I followed a career as an English professor, so that I naturally have spent a certain amount of my time—not enough time, of course, but still quite a lot—reading, teaching and thinking about Shakespeare and his works. He remains, and is likely to remain for some time, the most famous writer of the English language. This fact is due in part to what I shall call the law of classics. Once an author or a work has been acknowledged as “classic” for quite a while, the classical status itself becomes classic. I continue to believe that Shakespeare’s classical rating is amply deserved, but it is also now traditional. And in a cultural world in which change, innovation and fleeting novelty are the norms, his eminence should remain encouraging to people like me.
Almost everything about the Bard has been studied to near extinction; so I today am reduced to writing about his stage directions. One of the more memorable of Shakespeare’s stage directions occurs in the third act of The Winter’s Tale. In fact it is a famous stage direction. Antigonus, a Sicilian nobleman in the service of King Leontes, is charged with the indelicate task of getting rid of the infant Perdita by losing her in some distant wilderness. “Perdita” means in Latin “the Lost Girl.” Antigonus opts for a desert in Bohemia, but no sooner has he dumped the poor babe than a bear shows up. Antigonus hot foots it out of there, but to no effect, as we learn that the bear pursues and dispatches him. The stage direction for the actor playing Antigonus is Exit pursued by a bear.
Staging this scene is a little tricky, and probably was even for the Elizabethans, whose familiar commerce with bears was more culturally entrenched than is our own. The British Isles were free of the more obviously dangerous animal species that inhabit our own wilderness areas and are the stuff of scary stories. I mean critter like lions, tigers, Gila monsters, etc. The English forests had their dangers, to be sure, but the only really plausible feral danger was presented by wild dogs, wolves, and bears. For England did have some bears, and the English made the most of them. A popular amusement was bear-baiting. Bear-baiting—essentially chaining a captured bear to a stout post and then torturing it for fun and profit (you usually had to pay to see a bear tortured)--was one of several ancestral amusements now happily relegated to the past. The poor bear faced sharp sticks and fierce dogs. This “sport” had a long run, but was perhaps at the zenith of its popularity in Shakespeare’s day. He mentions or alludes to such amusements more than once. Macbeth, in his sense of outraged coercion, speaks thus: "They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course". Ah, Merry England! But what also interests me in the passage of The Winter’s Tale is a very small detail, the word exit. This is the third person singular indicative of a Latin verb, exire: (s)he leaves, departs, steps out. Elsewhere in Shakespeare and in other older dramatists you will find the plural form exeunt omnes, they all leave, everybody leaves.
Of course there are many splendid stage directions in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. One of my favorites is Offers to stab him. Talk about an offer you can refuse! There is no precise modern English equivalent for the verb offers here, though threatens come close. The actor was doubtless instructed by the word to brandish the dagger in a threatening fashion as he spoke them. Why the Latin, though? Well, Latin was the language of learning, and of much practical information of all kinds. It was in particular the language of commentary and explication. Some of this tradition is preserved to this very day. Most people would easily realize that a Vade mecum (go with me) is travel book, and that a primer is a book for tyros, or a book preliminary to another.
Of course it is important, if you are reading a prepared text, to be alert to the difference between what is text and what is commentary upon the text. Otherwise you end up saying things like “…and this is my solemn vow! Pause for applause.” During his painful public decline shortly before retiring from the last presidential race, President Biden uttered a couple of things along those lines, and I know from experience that it is easy enough to do. During the medieval period young scholars often wrote little “cribs” for difficult words in their communal textbooks. You may have done the same thing in your French or Spanish primers. By a kind of scribal “Chinese whispers”—you may know the game as “telephone”—the original text and the explanatory crib could get confused. The pious thought that “God encompasses us” could end up as the pub name “The Goat and Compass”, together with its puzzling sign of a horned animal with a cartographer’s instrument. A good deal of the more famous classical scholarship of the modern period was devoted to sorting out texts in which this process of scribal distortion had taken place. The great English scholar Richard Bentley (1662-1742) was particularly brilliant at the art of emendation, as the process of philological first aid is called.
To get back to bears, we had one very recently on my little road, Hartley Avenue, in Princeton, NJ. Bears actually show up in the East Coast suburbs with surprisingly frequency. They are not quite as predictable as the official garbage collectors, of course. What I shall call “my” bear, which appeared rather nonchalantly from between two houses as I was taking my daily constitutional, was surprising in several ways. He was young; he was black; and he paid me not the slightest heed. How do I know he was a he? The answer is, I don’t; he just struck me as definitely boyish. I can’t say he ignored me entirely, but he certainly was exercising a welcome ursine aloofness. He trotted away from me at something close to what in a horse would be a trot, straight down the sidewalk ahead of me, then hung a louie across the road and into a large expanse of tall grass and brush trees of the still empty acres of the Butler Tract. He was now out of sight. Upon reflection, I concluded that was actually a good place to be. I decided to cut my walk short and return to the comfort of my library. Baby bears do, after all, have mamma bears. Thus I exited, pursued by the thought of a bear.
