ABSTRACT
During a meal at a Chinese restaurant, critic Terry Castle once taught me an invaluable lesson about what might be called situational grammar. Any fortune-cookie fortune could be immeasurably altered, and enriched, she pointed out, by simply adding to it the phrase “in bed.” (Try this yourself and you will see.)
When Shakespeare left his “second-best bed” to his wife Anne Hathaway in his will, he left, as well, a seductive historical conundrum. Is the phrase “second-best” a sign of his estrangement from the marriage, or was the “best” bed in the house given to guests, so that the “second-best” was the connubial couch-the one, as Shakespeare biographer Sam Schoenbaum remarks with deadpan wit, “rich in tender matrimonial associations?”1
