This post goes out to my colleagues and comrades at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Washington D.C. (happening right now) in the hopes that you will all drink deeply of the collective knowledge offered there, and that you will drink responsibly otherwise. Difficult to imagine a group that is simultaneously as sage and as lost, and I mean both of those things in the best possible way. I raise a toast to all of you and salute you for your tireless work, and your ongoing contributions both within and beyond the field.
This week’s post was more difficult to write. Several things have been in the works, but perhaps due to my father’s sudden death a couple of weeks ago, or perhaps due to some unseen shift in the cosmos, the post for this week simply didn’t want to come together. This happens sometimes. Ask anyone who writes. Some nights the moonlight slants down just so and we must go running across that moonlit field instead of sitting at the desk. Some nights the crickets herald the coming summer with such subtle power that it almost drives us mad.
Yet, for this week, here is a verse my father loved:
There is something about a Martini,
A Drink With Something In It — Ogden Nash**
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
We won’t go into the potential hazards of drinking to excess here, but a gentle drink (and that can be sarsaparilla, for those who don’t drink alcohol) can offer a cooling respite in the course of, or at the end of, a long day. Drinking may make peace or trouble, be opener or closer in negotiations, or may simply refresh us, in both body and spirit, and there are more witty sayings about drinking than there are about almost any other human activity except one.
For whatever reason people may drink alcohol, it seems to bring out the innate hyperbole in our character. Shakespeare’s Rosalind (while disguised as a male) tells the attentive Phoebe, “I pray you, do not fall in love with me,/ For I am falser than vows made in wine” (As You Like It, 3.5). As the wise Porter tells us in Macbeth, alcoholic drink “provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” (Macbeth 2.3).
Amorous considerations aside, drink has more general implications in life. Oscar Wilde famously said that “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. Earnest Hemingway said, “I drink to make other people more interesting”, and Yeats lamented that “The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.” Even those of us who don’t drink often seek to enhance certain aspects of our lives. No argument that walks in the countryside, exercise, meditation, communion with like minded others, and yogic practice may offer similar kinds of alterations, but for so many, drinking seems to be a much faster way to get there.
One personal favourite artistic drinking depiction comes from the motion picture The Quiet Man, which, if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend. Without spoiling the story, there is a moment where two men have been fighting each other all afternoon, in a kind of epic battle that the whole county has been anticipating. The epic fist fight ranges across the countryside until they mutually decide to take a short break at the pub before resuming their brawl. Here are Victor Mclaglen and John Wayne**:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_dtqKyo9k4
Just a reminder that, if you do drink, it’s good to keep it civil. Not that arguments over literary points may not be hotly contested, but I’m grateful that they don’t usually come to fisticuffs. If I have any advice, it is to have fun out there and be gentle with each other.
*fromMerry Wives of Windsor, 1.1
**The complete poem may be read here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/11586611-A-Drink-With-Something-In-It–Complete-poem–by-Ogden-Nashh
***Both John Wayne and Victor McLaglen were Academy Award Winners, John Wayne won a Best Actor award for his performance in True Grit in 1970, and Victor McLaglen won a Best Actor award for his performance in The Informer in 1935.