Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions

Pick Up in Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Paperback
$11.11
BN.com price
$12.99 List Price (Save 14%)
Marketplace (New and Used)
from
$0.01
$12.99 List Price (Save 100%)
All (27)  
Used (9)  
New (18)  
Close
Sort by
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 27 (3 pages)
$0.01
(Save 100%)
Seller since 2006

Feedback rating:

(50891)

Condition:

New — never opened or used in original packaging.

Like New — packaging may have been opened. A "Like New" item is suitable to give as a gift.

Very Good — may have minor signs of wear on packaging but item works perfectly and has no damage.

Good — item is in good condition but packaging may have signs of shelf wear/aging or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Acceptable — item is in working order but may show signs of wear such as scratches or torn packaging. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Used — An item that has been opened and may show signs of wear. All specific defects should be noted in the Comments section associated with each item.

Refurbished — A used item that has been renewed or updated and verified to be in proper working condition. Not necessarily completed by the original manufacturer.

Very Good
Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!

Ships from: Mishawaka, IN

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$0.25
(Save 98%)
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(719)

Condition: Good
Sound copy, mild reading wear. May have scuffs or missing DJ. May have some notes, highlighting or underlining. Purchasing this item helps us provide vocational opportunities to ... people with barriers to employment. Read more Show Less

Ships from: Hillsboro, OR

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$2.17
(Save 83%)
Seller since 2006

Feedback rating:

(40)

Condition: New
2/2/2010 Paperback Reprint New 006149352X NEW/UNREAD BOOK W/REMAINDER MARK AND MINOR SHELF WEAR.

Ships from: Blaine, WA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$2.18
(Save 83%)
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(1)

Condition: New
PAPERBACK New 006149352X New Condition.

Ships from: Spotswood, NJ

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$2.18
(Save 83%)
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(1)

Condition: New
PAPERBACK New 006149352X New Condition.

Ships from: Spotswood, NJ

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$2.18
(Save 83%)
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(1)

Condition: New
PAPERBACK New 006149352X New Condition.

Ships from: Spotswood, NJ

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$2.18
(Save 83%)
Seller since 2012

Feedback rating:

(1)

Condition: New
PAPERBACK New 006149352X New Condition.

Ships from: Spotswood, NJ

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$3.22
(Save 75%)
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(236)

Condition: New
2010-02-01 Paperback New New, unread book with light shelf wear. May have a remainder mark.

Ships from: Amherst, NY

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$3.23
(Save 75%)
Seller since 2010

Feedback rating:

(1468)

Condition: New
006149352X BRAND NEW. We are a tested and proven company with over 700,000 satisfied customers since 1997. Choose expedited shipping (if available) for much faster delivery. ... Delivery confirmation on all US orders. Read more Show Less

Ships from: Nashua, NH

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
$3.25
(Save 75%)
Seller since 2005

Feedback rating:

(9714)

Condition: Very Good
Very Good 006149352X Very Good Condition. Minor shelf wear from storage. Has a small black line on bottom/exterior edge of pages.

Ships from: McKeesport, PA

Usually ships in 1-2 business days

  • Canadian
  • International
  • Standard, 48 States
  • Standard (AK, HI)
  • Express, 48 States
  • Express (AK, HI)
Page 1 of 3
Showing 1 – 10 of 27 (3 pages)
Close
Sort by
NOOK Book (eBook)
$9.99
BN.com price

Available on NOOK devices and apps

  • Nook Devices
  • NOOK
  • NOOK Color
  • NOOK Tablet
  • Tablet/Phone
  • NOOK for iPad
  • NOOK for iPhone
  • NOOK for Android
  • NOOK for Android (Tablet)
  • NOOK Kids for iPad
  • PC/Mac
  • NOOK Study
  • NOOK for PC
  • NOOK for Mac

Want a NOOK? Explore Now

Overview

“Browse the delightful Bardisms to find a fitting quote for any mood, moment, or occasion. But read it through to learn how to enjoy Shakespeare and bring more of his language into your daily life.” — Jacob Weisberg, Editor of Slate magazine and author of Bushisms

“A fantastic reference for anyone who loves Shakespeare!” — Steve Martin

From renowned Shakespearean director Barry Edelstein comes Bardisms: a straightforward, accessible guide to using Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom at special occasions of every type. Over the course of his career, Edelstein has directed more than half of Shakespeare’s plays, and he brings all his passion, insight, and years of study to Bardisms. In the words of Adam Gopnik (Through the Children's Gate), “Barry Edelstein knows more about Shakespeare, and in a less pedantic manner, than nearly anyone I know.”

