4 March 1985

Tonight, I had great difficulty getting to sleep. Shakespeare was at least partly responsible for my insomnia. I haven't been reading him lately, but somehow a line from Henry IV, Pt. 2 got in my head as I was tossing and turning and making elaborately precise, unnecessary, and useless but irresistible adjustments to the bedclothes, pillow, and pajama top. The line that popped into my consciousness just about twelve o'clock was Falstaff's to Shallow: "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."
     I said it softly aloud three or four times and then lay wide-eyed for a long time thinking about it for several reasons. It filled me with warm feelings for a Falstaff looking back, late at night with pleasure and some melancholy, upon amiable carousals of an earlier time. It seemed to be informed with such a generic valedictory spirit. Hearing it with my ears and then inside my head, I was awed—again—and roused to greater wakefulness, by Shakespeare's ability to invest even an incidental line like this one with music and meaning. Not a single sound in it was anything but the best possible one for its place. All the phonemes created euphony and a fine lilting rhythm. They felt good on the tongue and on the ear. And what about that extra syllable at the end of the line—the first half of an extra foot after the fifth one? That low. What a great bit after all those bell-like m's! Another tolling sound as a subtle echo.
     I remembered another by-the-way kind of line I saw recently, one in Antony and Cleopatra. Charmian, the maid delivers it just after Cleopatra has pressed the second asp to her flesh: "...A lass unparallel'd," she says. Is it nothing but wacky overinterpreting to see a slyly concealed ambiguity in those first two syllables? I asked myself. Can't "A lass" also be "Alas," a lament rather than a designation? You're stretching it, I warned, but I'm not sure that I paid much attention to the warning. These sorts of "accidental" multiple meanings are too common in Shakespeare to be passed over quickly.
     I rolled over on one side, then the other, then onto my back, and asked myself how anyone ever could try to write anything after having read Shakespeare. Doing so is like whistling in the gusting wind or shedding tears in the rain. All writers, I decided, have either to avoid Shakespeare—or forget him the instant they pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard.
     I thought, too, about how Falstaff's line fitted into Henry IV, like a lost feather from the plumage of a bright-hued bird. You could miss it in passage, but God! how it drew you up when from flight it floated down at your feet. The words glowed in the darkness of the bedroom, and somewhere bells sounded, almost causing me to sit upright in bed. Well, I thought, this is a better kind of keeper-awaker than Eliot's white mares.