The Parallel Lives

Strange how certain books captivate my interest, others not as much. I find myself going back again and again to reread Mark Forsyth’s 2013 book, “The Elements of Eloquence.”

     In Forsyth’s “Preface,” he writes, “Shakespeare was not a genius. He was the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. Instead, he learned rhetorical techniques and tricks.”

     Of Shakespeare’s first plays—“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Titus Andronicus,” and “Henry VI, Part 1”—Forsyth says, “there is not a single memorable line in them.” But the young poet / playwright kept learning, and transformed himself into a word craftsman.

     Forsyth argues that Shakespeare’s first memorable line was from “Henry VI, Part 2,” when one peasant says to another, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Then in “Henry VI, Part 3,” a character says, “I can smile, and murder while I smile,” an example of anastrophe.

     In each additional play, Shakespeare learned to lay down a series of thought-provoking lines. In “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Julius Caesar,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” he chocked each full of wonderful lines.

     A wit once called those illuminating lines, “Jewels in your mouth.”

     A favorite of mine is found in “Julius Caesar,” “O that a man might know the end of this day’s business, ere it come, but it sufficeth that it will end and then the end is known.” 

     Forsyth writes a series of quick chapters, 39 in all, and in each he describes a single rhetorical trick. The first chapter he entitles “Alliteration,” and then says, “Nobody knows why we love to hear words that begin with the same letter, but we do.”

     For example, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” comes from “The Tempest,” and, “The barge she sat like a burnished throne, Burned on the water,” from “Antony and Cleopatra.”

     In recent years, people would say, “ban the bomb,” “power to the people,” “put a tiger in your tank,” “it’s enough to get your goat,” “cool as a cucumber,” and “dead as a doornail.” 

     On page 12, Forsyth makes a startling statement. “You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”

     “Alliteration is the simplest way to turn a memorable phrase.”

     In chapter 16, Forsyth considers the “Tricolon.” Three is a magic number. “Eat, drink, and be merry.” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” “Truth, justice, and the American way.” “Faith, hope, and love.” “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

     Not one, not two, and not four, but three items points to completeness.  

     In chapter 21, Forsyth explains that Shakespeare surrendered to iambic pentameter, what Forsyth calls, “the Rolls-Royce of verse forms,” or “the king of English verse forms.”

     An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, “te-TUM.” A series of five iambs in a row, a single line, is a pentameter: te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM.

     Two examples: “If music be the food of love, play on,” from “Twelfth Night,” and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” from “Hamlet.” Each line contains just ten syllables.

     Tuesday of this week, November 19, marked the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

     I wonder, how did Lincoln learn to write like that? Brief, to the point, only 272 words, inspirational, motivating. Lincoln read a lot, most often Shakespeare’s tragedies. He read and re-read “Macbeth” throughout his life, often aloud to others whom he forced to listen.

     John Hay said of Lincoln, “He read Shakespeare more than all the other writers together.”

     Near the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln tried his hand at the elements of eloquence when he tied alliteration to a tricolon, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”