Shakespearean Backtalk

"Who's there?" says Bernardo. Francisco answers: "Nay, answer me."

It's the beginning of Shakespeare's Hamlet--as someone called it, the world's longest knock-knock joke. But has anybody noticed how typical this line is of Shakespeare--how it counts, almost, as a signature piece?

Here's Bernardo, taking up his duty as the midnight watch. It's Denmark. Maybe fog, maybe a bit of rain. He's afraid of--what, Fortinbras? A ghost! Who's there? But no, it is only Francisco, his companion in arms, the departing watch, his mirror. Nay, answer me. The response, is deflationary, ironic; in a less urgent setting, it would be comic.

It is the way people talk to each other--chiefly (though not exclusively) the way men talk to each other, bantering and slanging in wry competition, somewhere between friendly and hostile. "Gotta match?" we used to say. "Yeh, my ass and your face." That one is hostile; but it's the sinew of social relations, the stuff of drama.

And it is the stuff of drama; it is the way Shakespearean characters talk to each other all the time. Sometimes it is standard guy mockery: "What's that word "ducdame?" asks the oily and somewhat pompous Amiens. The clever Jacques responds: "'Tis a Greek invocation, to call fools into a circle." Sometimes it is casuistic: the simple shepherd Corin says "...the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck." The too-clever Touchstone responds: "That is another simple sin in you,...to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle."

Sometimes, it aims to deflate someone who richly deserves deflating. Owen Glendower boasts: "I can call spirits from the vasty deep!" Hotspur (not much given to suavity) suavely agrees: "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?"

More than once, they speak truth to power. Bates (though he does not know he is addressing the king) gives his view of kingly courage: "He may show what outward courage he will, but I believe, as cold a night as `tis, he could wish himself in Thames up to the neck, and so I would be were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here."

At other times, characters adopt this tone in mocking themselves. Viola, told that she is in Illyria, reflects "And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium" (of course he is not, but we save that for later). Falstaff observes: " There live not three good men unhanged in England; and one of them is fat and grows old."

You could find a hundred more. This is good drama, of course: most of these lines get a laugh, or at least a frisson of recognition. But they are also living proof, if any is needed, that Shakespeare is a poet of the streets, the pubs, the playing fields and not the library--the kind of talk that makes him so recognizable and so enduring. It's the reason why we can fit him in with Lear'sesponse to Gloucester when Gloucester says "The trick of that voice I do well remember. Is't not the King?"

And Lear replies:

"Ay, every inch a king!"

Update: A commentator asks--is there a bit of sexual innuendo in that "every inch" stuff. Sure, why not? Sexual innuendo has a prominent place in backtalk all its own.