Since I started paying serious attention to The Dick Van Dyke Show, I've found mention of a grade school production of Hamlet, a general Shakespeare joke, and a summary of Romeo and Juliet. And I predicted that it wouldn't be long before the show provided an actual Shakespeare quote.
In this episode, Laura Petrie (Mary Tylor Moore's character) has recently learned that she's pregnant. Sally Rogers (Rose Marie's character) suspects something and has to engage in desultory conversation because Laura is not being forthcoming.
That's where the Shakespeare comes in:
We start off strong with a genuine Shakespeare quote—but it deteriorates (or elevates, depending on your point of view) into a joke.
And that's it. Well, except that the title of the episode also quotes / alludes to Shakespeare.
[Note: As I write this, I've already watched further forward in the series, and there's more—and more substantial—Shakespeare to come.]
But I found something else interesting in the episode—something that may provide some understanding of Shakespeare.
Here's how Laura announces her pregnancy to Rob:
I didn't grow up in the 1960s, but I thought I was pretty culturally literate about many things in the era. After all, I know who Billy Sol was! Note: That's thanks to my early obsession with Allan Sherman—go try his song "Shticks Of One And Half A Dozen Of The Other" to learn more. But I had never run across the expression "The rabbit died" to mean "I'm pregnant."
The expression comes from a kind of pregnancy test of the time. You can read about The Rabbit Test here.
To someone who had never heard that before, it seems like a very bizarre way to tell someone about a new baby on the way. There's a very deep paradox at work there—usually, no one is happy that a rabbit died (with the exception of rabbit hunters, people who are hungry for Lapin à la Moutarde, and Elmer Fudd). But Rob Petrie's reaction to the news that the rabbit died is to jump for joy.
And that's where the Shakespearean understanding might come in. To people in the 1960s, "the rabbit died" was a perfectly normal and perfectly comprehensible expression. To me, it seems utterly strange. Likewise, there are many expressions in Shakespeare that made perfect sense to him and his contemporaries but that give readers pause. This speech of Beatrice's could serve as a case in point: "I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell."
The conclusion is this: As with The Dick Van Dyke Show, so with Shakespeare. It's not incomprensible; it make perfect sense to its contemporaries. We just need to do a little bit of work to understand some expressions that have fallen out of use. And, honestly, those are fewer and farther between than you might expect!
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the entire run of the show from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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