NOW THAT I’VE GOT YOUR ATTENTION, there’s nothing scatological here. Rather, it’s a timely update of “Do Our Languages Shape Us? Or Do We Shape Our Languages?”
Background. There we learned from Manvir Singh in The New Yorker that there are people who describe the future as “behind us” (that is, visually unknowable) and the past as “in front of us” (i.e., viewable).
By contrast, Singh notes, “For English speakers, time is understood spatially, with the past typically ‘behind us’ and the future ‘ahead.’ ”
But Then There Were the Elizabethans. In “The Mail,” The New Yorker, February 10, 2025, reader Scott Shepherd writes, “There are instances in English, however, that present something of a counter-argument. Shakespeare sometimes used ‘behind’ to mean ‘in the future’—a speed bump for modern audiences.”
Shepherd offers two examples: “‘Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind,’ Hamlet complains. ‘Glamis, and Thane of Cowdor! The greatest is behind,’ Macbeth hopes.”
“In Shakespeare’s time,” Shepherd continues, “ ‘before’ and ‘behind’ were natural opposites in time as in space. At some point, we flipped the metaphor, putting the past at our backs and the future ahead of us.”
“Behind” and “After.” Shepherd recounts, “ ‘Behind’ got retired as a time word, ceding the field to ‘after’—which, etymologically, means behind! (Consider the fore and the aft of a ship.) But we made peace, somehow, with continuing use of ‘before’ to represent both earlier and in front.”
Fascinating, and a good example of the erudition of The New Yorker readership.
Just for fun, I checked for speed-bump signs in The Annotated Shakespeare, The Comedies, Histories, Sonnets and Other Poems, Tragedies and Romances Complete.
“Thus Bad Begins, and Worse Remains Behind.” This is from Hamlet, Act III Scene 4. He’s talking to his mother not long after he killed Polonius. It’s part of a more familiar quotation: “I must be cruel, only to be kind:/ Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
The word choice makes this a rhymed couplet and Rowse lets it pass with nary an annotation. Thus, it leaves the implication that perhaps Hamlet is using “behind” in the sense of “left behind,” i.e., in the modern sense of “past,” not “future.” Hmm….
“Glamis, and Thane of Cowdor! The Greatest is Behind.” In Act I Scene 3, Macbeth encounters the Three Witches who inform him he’s soon to be Thane of both Glamis and Cowdor; this, despite these two people being still around.
Macbeth muses the Glamis/Cowdor/Greatest idea as an Aside. But is he lauding the two? Or dreaming of his titles “to come”?
In either case, reader Shepherd believes Shakespeare was using “behind” (spelled “behinde,” by the way) in its older sense of “to come.”
My Googling Adventures. There were several rabbit holes in trying to confirm the archaic “behind.” Simply Googling “Shakespeare Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind” gets me down the “cruel/kind” rabbit hole.
Trying simply “Shakespeare behind” gets Shakespeare Behind Bars, a 2005 documentary about “one of the longest running, continuously operating, art, theatre, Shakespeare, and original writing prison programs in the US.”
Uh. Interesting, but not the behind I was thinking of.
Finally, after several other rabbit holes, I tried “Shakespeare word behind.” And bingo! It even lists three more examples.
Shakespeare’s Words: The book Shakespeare’s Words, 2002, “was one of the largest books Penguin had ever published (almost 700 pages)…. Over the winter of 2017, the entire shakespeareswords.com website was redesigned, the search engine rewritten, and the database rebuilt.”
Thanks, Mr. Shepherd. Thanks, Shakespeares Words. It was good fun researching this one.
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025