SHAKESPEARE's SEXUAL LANGUAGE STUDENT SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY Series Editor Sandra Clark (Birkbeck College, University of London)
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SHAKESPEARE'S SEXUAL LANGUAGE STUDENT SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY Series Editor Sandra Clark (Birkbeck College, University of London) Shakespeare's Legal Language B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol Shakespeare's Military Language Charles Edelman Shakespeare's Theatre Hugh Richmond Shakespeare's Books Stuart Gillespie Shakespeare's Non-Standard English N. F. Blake Shakespeare's Sexual Language Gordon Williams STUDENT SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY Shakespeare's Sexual Language A Glossary By GORDON WILLIAMS continuum LONDON • NEW YORK Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038, USA First published in 1997 by The Athlone Press This edition published in 2006 © Gordon Williams 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Gordon Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0-8264-9134-0 The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows Williams, Gordon, 1935- A glossary of Shakespeare's sexual language / Gordon Williams, p. cm. Supplement to: Dictionary of sexual language and imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart literature. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-485-11511-5 (cloth). - ISBN 0-485-12130-1 (pbk.) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Language-Glossaries, etc. 2. English language-Early modern, 1500-1700-Gloss- aries, vocabularies, etc. 3. English language-Early modern, 1500-1700-Slang-Dictionaries. 4. Erotic literature, English- Dictionaries. 5. Figures of speech-Dictionaries. 6. Sex in literature-Dictionaries. 7. Sex symbolism-Dictionaries. 8. Sex-Dictionaries. I. Williams, Gordon, 1935- Dictionary of sexual language and imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart literature. II. Title. PR2892.W55 1997 822.3'3-dc21 96-49008 CIP Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd., King's Lynn, Norfolk To Rose This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 Method, Scope, and Conventions of the Glossary 15 Signs and Abbreviations 17 Glossary 20 Select Bibliography 348 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Although reference is made to my Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, the present work is on the whole supplementary rather than derivative. The approach is necessarily different: the one endeavours to map out broad areas of use, the other must take account of more personal and idiosyncratic aspects. Here patterns of innuendo are apt to loom larger than firm linguistic usage, though dividing lines become blurred. In the earlier work, other writers than Shakespeare are often preferred to illustrate common uses. Here, it is Shakespearean practice that is the object of attention and a path has been sought between ultraconservatism and the if-it-can-it-must approach. Even the personal and idiosyncratic must make sense in terms of Elizabethan mental habits rather than those of today, especially as they show in the configurations of dramatic speech. There is neither space nor need to argue this point in the majority of cases. But occasionally, where it has seemed worth while to enable those consulting the glossary to make up their own minds, the evidence has been set out at some length. A large number of entries is to be expected. The sexual element in Shakespeare is extensive, varied and, although this is necessarily hard to establish, probably innovative at times. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, his authorial identity was very much bound up with the use of sexual language and treatment of erotic themes. It was Venus and Adonis which established his reputation as erotic poet, Middleton (A Mad World, My Masters I.ii.48) linking it with Marlowe's Hero and Leander, 'two luscious marrow- bone pies for a young married wife' (marrowbone was 2 A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language a popular aphrodisiac). Shakespeare's poem is called the 'Maids' Philosophy' in Markham's Dumb Knight (1607-8; Dodsley X. 158) III. i; but Brathwait, eschewing irony, cau- tions that 'Books treating of light subiects, are Nurseries of wantonnesse', specifying that' Venus and Adonis are vnfitting Consorts for a Ladies bosome' (English Gentlewoman [1631] p. 139). It is one of the whore's favourite 'amorous Pam- phlets' in Cranley's Amanda (1635, Ebsworth p. 531), and is perhaps the text envisaged in Johnson's Academy of Love (1641) p. 99, where 'the young sparkish Girles would read in Shakespeare day and night, so that they would open the Booke or Tome, and the men with a Fescue in their hands should point to the Verse'. Venus's topographical account of her physical charms (bottom-grass, brakes, graze, hillocks, mountain, park, relief) was the passage most singled out for comment and imitation during the seventeenth