words kill as skillfully as daggers.
Perhaps not as quickly, but certainly as skillfully. Witness the effect of what
the Ghost tells Hamlet in Act One.
Isn't Shakespeare an amazing craftsman?
6. While I suppose it cannot be totally disproved that Caesar wasn't wearing
Brut when he said it, nor that there hasn't been an actor who wore Brut when he
spoke these lines on stage, when Caesar is stabbed in the Forum and says,
"Et tu, Brute?" (3.1.77), he means (c) "You, too, Brutus?"
Or, perhaps more literally, "And you, Brutus?"
This, my friends, is Latin.
It is one of the many historical inaccuracies that exist in this play, for
Julius was actually murdered in the Theatre of Pompey, not in the Forum. There
were actually many more conspirators (as many as 60), of whom Cassius and
Brutus were the leaders. Some Roman sources mention rumors that Brutus was
Julius's illegitimate son (though Shakespeare never mentions it in the play.)
Whether Julius actually spoke these last words is not known, though Shakespeare
did not invent them; they had long been a commonplace by the time he wrote this
play. Some historians have postulated that, whatever his last words were, he
probably spoke them in Greek rather than in Latin, but that, too, is debatable.
In any case, it's a safe bet he did not speak his final words in Elizabethan
English, as he speaks in the play, "Then fall Caesar!"
This scene is one of the climaxes of the play, perhaps THE climax of the play
if you agree with those few commentators who argue that, because of its title,
Julius Caesar is a hero of this tragedy. Most critics would instead argue that
the play would more properly be titled Brutus. In this emotionally charged moment,
when the conspirators close around Julius and stab him, he is reeling not only
from the blows of their daggers but also from the stunning blow to his ego-- he
did not suspect that these men had it in for him. More importantly, given the
line he speaks out of his breathless surprise at this particular moment, when
Brutus delivers the final blow, he did not suspect that Brutus would ever do
such a thing. He has earlier said he does not trust Cassius, but Brutus has
been thoroughly honorable in Caesar's eyes, and the question itself could be
said to ring in Brutus's ears throughout the rest of the play, emerging as
Brutus's own ghostly guilt just before his suicide at the end. It is the old
"Judas theme" that we find running throughout Shakespeare's plays.
Of course, if you view Julius Caesar as somewhat or downright villainous, then
"Judas" isn't exactly an apt parallel for Brutus, since Julius would
then become Jesus in the parallel. It is perhaps unarguable that Julius Caesar
saw himself in a rather godlike way, though, an aspect of character that seems
to be largely Shakespeare's invention.
In any case, Cassius has deliberately involved Brutus in the plot simply to
make the conspirators respectable. Both this aspect and Caesar's incredulous
question at his death serve to elevate Brutus's character.
7. When Lady Macbeth says, "Out damn'd spot! out, I say!" (5.1.35),
she is speaking to .
In fact, many modern commentators have remarked on the Bard's precocious
understanding of human psychology, long before Sigmund Freud.
In fact, as Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, New York: Riverhead, 1994)
remarks, had there been no Shakespeare, there would have been no Sigmund Freud.
In fact, Harold Bloom states it a bit more eloquently (if not more
acerbically):
Shakespeare . . . is always ahead of you, conceptually and
imagistically, whoever you are and whenever you are. He renders you
anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You
cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or
Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not
by prefigurations but by postfiguration, as it were: all of Freud that matters
most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud
besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare's; Freud seems only to
have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud
illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare
reduces Shakespeare. (24)
8. In Elizabethan terms, when you "clip" someone, you .
"Clipping" is a very old word (not to be confused with
"clyppe" or "cleppe," meaning "to call by name"),
that goes back at least to Anglo Saxon clyppan. It was used for
centuries, up through Chaucer ("He kisseth hire and clippeth hire full
oft," Merchant's Tale, 1380s) and Malory ("'and dayly I sholde
have clypped the and kyssed the,'" Sir Launcelot du Lake, 1480s).
Shakespeare uses it, for example, in Coriolanus: "O! let me clip ye
/ In arms as sound as when I woo'd" (1.6.29-30).
9. Actually, the only positive appellations among these are
(a form of "uncle," used as an endearment to any older male,
including one's own uncle), (a shortened, slangy version of
"cousin," again permissible to use with anyone roughly near one's own
age, including one's own cousin), and (a familiar term for
an intimiate, much like the generic "sweetie" of today, but derived,
it is thought, from "chick" or "chicken," denoting a small
bird. Other forms include "chucking," much like today's
"darling.")
All the other terms are insults. A "buzzer" was a gossip-monger, as
was an "aunt" in slang usage (though "aunt" in slang could
also mean a prostitute. Hmmm . . . and yet "nuncle" was a term of
endearment. Yet another place where the language betrays the culture's biases.)
