With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.
– William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act V, scene i, ll 391 - 410
He that has and a little tiny wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.
King Lear, Act III, scene ii, ll 74 - 77
Yesterday, 23 April, is the date traditionally assumed to be Shakespeare's birthday, but as he was not of an age but for all time, I figure it's OK to slip this form of commemoration to the day after.
The first & longer song above is the final moment of Twelfth Night. The action of the play has already concluded with Duke Orsino's speech tying up the various plot strands: go placate Malvolio, as we need information from him about the sea captain; his beloved Olivia will now be his sister, & he plans to stay on at her place until everything is settled; he will still refer to Viola by her male pseudonym, Cesario, until she's back in women's garb, when she will be "Orsino's mistress and his fancy's queen" – the same fancy (imagination) he indulged in his celebrated opening lines of the play, "If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die". Guided by the whims of his fancy, Orsino's love for Viola seems unlikely to be as strong or as long-lasting as hers for him (a supposition foreshadowed & strengthened by their debate in Act II, scene iv). It's part of the underlying melancholy of this funny & sad play. (Most productions I've seen play up the farce at the expense of the poetry & pensiveness, which is too bad.)
This song continues the overcast mood of the play (very overcast, with all the wind & the rain). It is delivered by the fool Feste, who has sung other mournful & lovely songs for us, along with some drunken rounds. He wanders between households, disappearing & reappearing without excuse (his first appearance in the play, in Act I scene v, begins with the maid Maria reprimanding him for being gone without leave). Though involved in the action, particularly the plot against Malvolio, he stands a bit outside of it all. And in his final song, he sounds a bit outside his usual character; here he is not a witty jester but an ordinary, very ordinary, man, beaten down by life in general. In the final stanza, he abandons all pretense of being anything but a working actor, packing up his stage props & hoping you've found the show worth your time.
The song progresses through the stages of a man's life (very specifically a man's), somewhat in the manner of Jacques's famous, & more elaborately theatrical & poetical, Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It, Act II, scene vii. It begins with the singer as "a little tiny boy", surrounded by foolish things & trifles. But the second & fourth lines of this stanza, & each stanza to follow until a variant in the last line of the last stanza, cast a gloomier mood over the lyrics: after the traditional nonsense refrain of "hey, ho", we immediately get "the wind and the rain". Is the singer shrugging off the bad weather? defying it with a cheerful hey ho? merely noting its inevitability? Whatever it is, the wind & the rain are his constant companions through life. No golden afternoons here!
In the second stanza, the singer is now a man, & aware of the duplicity & cheating rampant among his kind: he shuts the gates against them. Then he marries, unhappily (alas!), though we don't hear his wife's side of things (personally I imagine her as sister to Chaucer's Wife of Bath, standing up for herself against a husband who tries to dominate through the ineffective arrogance of his swaggering). Then he becomes an old man (a physical diminution which seems to lie behind the more vivid metaphor of his coming "unto his beds"); he drinks too much, & hangs out with drunkards (tosspots). A sad & ordinary life, sad in its ordinariness, ordinary in its sadness. He still repeats his hey ho (philosophical acceptance? on-going resistance? merely the mental habit of a lifetime, carried into alcoholic elder years?) in the face of the constant wind & rain. Presumably some sunshine would be a good thing, but he's beyond lamenting its absence, or wishing for its presence. (I at least find some beauty in the drama of the wind & rain; I keep picturing something like Hiroshige's Driving Rain at Shono).
The phrasing of the song, its persistent refrains, & its emblematic view of life make it sound like an old ballad, some sort of summation of folk wisdom. It's a beautiful & amusing song (the guy can't catch a break), but also resigned & even hopeless (because, again, the guy can't catch a break). The first line of the final stanza, A great while ago the world begun, moves us beyond the individual singer into a world-view, but one that does not contradict our singer's damp & chilly experience. That's all one, he shrugs, resigning himself to . . . fate? destiny? the universe? God? the general hardness of living? The simplifications of this sunless life lend it a ruefully comic aspect.
And as we all know, there is a very fine & blurry line between comedy & tragedy. This song must have been fairly popular, as it received a bit of a sequel in King Lear. Again, it is sung by a licensed jester, the enigmatic & satirical Fool, who comments on action that he is mostly apart from. He loyally follows Lear out into the literal wind & rain of the storm on the heath, which is where he sings his stanza. (Shortly after this song, the Fool makes his odd reference to a prophecy by Merlin, who will live after his (the Fool's) time: does this strange unearthly figure have some sort of second sight?)
But there are some interesting shifts from the Twelfth Night song to the lagniappe in King Lear: for one thing, we no longer have the impression that the singer is speaking of himself, & of himself as a sort of Everyman; here the first line singles out He that has and a little tiny wit: we don't know if the Fool means himself, Lear, or someone else, but the line does seem to make a distinction between those with "a little tiny wit" & others – he's commenting, to some extent, on the arbitrary divisions of fate (or destiny, the universe, chance, God. . . ). As in Twelfth Night's "a little tiny boy", we get the intensifier of a redundant "little tiny", but here it refers to insight & intelligence, not just to the general state of being a small boy. Such a one must make content with his fortunes fit (that is, be satisfied with the hard fortune that suits his level of wit/intelligence) though the rain it raineth every day. Though is an important switch there; in the Twelfth Night song, For the rain it raineth every day states a general truth; switching for (because) to though (that is, despite the fact that for you it raineth every day – it doesn't do so for all people, as for implies) makes it a more peculiar & individual fate. The rain is part of the hard fortune you must deal with, possibly through your own fault (that is, the fault of your "little tiny wit" & the errors it has led you into). In Twelfth Night, there is some human solidarity in the universal wind & rain; in King Lear, it becomes part of the inexplicable & arbitrary cruelties that fall on some but not on others possibly more deserving of punishment.
The reappearance of the comedy's song in the tragedy is an interesting link between what are probably my two favorite plays by Shakespeare. I used the Signet Classic editions (general editor Sylan Barnet), though of course there are many editions of both plays available.
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