To Be (Employed) or Not to Be, That Is the Question

Can it be that William Shakespeare was downsized, rendered redundant and, in the most unkindest cut of all, cut untimely from the payroll?

Perchance the Globe Theater fell upon hard times, and the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon was “riffed,” the cruel verb forged from the fateful initials of the personnel-pruning policy known as “reduction in force.”

Verily, the playwright’s dialogue echoes all the economic woes that those who grunt and sweat under a weary life fall prey to in this computerized, automated age.

Lady MacBeth could have written the marching orders when IBM amended its motto from”THINK” to “SHRINK” and lopped 100,000 from the work force:

“Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.”

Or as her hapless husband might have put it: “Avaunt! and quit my sight!”

With pink slip in hand, the peasant slaves severed from General Mills, General Dynamics, General Motors and similar corporate giants could make the vault of heaven resound with Isabella’s lament in “Measure for Measure”:

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

Forsooth those suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous outplacement after years of loyal service with AT&T;, Aetna or Kodak can wail like Flavius, the steward to Timon of Athens: “We have seen better days,” and ogle the future with the grim pessimism of Cleopatra’s handmaiden:

“The bright day is done, and we are for the dark.”

Cleaning out his desk, the banished CEO or vice president might mimic Rosalind, daughter of the banished duke in “As You Like It”:

“O how full of briers is this working day world.”

And for final words at the office farewell party, the suddenly excessed executive mayhaps might speak the speech Shakespeare ghosted for Othello, beginning:

“O, now, for ever farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content! and ending: Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone.”

Threatened with selective separation by the merger of NYNEX and Bell Atlantic, middle-level management types, whose “way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf,” can only agree with the first stranger in Timon of Athens that “policy sits above conscience.”

Big business, of course, may defend its executive culling with the survival argument advanced by the Duke of York’s gardeners in Richard the Second: “Superfluous branches we lop away that bearing boughs may live.”

But even the golden handshake and the green parachute of a negotiated departure might not in the long run, or even over the short haul, be worth the candle. Many’s the early retiree, bought by a buyout, who soon finds himself dining on Richard the Second’s “bitter bread of banishment” and pleading penury on the way to the unemployment office with a sad refrain from “Love’s Labour Lost”: “The naked truth of it is I have no shirt.”

Alas poor yuppy, when the welfare entitlements run out, the axed employee experiences nothing sweet about the uses of adversity promised in “As You Like It,” only the approaching calamity sung of in sonnet 50: “My grief lies onward and my joy behind.”

Yet, save the mark, there be some for whom parting is such sweet sorrow. They can seize the days of their discontent to embark on enterprises of great pith and moment and forge a brave new world in retirement.

Some screw their courage to the sticking place and send around resumes, assuring prospective employers, like the Earl of Kent offering his services to King Lear, “that which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in; and the best of me is diligence.”

Many such become consultants, confident that “good counsellors lack no clients,” as Shakespeare observed in “Measure for Measure.”

Free from the rat race, the whirligig of Time-Warner or the disunion of Union Carbide, others beguile the hours with golf, gardening or gadding about in the maritime motley of cruise wear.

Unlike MacBeth, this happy breed of prematurely idled pensioner cares not “if tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Reprising a line from the Earl of Worcester in Henry IV, they assure friends: “I could be well content to entertain the lag end of my life with quiet hours.”

Alas and alack, for parting words to ring down the curtain on this melancholy tragedy of curtailed ambitions and gilded hand clasps, the bard provides this soliloquy in “Cymbeline”:

Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone and taken thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must

As chimney-sweepers come to dust.”

Exeunt omnes, weeping.