Clives James on Shakespeare's Eighth-Grade Teacher

Clive James salutes all those eighth-grade teachers (ours, and Shakespeare's) who made us diagram all those sentences:

[U]nless we ourselves know quite a lot about how grammar works, there will be severe limits on our capacity to understand what [Shakespeare] wrote, especially when he seems to be at his most untrammelled. Take a single line from Henry V:

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester

Here is a whole story in eleven syllables, but unless we grasp how an extremely compressed sentence can be put together, we won't get the story out, and if Shakespeare had not grasped it, he would not have been able to put the story in. Though they might look like it at first glance, "ill" and "white" are not a pair of adjectives. "Ill" is an adverb, modifying the verb "become." If this is not realized, the meaning is reversed. If Shakespeare hadn't realized the fundamental diference between an adjective and an adverb, he couldn't have written the sentence. A good actor will help make the point, by emphasizing "ill" so that its effect carries over to "become." But it is quite easy to imagine a bad actor missing the point, and conveying the impression that ill white hairs make a fool and jester look good, or, even worse--two errors in one--allowing it to be thought that ill white hairs have turned into a fool or jester.

--Clive James, Cultural Amnesia 777 (2007)

Or, as Shakespeare did not say, "I kissed her on the lips and left her behind for you."