century. However, Freeman, Rubbe, and A great Cast (1614) sig. K3, allows the poet mastery in both virtuous and vicious subjects, The Rape of Lucrece balancing ' Venus and Adonis, / True modell of a most lasciuious leatcher'. That both poems maintained their racy appeal into the next century is attested by their inclusion in Poems on Affairs of State IV (1716). Bawdry in the Sonnets has always been more of a problem. Even before the confusions of post-Romanticism, when their conventional aspects were downplayed in favour of seeing them as revelations of the inner man, there was resistance to the idea of sexual punning. What might serve for epyllia or the playhouse evidently seemed out of place in these most personal of utterances. Steevens's approach had been evasive whereas Malone, as Margreta de Grazia shows, trapped him- self in his 1780 edition of the Sonnets by seeking to identify Shakespeare with their protagonist when 'the majority of them expressed desire for a young male' (p. 37). He seeks to translate desire into sixteenth-century literary affectation, to immaterialize the dangerously physical. But Sonnet 20 is the stumbling block. It upset eighteenth-century critics on account of its 'indecency' (Sonnets, ed. Rollins 1. 55), the Victorian Dyce specifying a prick pun (Shakespeare, IX. 335). Introduction 3 Eric Partridge joins others in making it the focus of his passionate efforts to save Shakespeare from the homosexuals. However, for Rolfe (1883), Sonnet 151 was 'the only one in the series which is frankly and realistically gross' (rise; Rollins 1. 388). But Conrad, in 1878, 'commented on the probable obscenity of Sonnet 135, and Kellner (1922) 'started a new trend by defining will in "134-136" as "membrum virile"'' (Rollins 1. 346). Tucker (1924) followed up with 'an obvious equivoque' on ride (Sonnet 137), a pox quibble in 144 (hell), and pride in 151 (Rollins 1. 351, 371, 388). Yet even as late as 2 April 1967, with the cat fully out of the bag, Marghanita Laski was still fighting a rearguard action in the Observer. 'So many words have at one time or another had indecent connotations that it is easy to find dirty puns anywhere, if seeking them. I remain unconvinced that Shakespeare intended them in the Sonnets. ' However, it is the plays which command a central place, their bawdry stimulating early writers as much as later commentators. Fletcher recalls Hamlet's 'rank sweat of an enseamedbed' in his Triumph of Death (1612) vi. 121, combin- ing it with an inverted allusion to Claudius at 'prayer': 'take him dead drunk now without repentance, / His leacherie inseam'd upon him. ' Dekker, burlesquing Romeo and Juliet in Satiromastix (1601), adapts Shakespeare's vaginal O joke when a gentlewoman's 'tis - 6 a most sweet thing to lye with a man' is answered: 'tis a O more more more sweet to lye with a woman' (Li. 17). But it is Othello, which even the hostile Rymer acknowledges as the most highly rated tragedy 'acted on our English stage' (Spingarn 11. 219), that proved most memorable in this respect, especially for its images of bestial sexuality. Sampson, The VouhBreaker (c. 1625) II. ii. 162, directly appropriates the comparison 'More prime then Goates, or Monkeys in their prides' (see monkey). Thomas Blount's Academie of Eloquence (1654) p. 226 glances at 'the Beast with two backs, which the knavish Shakespear speaks of, a recurring association despite the fact that it was a common French proverb long before Shakespeare was born. John Ford was perennially fascinated by Othello, turning it succes- sively into Caroline tragedy, farce and tragicomedy. That the 4 A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language brute images are part of the appeal is indicated by echoes like 'this ramkin hath tupped my old rotten carrion-mutton' (The Fancies IV. i). The same play also has a remarkable borrowing from Henry V, the husbandly injunction to 'Keep your bow close, vixen' (Ill. iii) seeming to combine elements from the Shakespeare quarto and folio though perhaps indebted to a third, performed version (see buggle boe, close). Shakespearean scholarship began in the eighteenth cen- tury, and by the end of that century many of the textual cruxes had been satisfactorily resolved. Sound texts were established and only two lines seem to have caused real trouble for their sexual content (see medlar). These lines, 'omitted in the text of Steevens's edition, which Malone has restored to the text', prompt an extensive footnote from the early Victorian editor Charles Knight. He confirms in his own case what is apparent from the work of those whom Amner acknowledges as 'associates in the task of expounding the darker phrases of Shakespeare' (1793, XIV. 429) - that sexual passages attracted close attention from early editors: 'As far as we have been able to trace - and we have gone through the old editions with an especial reference to this matter - these two lines constitute the only passage in the original editions which has been omitted by modern editors.