I saw a post recently on the most badass things to say before you take someone’s life.  I thought, “Aw come on, Shakespeare cornered that market 400 years ago!”  So I present the 5 best lines in Shakespeare spoken by someone just before killing someone else. Honorable Mention : The list would not be complete without Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech (Act IV, Scene 3).  It is quite possibly the greatest motivational speech in all of Shakespeare.  Since they’re going into battle, it is technically something cool to say before you go kill somebody.  But since he’s not actually in the process of killing somebody, and saying it to that person, I couldn’t count it in my list.  This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. #5) Othello, Act V Scene 2 “O perjured woman!  thou dost stone my heart, And makest me call what I intend to do A murder, which I thought a sacrifice.” Translation?  “I’m planning on killing you, but please stop making me feel bad about it. ” The context for this one is just great.  Othello has convinced himself that Desdemona, his supposedly unfaithful wife, has to die.  He’s worked up the courage, and even then he can’t bring himself to mar her beautiful skin (so he decides to smother her with a pillow).  He then interrogates her to get her to confess her sin.  “Have you prayed tonight?” is an earlier line, which if you think about it is a great way to start a murder as well.  How do you ask someone that without having them ask, “Why…what exactly are you planning to do with that pillow?”  To her credit, Desdemona doesn’t even turn her husband in.  When asked who did it, she replies before dying, “Nobody, I myself.  Farewell.  Commend me to my kind lord.”  If Othello was already feeling guilty about it, that must have really kicked it up a notch. #4)  Hamlet, Act V Scene 2 “Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? Follow my mother.” The entire play up to this point has supposedly been about Hamlet’s revenge for his father’s death at the hands of Claudius.  For three hours we’ve been waited for him to “revenge the foul and most unnatural murder”, which Hamlet has promised to do “with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.”  Along the way he kills his girlfriend’s father (which at least in part causes her to lose her mind and kill herself), and is sent away to London where he escapes on a pirate ship, arranging to have two of his former friends from college killed in his place.   So what causes him to finally snap?  His mom drops dead, poisoned by Claudius.  Now it’s on, bitches.  In front of the entire court he not only stabs Claudius (who is the king, don’t forget), but when Claudius yells that he is only wounded, Hamlet pours the rest of the poison down his throat.  At this moment is he thinking “Here’s revenge for my dad”?  Nope, our dear Hamlet is thinking about mom.  You can even tell by the way he says it — “incestuous” is a worse sin than “murderous.”  It’s hard to tell what is the worse crime in Hamlet’s eyes, the fact that Claudius killed him mom, or that he slept with her. #3)  Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1 “Now, Tybalt, take the villain back again, That late thou gavest me; for Mercutio’s soul Is but a little way above our heads, Staying for thine to keep him company: Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him.” Ok, your best friend Mercutio is dead.  Technically it’s your fault, you held him back and allowed Tybalt to sneak in a cheap shot.  And now the bad guy’s come back to gloat.  You’re pissed off.  Here’s the thing, though – you don’t know if you’re as good a swordsman as he is.  Quite frankly you’re a bit worried about that.  Mercutio was the only one in the play with the guts to take him on, and he’s dead now.  So what do you do?  You challenge the bad guy on the spot (that’s what that “take the villain back again that late you gavest me” thing is all about, by the way).  And then you tell him, “Mercutio’s not dying alone, not today.  Either you, or I, or both of us are going with him.”  The image of Mercutio’s soul watching the battle is a particularly powerful one, giving Romeo that extra motivation he needs to do what must be done. It might not be the most badass way to launch yourself at your enemy, what with the whole “I might be the one who dies now” thing, but it is a pretty awesome way to get some revenge for your fallen friend. #2) Titus Andronicus, Act V Scene 3 “Why, there they are both, baked in that pie; Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. ‘Tis true, ’tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point.” Titus Andronicus is not well known among folks who don’t study Shakespeare’s entire works.  It is, to put it bluntly, a horror show.  There’s rape, mutilation, and plenty of murder.  But perhaps what Titus is most infamous for is this moment, when Titus has actually cooked Tamora’s sons and fed them to her!  They were the ones who raped and mutilated Titus’ daughter, you see.  So that’s how he gets his revenge.  “Looking for the boys?  Yeah, they’re in the pie that their mother is eating.”  Then, without even giving them time to say “Ok, gonna be sick!” he follows up with “Witness my knife’s sharp point!” stab stab stab.    A fairly modern movie adapation of Titus had Anthony Hopkins in the lead role. That’s right, the man who made Hannibal The Cannibal Lecter famous, took on the role of Shakespeare’s cannibal as well.  (Ok, technically Titus didn’t actually do any of the flesh eating, cut me some slack.) #1)  Macbeth, Act V, Scene x “I will not yield, To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,  And to be baited with the rabble’s curse. Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, And thou opposed, being of no woman born, Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!'” When it comes to being a badass, Macbeth gets the trophy for the best final words in all of Shakespeare.  Throughout the entire play, everything the witches have told him has come true.  They told him he’d be king, and he is.  They told him that Birnam wood would come to Dunsinane, and it did.  They told him that “no man of woman born” could harm him, and until now, he’s believed it.  That is, until he learned that MacDuff, who stands before him, was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”    He’s got no reason to doubt that the man standing in front of him is the one who is going to kill him.  Does he back down?  Does he “yield”?  Macduff has even given him the opportunity to do so, to “yield, coward, and live to be the show and gaze o’ the time.”  Oh hell no.  Macbeth raises himself up, throws down his shield and tells him, in no uncertain terms, to f*ck off.  If Macbeth is going down, he’s going down fighting.  “I will try the last,” he says, and then offers a challenge of his own:  “Damned be him that first cries Hold, enough!”  If you’re Macduff right now, even with the prophecy on your side, you’re quaking in your boots just a little bit.  Of course, Macbeth ends up dead, which does seem a bit anti-climactic.  But it’s still a great thing to say before launching yourself at the guy.  “You know, there’s a 99.99999% chance that you’re gonna win this one, but you know what?  You’re still getting my best game, bitch.  Bring it.”

