A Choice of Shakespeare's Verse Read online

  A CHOICE OF

  Shakespeare’s Verse

  Selected

  and with an introduction by

  TED HUGHES

  For Roy Davids

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Shakespeare’s Verse

  Note

  List of Sources

  Index of First Lines

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  The text of this Selection follows that of the Oxford Standard Authors edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare: acknowledgements are due to the Oxford University Press for their permission.

  Introduction

  It has never been easy to settle Shakespeare into the succession of poets in English. According to most anthologies, he wrote only sonnets and songs for his plays. The reasons for this reluctance of anthologists to break into the sacred precincts of his drama and start looting portable chunks from the holy structures would make a curious chapter in the history of England’s attitudes to its national hero.

  Yet when the great speeches of his plays are taken out of context they are no more difficult to understand and appropriate than poems by other great poets. In many cases they are very much easier. Is it more difficult to pick up, and make part of one’s mental furnishings, the following:

  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more; it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.

  (Macbeth, v.v. Macbeth)

  than it is to come to terms with Yeats’s ‘Death’:

  Nor dread nor hope attend

  A dying animal;

  A man awaits his end

  Dreading and hoping all;

  Many times he died,

  Many times rose again.

  A great man in his pride

  Confronting murderous men

  Casts derision upon

  Supersession of breath;

  He knows death to the bone –

  Man has created death.

  or with Eliot’s:

  Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

  Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

  And the profit and loss.

  A current under sea

  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  Gentile or Jew

  O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  (‘The Waste Land’, IV)

  In fact, if one specifies that ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’ is spoken by Macbeth as he faces the leafy army that will put an end to his spellbound, murderous career (having just heard that his wife, who prompted the course of action that converted him from the King’s loyal champion to a regicidal tyrant, has died), it actually limits the use of the passage for a reader. Its relevance is then confined to Macbeth’s unique predicament in a sacrosanct, old-fashioned play, rather than applied generally to the reader’s own immediate plight, as an ephemeral creature, facing the abyss, on a spinning ball of self-delusion.

  Obviously, by reading the passage out of context, one is missing the great imaginative experience of the drama – but one is missing that anyway. The speech on its own is something else, read in less than a minute, learned in less than five, still wonderful, and a pure bonus.

  Accordingly, I have collected here a wide range of speeches (from all the plays except two or three) that seem to me self-sufficient outside their dramatic context and capable of striking up a life of their own in the general experience of the reader. In among, I have distributed many of the sonnets and songs.

  Ted Hughes, August 1991

  Shakespeare’s Verse

  1

  Now the hungry lion roars,

  And the wolf behowls the moon;

  Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,

  All with weary task fordone,

  Now the wasted brands do glow,

  Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,

  Puts the wretch that lies in woe

  In remembrance of a shroud.

  Now it is the time of night

  That the graves, all gaping wide,

  Every one lets forth his sprite,

  In the church-way paths to glide:

  And we fairies, that do run

  By the triple Hecate’s team,

  From the presence of the sun,

  Following darkness like a dream,

  Now are frolic; not a mouse

  Shall disturb this hallow’d house;

  I am sent with broom before,

  To sweep the dust behind the door.

  2

  Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

  Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:

  Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

  Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

  If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,

  By unions married, do offend thine ear,

  They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

  In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

  Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

  Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

  Resembling sire and child and happy mother,

  Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

  Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

  Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

  3

  Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;

  What other pleasures can the world afford?

  I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap,

  And deck my body in gay ornaments,

  And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.

  O miserable thought! and more unlikely

  Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns.

  Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb:

  And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,

  She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

  To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub;

  To make an envious mountain on my back,

  Where sits deformity to mock my body;

  To shape my legs of an unequal size;

  To disproportion me in every part,

  Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp

  That carries no impression like the dam.

  And am I then a man to be belov’d?

  O monstrous fault! to harbour such a thought.

  Then, since this earth affords no joy to me

  But to command, to check, to o’erbear such

  As are of better person than myself,

  I’ll make my heaven to dream upon the crown;

  And, whiles I live, to account this world but hell,

  Until my mis-shap’d trunk that bears this head

  Be round impaled with a glorious crown.

  And yet I know not how to get the crown,

  For many lives stand between me and home:

  And I, like one lost in a thorny wood,

  That rents the thorns and is rent with the thorns,

  Seeki
ng a way and straying from the way;

  Not knowing how to find the open air,

  But toiling desperately to find it out,

  Torment myself to catch the English crown:

  And from that torment I will free myself,

  Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.

  Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile,

  And cry, ‘Content,’ to that which grieves my heart,

  And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

  And frame my face to all occasions.

  I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;

  I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;

  I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,

  Deceive more slily than Ulysses could,

  And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.

  I can add colours to the chameleon,

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

  And set the murd’rous Machiavel to school.

  Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?

  Tut! were it further off, I’ll pluck it down.

  4

  Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye

  And all my soul and all my every part;

  And for this sin there is no remedy,

  It is so grounded inward in my heart.

  Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,

  No shape so true, no truth of such account;

  And for myself mine own worth do define,

  As I all other in all worths surmount.

  But when my glass shows me myself indeed,

  Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,

  Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;

  Self so self-loving were iniquity.

  ’Tis thee, myself, – that for myself I praise,

  Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

  5

  But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

  Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

  Who is already sick and pale with grief,

  That thou her maid art far more fair than she:

  Be not her maid, since she is envious;

  Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

  And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.

  It is my lady; O! it is my love:

  O! that she knew she were.

  She speaks, yet she says nothing: what of that?

  Her eye discourses; I will answer it.

  I am too bold, ’tis not to me she speaks:

  Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

  Having some business, do entreat her eyes

  To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

  What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

  The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars

  As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven

  Would through the airy region stream so bright

  That birds would sing and think it were not night.

  See! how she leans her cheek upon her hand:

  O! that I were a glove upon that hand,

  That I might touch that cheek.

  6

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:

  And every fair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

  Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  7

  I do affect the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread. I shall be forsworn, – which is a great argument of falsehood, – if I love. And how can that be true love which is falsely attempted? Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love. Yet was Samson so tempted, and he had an excellent strength; yet was Solomon so seduced, and he had a very good wit. Cupid’s butt-shaft is too hard for Hercules’ club, and therefore too much odds for a Spaniard’s rapier. The first and second clause will not serve my turn; the passado he respects not, the duello he regards not: his disgrace is to be called boy, but his glory is, to subdue men. Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me some extemporal god of rime, for I am sure I shall turn sonneter. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.

  8

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove:

  O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wandering bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error, and upon me prov’d,

  I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

  9

  Thy life did manifest thou lov’dst me not,

  And thou wilt have me die assur’d of it.

  Thou hid’st a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,

  Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart,

  To stab at half an hour of my life.

  What! canst thou not forbear me half an hour?

  Then get thee gone and dig my grave thyself,

  And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear

  That thou art crowned, not that I am dead.

  Let all the tears that should bedew my hearse

  Be drops of balm to sanctify thy head:

  Only compound me with forgotten dust;

  Give that which gave thee life unto the worms.

  Pluck down my officers, break my decrees;

  For now a time is come to mock at form.

  Harry the Fifth is crown’d! Up, vanity!

  Down, royal state! all you sage counsellors, hence!

  And to the English court assemble now,

  From every region, apes of idleness!

  Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum:

  Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,

  Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit

  The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?

  Be happy, he will trouble you no more;

  England shall double gild his treble guilt.

  England shall give him office, honour, might;

  For the fifth Harry from curb’d licence plucks

  The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog

  Shall flesh his tooth in every innocent.

  O my poor kingdom! sick with civil blows,

  When that my care could not withhold thy riots,

  What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?

  O! thou wilt be a wilderness again,

  Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants.

  10

  When I do count the clock that tells the time,

  And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

  When I behold the violet past prime,

  And sable curls, all silver’d o’er with white;

  When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

  Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

  And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,

  Borne on
the bier with white and bristly beard,

  Then of thy beauty do I question make,

  That thou among the wastes of time must go,

  Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

  And die as fast as they see others grow;

  And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

  Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

  11

  — Swearest thou, ungracious boy? henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace: there is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of a fat old man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloakbag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? Wherein is he good but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning but in craft? wherein crafty but in villany? wherein villanous but in all things? wherein worthy but in nothing?

  — I would your Grace would take me with you: whom means your Grace?

  — That villanous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.

  — My lord, the man I know.

  — I know thou dost.

  — But to say I know more harm in him than in myself were to say more than I know. That he is old, the more the pity, his white hairs do witness it; but that he is, saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry’s company: banish not him thy Harry’s company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.