A "caitiff" was a later form of "captive," meaning weak or
wretched. To call someone a "finch-egg," perhaps obviously, was to
say s/he is "the lowest of the low," since finches are tiny birds and
their eggs are, thus, tinier than tiny. "Son and heir of a mungril
bitch" probably goes without saying. An "eater of broken meats"
meant tomsone who scrounges table-scraps, hence, a servant or someone below one's
self. And a "bawd," of course, was a panderer.
As you can see, Elizabethans had a colorful variety of ways to insult someone,
but they had recourse to only a limited number of cutesy names, it seems. The
same goes for their many and varied forms of profanity, a subject, no doubt, to
be covered in later incarnations of "Are You Shakespearienced?"
10. When Patroclus calls Thersites a "ruinous butt" in Troilus and
Cressida (5.1.28), he means .
Thersites drinks a wee bit too much, don'cha know. But the insults don't stop
there. Patroclus also calls him "thou damnable box of envy,"
"you whoreson indistiguishable cur," "gall," and some other
choice words in this scene. Ah, for the good ol' days, when you could insult
someone with style.
Archaic uses of the word "butt" are much more numerous than our own
(yet one more indication of the greater versatility of Early Modern English
than our own). A "butt" could have been, according to the OED,
"a cask for wine or ale, of capacity varying from 108 to 140 gallons . . .
usually in ale [a] measure [of] 108 gallons, in wine 126 gallons, but these
standards were not always precisely adhered to."
Thus, when Prospero talks of being thrown out to sea in a "rotten carcass
of a butt" (1.2.146), he means that they threw him and Miranda out in a
barrel or a tub.
Of course, "butt" also had many other possible denotations (in
addition to the modern sense of the word), such as a plot of land, the bottom
of a fishing rod, the end of a rifle (still used today, although in earlier
usage, a "butt-head" was a leather case for a mounted soldier's
rifle!), an end or goal or object of action, a mark for archery practice, a
boundary-mark, a mound or little hill, a juncture of two planks in a ship, and
the list goes on.
Isn't English a wonderful thing?
11. A "licensed fool" is an ,
although I personally have to make my arguments for the possible veracity of
using the term to speak of a lawyer.
There are many wonderful "licensed fools" (also sometimes called
"allowed fools," because they are allowed to say anything they
please) in Shakespeare: the most memorable, perhaps, is Lear's Fool, though I
think that Feste in Twelfth Night runs him a close race, as does perhaps
Touchstone in As You Like It or Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well.
It is sometimes argued that the royal practice of keeping a "licensed
fool" (not "licensed" in the sense of card-carrying, but
"licensed" because he is given license or freedom to do what he does)
originated in the king's practice of taking into the palace a homeless man with
mental deficiencies enough (a "fool" in a more clinical sense of the
word, perhaps) that he could be the butt (there's that word again) of jokes for
entertainment at dinnertime. Thus this person could not be held responsible for
anything he said, because he was usually not mentally competent enough to know
what a king is, let alone how one properly ought to treat a king.
Gradually, one would think, it became apparent that if a fellow were willing to
be kicked around a bit, he could get some pretty swanky room and board, so that
the most intelligent guys began to pretend to be mentally deficient, and
eventually the "licensed fool" was not the most deficient poor soul
in the land but rather the most intelligent, wittiest guy around. While the
court practices adapted and acknowledged his intellect, he still retained the
"license" to be the only one who could say anything in the world to
the monarch and get away with it.
As Shakespeare's Feste remarks, "I wear not motley in my brain,"
meaning, "I may look silly in this outfit, but there's not an ounce
of silliness in my intellect, thank you very much."
By Shakespeare's day, the practice was still in vogue--Queen Elizabeth kept a
court jester, as had the monarchs before her, and there were several highly
celebrated court jesters in the sixteenth century. One might think that with
the increasing cultural interest in the theatre, court jesters enjoyed an even
greater popularity during Shakespeare's day.
12. The fact that Shakespeare refers so negatively to dogs throughout his works
probably means absolutely .
This is not to say that there haven't been some critics who have tried to argue
that he must not have liked dogs, personally. There is even a witty little book
somewhere that takes its narrative to be spoken from the standpoint of
Shakespeare's dog, though we have no idea, actually, whether he ever had a dog
or ever wanted one. His negative references might mean that he
personally hated dogs or that he loved cats better, but there is no way to
prove this.
However, while it may be possible to infer from Shakespeare's negative
references to dogs that he didn't like them personally, it is more likely that
the Elizabethan culture didn't particularly like or value dogs and that he
unconsciously adopted attitudes that were widespread in his culture. It was
widely thought that dogs were the cause of the plague--in actuality, it was the
fleas, of course, that carried the plague, and the greater culprit was the
flea-infested rat that was able to board ships almost invisibly and carry the
disease all over Europe. Nevertheless, Europeans destroyed thousands and
thousands of dogs in times of plagues, desperately hoping to rid themselves of
the plague.
Dogs got a really bad rap, don't you think?
All of this would come, of course, as a shocking surprise to my own splendid
canines, so mum's the word, okay? Shhhhhhhh . . . .