Ok, we finished the movie last night and I have to say it did get better.  They stayed surprisingly close to story, including the downfall of Mercutio (this being a children’s movie, nobody dies).  I particularly liked during this section that they even stayed true to script, with Mercutio asking “Why the devil came you between us” (or however he says it) and Romeo saying, “I thought it for the best.”  

They then followed through on the whole sleeping potion / mistaken for death plot as well.  There’s no happy daggers.  Mercutio does still bother me, as he goes from being mindless to downright offensive.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the feeling from the original text that while he may side with the Montagues, he didn’t particularly care about the feud one way or the other.  It’s not like he was seeking out Capulets to taunt.  Here he goes out of his way to taunt them using every ethnic joke you’ve ever heard.  I’m serious.  “Hey Benvolio!  What have you got when you’ve got a Capulet buried up to his neck in sand?  Not enough sand!!!  Hey Benvolio!  What do you call a Capulet with one brain cell?  Gifted!”  And so on.  You actually end up sympathizing with the Capulets, who do nothing to deserve that.

Although he is written to marry Juliet, “The Prince” plays more Tybalt than Paris.  Even after the Mercutio scene, he ends up playing more of a “Tybalt who didn’t die, just got pissed off” character.  After all, he also has to be the one who banishes Romeo.  Hard to explain without seeing it.  

So, not bad.  The kids liked it.  Heck, whenever they were on script, I liked it.  I was supposed to be putting my son to bed right during the Mercutio scene, and I couldn’t leave the room; I wanted to see how they’d do it. 

