A Shakespearean Excerpt: Cakes and Ale
As you may know from reading his plays, Ken Ludwig is a bit of a Shakespeare fanatic. He began teaching his own children how to read and memorize passages from Shakespeare from the time they were six years old. The purpose of his book How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare is to pass on the torch and create a whole new generation of Shakespeare lovers.
In total, the book presents 25 passages that Ken taught his kids over the course of several years, ordered into a specific sequence to make learning them as easy as possible. And as each passage is discussed, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Tempest (with a lot more plays in between), he explains the stories, the characters and the meanings of the works, giving readers the kind of knowledge of Shakespeare they’ll need to become great students, great thinkers, and great teachers.
In addition to the book’s success as a means of teaching Shakespeare to children, adults may also find it useful as a stealth method of brushing up on their own knowledge. From Shakespeare novices to experts, readers of all ages will find something wonderfully irresistible in these pages.
Samuel French is delighted give you a taste of this indispensable guide to Shakespeare in three excerpts, published weekly.
To learn more and to download extra content relating to the book, including an excerpt and audio from actors Derek Jacobi, Richard Clifford, and Frances Barber, visit HowToTeachYourChildrenShakespeare.com.
CHAPTER 15
Passage 8
Cakes and Ale
Out o’ tune, sir? You lie.
Art any more than a steward? Dost thou
think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and
ale?
(Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene 3, lines 113–15)
Malvolio, the steward of Olivia’s household in Twelfth Night, is one of Shakespeare’s most remarkable comic creations. He’s a starchy stick-in-the-mud who has aspirations of “marrying up” but then gets taken down a peg. Olivia tells him that he is sick with self-love and taste[s] with a distempered appetite. Yet in the end, we identify with his mortification and feel sorry for him.
The passage above is part of an exchange that occurs at a key moment in the play: We have met Orsino, Viola, and Olivia, and their crisscrossed love plot is well under way. The scene now shifts to a room in Olivia’s house after midnight, where Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are having a booze-up with Feste the jester and Maria the housekeeper. They are full of high spirits, drinking, dancing, and singing at the top of their lungs, when suddenly Malvolio storms in wearing his nightshirt and cries:
My masters, are you mad? Or what are you? Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? [Tinkers, who mended pots and pans for a living, were known for their drinking.]
Do you make an ale-house of my lady’s house …? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?
Sir Toby sneers back:
Out o’ tune, sir? Ye lie. Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because
thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
And here we have the nub of the exchange. “Do you think because you’re virtuous — because you’re upright and self-righteous — that the rest of us can’t have fun? That the rest of us can’t partake of life’s joys now and then?”
Out o’ tune, sir? Ye lie.
The meaning of the words Out o’ tune, sir? is not entirely clear. It appears to mean that because Malvolio has belittled Sir Toby’s singing ability, Sir Toby is protesting. And now comes the sting:
Art any more than a steward?
Could Sir Toby possibly come up with a more pointed insult? It is clear in the story by this time that Malvolio thinks of himself as more than “just” a servant. He is Olivia’s right-hand man; he runs the household and gives advice; and he believes that Olivia values him as such. So for Sir Toby, a knight and a nobleman, to snap back “Do you think you’re anything more than a servant?!” is instantly degrading to Malvolio. And then of course, comes the remarkable epigram:
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
This is one of those moments when Shakespeare manages to crystallize an entire worldview into a few words. In this case, it’s the concept of duty versus freedom, rules versus license, virtue versus cakes and ale. It is part of Sir Toby’s campaign in favor of the good life against the encroachment of death; the life of the artist versus a life unlived. The phrase cakes and ale has entered into our consciousness as if it were part of our vocabulary, and it even became the title of a best-selling novel published in 1930 by Somerset Maugham.
Epigrams
An epigram is a short, witty statement, often satirical, often depending on paradox for its effect. (Another word for it is aphorism.) The cakes and ale sentence is a perfect example of an epigram.
Shakespeare’s ability to create epigrams and weave them seamlessly into the dialogue of his plays is a significant, often undervalued aspect of the poet’s genius. Often when we talk about Shakespeare, we discuss those complex aspects of his art that we study in school: his imagery, his symbolism, his themes, his meaning. But a more down-to-earth aspect of his genius is this extraordinary ability to crystallize thoughts into memorable phrases:
All that glitters is not gold.
Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Speak low if you speak love.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be.
Screw your courage to the sticking place.
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
The lady doth protest too much.
Frailty, thy name is woman.
Fair is foul and foul is fair.
A rose by any other word would smell as sweet.
The better part of valor is discretion.
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
There are hundreds of them. Sometimes Shakespeare borrows the ideas from other writers. Sometimes he repeats ideas. And sometimes Shakespeare’s epigrams take the form of longer sentences, no less memorable than the shorter ones:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are
May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
The point is that Shakespeare is brilliantly quotable in the best sense of the word.
To purchase Ken Ludwig’s How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, click here.