Looking for an ideal toast, quip, or remark for that special occasion—or the perfect pithy comment to enliven an everyday conversation? Ask Shakespeare!

A wedding vow—"To you I give myself, for I am yours" (As You Like It)

A birthday greeting—to me, fair fried, you can never be old. (Sonnet 104)

Party time!—"Let's mock the midnight bell." (Antony and Cleopatra)

The plays and poetry of the Immortal Bard make up a vast repository of wit and wisdom, insight and passion. If there's an occasion that needs commemorating, chances are there are some lines from Shakespeare that will do the job right. Whether you want to "speak the speech" with verve and flair or craft an elegant toast, lecture, or missive, world-renowned Shakespearean director and teacher Barry Edelstein will help you find the perfect "Bardism" for any occasion.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061493522
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 2/2/2010
  • Pages: 275
  • Sales rank: 851,144
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 7.00 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Barry Edelstein

A theater director noted for his productions of the plays of William Shakespeare, Barry EdeLstein has taught Shakespeare at the Juilliard school, the graduate acting program at NYU, the Public Theater's Shakespeare Lab, and in master classes around the United States and abroad. The list of actors he has directed includes Anne Hathaway, Hwyneth Paltrow, John Turturro, Kevin Kline, Jeffrey Wright, and others. Edelstein lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

Bardisms
Shakespeare for All Occasions

Chapter One

At First the Infant

Shakespeare for the Occasions of Birth and Family Life

At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

It begins with caterwauling and vomit.

Such is the stark and altogether unceremonious verdict rendered upon life by William Shakespeare, the eternal, inimitable, and ineffable Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.

So much of the mystery and mythology surrounding Shakespeare has to do with the beauty and wisdom of his insights into human nature, and the noble sensibility behind their poetic expression. Yes, yes, that sparrow's fall does indeed have a certain special providence about it, and, to be sure, the defining quality of mercy is precisely that way it cascades gently down, like rain from heaven. But a baby? Alas, what descends from a baby are substances resistant to euphemizing metaphor, and defiant to characterization by such felicities as "God-like uniqueness" and "heavenly rain." No, no. From a baby drop drool, spit-up, pee-pee, and poop. Not even the epochal mimetic gifts of Shakespeare could poeticize those.

This is why his description of the First Age of Man, infancy, is so marvelous. Instead of some lines-long rhapsody about skin soft as down, or dove-like cooing, or beatific smiles, Shakespeare offers only two gerundial verbs, two little words, of brain-addling noise and stinking bodily fluids: mewling and puking. There's nothing grand about them, nothing noble. The Sweet Swan of Avon is nowhere to be found. Rather, we're visited by a tired, even slightly irritated father, trying to goabout his day while Junior cries and makes. It's an image striking in its realism, honesty, and truthfulness, and in all its blunt indecorousness, it sounds a lot like infancy as we know it to be.

I think of this Shakespeare, the one who trades in vomit and caterwauling, as the doppelgänger of that other, more familiar Shakespeare, he of the whatever-named but still sweet-smelling rose, and the summer's day to which I'm not sure I shall compare thee. And if the latter Shakespeare writes poetry, then the former writes a kind of anti-poetry, a poetry of what's usually non-poetic, composed in an unmistakably "Shakespearean" language whose beauty, such as it may be, is its ordinariness, Shakespearized.