I’m not even going to bother linking to this, since we probably all know the story.  Some students over in the UK refuses to take their Shakespeare exams because of the anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice.  The thing is, the exam itself was on The Tempest, MoV wasn’t even part of the curriculum.  They were making a statement about the entirety of Shakespeare’s canon, not just the one play.  And, that these were some sort of national standings exams, so their failure to take them resulted in their school tumbling in the standings. Here’s my opinion. I think they’re stupid and they deserve to fail. Too strong? I’m not a fan, at all, of close-mindedness.  Let’s assume for the minute that you have actually read MoV and come to your own conclusions that Shakespeare is anti-Semitic, and this bothers you greatly.  You owe it to yourself, then, to learn more about the man’s work, to see if this is a theme that permeates his entire literary output, or if it is instead just a single character in a single play.  To simply say “I didn’t like this play therefore I refuse to read anything by him, regardless of the cost to myself or my school” is … misguided? At best. That doesn’t even bring up the question of whether MoV is actually anti-Semitic at all, and if so, whether that also means that Shakespeare was.  Some people dismiss it with a simple “those were the times, everybody was anti-Semitic back then.”  Personally I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think that Shakespeare was showing us anti-Semitism as a mirror up to ourselves and saying “Don’t you get how ugly you come off looking?  Are you missing the basic hypocrisy, here?”  He didn’t just draw a character and stick a big Jew sign on him, he gave us a very complex individual.  A father who lost a daughter, for one.  Shylock may come off as a bad guy, sure, but is that because of his own nature, or because that is the role that the rest of society forces him into? The play is supposed to be a comedy, so it’s a reasonable assumption that Shakespeare was not trying to hammer us over the head with his life lessons.  But I have to wonder, did people walk out of there thinking, “Well, you have to have a little sympathy for the Jew, don’t you?”  It goes back to a regular topic here on this blog about the timeliness of Shakespeare’s message, and whether his audiences just wanted a simple play where they could spot the good guy from the bad guy, or whether it was more complex than that.  It seems a very great irony in stories like this that we’ve become just as simple, haven’t we?  Only we’ve become the worse for it.  Dear god in heaven he portrayed a Jew in a negative light, therefore he must be anti-Semitic!  It can’t possibly be more complex than that!  Quick, compare him to Hitler!  (I’m not kidding, earlier today I read a blog post that compared this issue to what it would be like if Hitler wrote a nice romantic comedy in his youth.  NOT THE SAME THING!)

As I force my way through The Shakespeare Wars I come to the chapter on the original spelling argument.  It goes a little something like this — there were no rules of spelling in Shakespeare’s time, so modern editors have actually been losing a good portion of what Shakespeare meant when they ‘clean it up’.  When he spelled a word one way, he did it for a reason.  Want a simple example?  You know in Hamlet we were all taught that the line either goes “O that this too, too solid flesh” or “sullied flesh”?  And depending on which you picked, it means a different thing?  The original spelling argument suggests that Shakespeare would have spelled the word in such a way that it meant both, simultaneously.  Not only was he a genius with words, but he actually packed multiple meaning into each word. That might be oversimplified, and I’m sure the experts in the audience can correct me, but I wanted to introduce the topic for those not familiar. My first thought on the subject is that I want to go back in time and punch my ninth grade English teacher in the nose.  The same person who taught us that there were no spelling rules, and that Shakespeare’s name alone is recorded 36 different ways, went on to give us the solid/sullied lecture as if, in that case, it had to be one or the other and darnit we need to know which one in order to properly understand Shakespeare. But my second thought is – are we hoping for a bit too much, here? Remember that we have almost nothing in Shakespeare’s original hand.  There’s just no way to know for sure that a word is spelled a certain way because Shakespeare wanted to spell it that way, or because an editor did it, or because it is just coincidence.  It’s intriguing, sure – but I think it borders on religious argument, the kind with no meaningful way to advance beyond “I hope this is true, because it would be cool.” I’ll close up this post with a story.  Years ago, when I was in high school, a friend and I kept a sort of personal “quote of the day” file on the school computers (this being well before even local networks, and we kept it as a single file on a single computer).  During breaks we would take turns coming up with jokes and random silly phrases and then compare notes.  At one point he tapped me on the shoulder and showed me his latest – he’d typed in the alphabet.  “Odd,” I thought, thinking that I did not get the joke.  Then I read it again, and realized he’d left out the letter Q.  “I like it,” I told him. Years later, well after we’d graduated, we are hanging out in his basement with some other friends from school.  “Remember that list of sayings you guys used to have?” someone asked.  We’d printed it, you see, and it had circulated around the school.  Conversation then turned to remembering the various phrases.  So I told the story of how at first I though that Joe had typed in the alphabet, but how it was actually a commentary on the uselessness of the letter Q.  You don’t even realize it’s not there. Joe was in the room.  “I FORGOT THE Q?????” he asked.  Turns out it was just a typo, he really had meant to type the whole alphabet. “Oh, then, I guess my interpretation was wrong,” I said. “Actually, it shows that it was completely accurate,” Joe said.