Such a language is audible in the odd prosody of mewling and puking. It takes a great writer to serve perfect mewl when the mental thesauri of mere mortals would run dry after shriek, screech, wail, and, in a reach, waaah. Making mewl the first syllable in a verse line is also a neat trick. It breaks the expected rhythm of iambic pentameter, which would place an unstressed syllable in that position, and places a stressed one there instead. This syncopation not only jars our ears in the same manner as a baby's cry but also sets us up for the one-two punch landed when the pattern repeats milliseconds later in puking, also accented on its first syllable. In its resolutely non-iambic refusal to go with the flow, this language suggests that there's no way this particular baby will be calmed. Then, there's the assonance of the "liquid U" in both words (the sound that letter makes as a long vowel: you), a pretty piece of poesy that suggests at once the cloying nasality of a baby's drone, as well as that apt exclamatory response to all things gross-out, ewwwwwww. Mewling and puking may speak well about cacophonous midnight meltdowns and hot regurgitation, but they well bespeak a writerly gift for marshaling an offbeat and idiosyncratic imagination to the English language at its most muscular, expressive, and bracing.

This gift is on display in all the Shakespeare excerpted below. Shakespeare on infancy may not wield the emotional heft of Shakespeare on love or pack the philosophical wallop of Shakespeare on death, but it lacks none of the linguistic virtuosity, uncanny verisimilitude, or heart-stopping incisiveness of any of the excerpts we'll find in the latter Six Ages of Man when we hear Shakespeare on the occasions of grown-up life.

Shakespeare on the Experience of Childbirth

The pleasing punishment that women bear.
—Aegeon, The Comedy of Errors, 1.1.46

Though never depicted onstage, births deliver quite a few bouncing babies offstage in Shakespeare's plays. Since he had three children of his own, he no doubt knew something about the birthing process, and it's interesting to note which aspects of it stick in his mind. This selection of Bardisms covers a range of childbirth experiences.

Why Newborns Cry

Here's Shakespeare's explanation of what's behind that piercing bawl that's every human being's first utterance.

We came crying hither;
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
We wail and cry.
. . . 
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools. 5
—King Lear, King Lear, 4.6.172–77

How to use it:

  • I found these lines of great comfort to my inconsolable little one, or, perhaps more accurately, of great comfort to myself in rationalization of my failure to console her.
  • If you don't have a baby of your own, keep this handy as a nicely erudite editorial comment on the nearest squalling bundle of joy. (Just think how much cruising-altitude tension could be eliminated were flight attendants instructed always to quote this Bardism, Shakespeare for the Screaming Kid in the Bulkhead Seat.)

Some details:

This excerpt is from the famous "Dover Cliff" scene in King Lear. Gloucester, the king's old friend and counselor, blind, in pain, and despairing over his son's treachery, has come to Dover to commit suicide by jumping off its famous white cliffs. Lear, too, is desperate, driven mad by the cruelty of his daughters Goneril and Regan, and he's been wandering the countryside, railing at the world's manifold injustices. He encounters his sad friend and philosophizes with extraordinary insight and considerable cynicism about life and death.

Lear's interpretation of why babies cry is certainly a dark one, and strikingly modern in its bleakness and nihilism. It seems almost to belong to the worldview of the twentieth-century master Samuel Beckett ("we are born astride a grave"), and indeed, some productions of King Lear render the knolls atop Dover Cliff as a landscape as grim as that in Beckett's seminal work Waiting for Godot. Yet the image of life as a "stage of fools" is in its own way a comic one. (Certainly whenever I whispered these lines to my crying baby daughter, they struck me as sounding more comforting than ominous.) The best productions of King Lear capture this double-sidedness, this proximity of the funny and the awful, and create from the image of two broken old men pondering the dilemmas of infancy a kind of horrid laughter.

Bardisms
Shakespeare for All Occasions
. Copyright (c) by Barry Edelstein . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Customer Reviews

Be the first to write a review
( 0 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

  • - HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
  • - Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
  • - Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
  • - Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
  • - Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
  • - Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
  • - Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

  • - By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
  • - Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
  • - See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.
Search for Products You'd Like to Recommend

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Create a Pen Name

Your Pen Name is your unique identiy on BN.com. It will appear on the reviews you write and other website activities. Your Pen Name cannot be edited, changed or deleted once submitted.

Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

We're sorry, but penname is already taken.

Please select one of the following:
Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously

penname is available!

By visiting the BN.com website or marking a purchase on BN.com, a User is deemed to have accepted the Terms of Use.

Continue Anonymously

Welcome, penname

You have successfully created your Pen Name. Start enjoying the benefits of the BN.com Community today.


If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)
500 character limit