Renaissance, the

Swearing in England during the Renaissance (a period of disputed length, but here taken to extend approximately from 1400 to 1600) showed two radically contrary tendencies, toward efflorescence and censorship. The extraordinary exuberance of the religious oaths of the Middle Ages continued and was enriched by a great variety of new secular modes. The practice of flyting, or set-piece tirades of astonishing personal abuse, reached its highest point of development in Scotland in the early sixteenth century. Henry VIII (1509–1547) swore freely and his daughter Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603) reputedly “swore like a man” (Shirley 1979, 10). Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Ben Jonson (1572–1637) indulged in scurrilous personal “conflicts of wit,” and both playwrights included in their plays many passages of personal execration, cursing, and desperate exclamation of such power that they are still painful to read and hear.

The Renaissance essentially embodied a new skeptical and empiricist attitude, a radical contrast with the more credulous medieval mind-set. As John Donne (?1571–1631) acutely observed: “the new Philosophy sets all in doubt” (“Anatomy of the World”; “First Anniversary,” l. 205). This included the “nominalist” view of language, holding that the meanings of words were essentially conventional and not based on ultimate realities. Thus in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (1592) the hero ritualistically calls up the Devil in the form of Mephistophilis, but then expresses the heretical view “I think hell’s a fable” (Scene 5, l. 127). Even though the play shows that hell does indeed exist, in both a physical and mental sense, this staging violated the most powerful taboos. Indeed, all of Marlowe’s extraordinary heroes test conventional boundaries with deeply subversive views. The insatiable world-conqueror Tamburlaine argues sophistically that “Nature … doth teach us all to have aspiring minds,” Edward II is tragically obsessed with his homosexual lover Gaveston, while Barabas, the savage Jew of Malta, mocks “swine-eating Christians, never circumcised,” cursing them as “infidels.”

Consequently, the period also saw the beginnings of severe restraints against swearing, framed in various pieces of legislation. Strict punishments were proposed in Scotland in 1551 and in England in 1606 and 1623. One of the great cultural glories of the Elizabethan Age was the flowering of the drama, highly popular with both the nobility and the groundlings. However, formal censorship of plays was embodied in the figure of the Master of the Revels, a position initiated in 1574, two years before James Burbage had even built the first theater in London.

Furthermore, as John Dover Wilson has stressed, “From the erection of the theatres in 1576 to their suppression at the outbreak of the Civil War ¹⁶⁴¹, the Puritan party waged an unceasing warfare against the stage” (1944, 227). The Puritans were fundamentally opposed to fiction, regarded the theaters as dens of iniquity, and took literally the injunction in the book of Deuteronomy 22:5 that “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” The latter practice was, of course, a staple convention of Elizabethan productions. Dover Wilson cites a number of polemical attacks condemning “Italian bawdry [lasciviousness]” and “beastly and filthy matters” (1944, 206, 228). Philip Stubbes questioned the moral function of plays: “Do they not maintain bawdry, insinuate foolery and renew the remembrance of heathen idolatory?” He also condemned the lascivious behavior of the audience and, by insinuation, that of the actors, who “in their secret conclaves (covertly) play the sodomite or worse” (1944, 229). The anonymous “T.G.” in “The Rich Cabinet” (1616) denounced “execrable oaths, artificial [ingenious] lies, discoveries of cozenage [deception], scurrilous words, obscene discourses, corrupt courtings, licentious motions, lascivious actions, and lewd gestures” (1944, 224).

These Puritan tendencies took completely new and thorough forms of policing the theater and dramatic language, gaining force as the decades passed and staying on the statute books for centuries. As a court officer in the service of the Lord Chamberlain, the Master of the Revels during the reign of Queen Elizabeth was increasingly given the preemptive right to censor plays, which the actors were required to recite and present to him prior to public performance. The grounds for not granting the players a license to perform could be political or doctrinal, a reinforcement of previous orders against “players and pipers strolling through the kingdom disseminating heresy and seditions” in “naughty [wicked] plays” (Gildersleeve 1908, 12). The staging of two satirical plays, The Isle of Dogs (1597 but now lost) and Eastward Ho! (1605), led to the jailing of the actors and the author Ben Jonson. A performance of his play The Magnetic Lady (1632) led to a charge of blasphemy.

Following An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606), profanity became a major consideration. Frances Shirley has speculated that the legislation was delayed until after Elizabeth’s death, since the queen, a copious swearer herself, would have been unsympathetic to it (1979, 10). According to this Act:

If … any person or persons doe or shall in any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame or Pageant jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie … [they] shall forfeite for every such Offence by him or them committed Tenne pounds.

(3 Jac. I. c. 21)

Had this legislation been strictly enforced it would have ruined any company putting on the highly popular religious plays known as Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, acted all over the realm from about 1554 to 1576. As the entry for the medieval period makes clear, the Wakefield Master’s language at sacred moments is surprisingly coarse and blasphemous. The spectacular ranting of Herod the Great in one these plays is memorialized in Shakespeare’s famous phrase condemning the “ham” actor who “out-Herods Herod” ( Hamlet , III ii 15).

The immediate effect of this censorship was that profane terms were euphemized into minced oaths. The name of God was either distorted to gad or abbreviated to od , older euphemistic forms like cock and gog were resuscitated, and foreign forms like perdy (from French par Dieu ) introduced. Alternatively, it was omitted, so that God’s wounds! became “minced” into zounds! and God’s blood! likewise euphemized into ’ sblood! These technical evasions of sacred names seem strange now, but would have had fairly obvious meanings for the audience.

Another stratagem was to substitute pagan deities like Jove or Jupiter, which are still current. Shakespeare used a wide variety of such names, including Apollo, Hercules, Mars, Pluto, and Venus, especially, but not exclusively, in the Roman plays. In his comedy Everyman in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson created amusing and absurd oaths like Body o’ Caesar! and by the foot of Pharaoh! However, in King Lear (ca. 1605), set in pagan times, characters appeal in curses to “Nature” as a goddess and to primitive natural forces, as in “By the sacred radiance of the sun” (I i 111). Both polytheistic forms like “the gods” and the monotheistic “God” are appealed to. Nevertheless, the name of God still flourished in many contexts.

With signs of a decline in the efficacy of religious oaths, secular modes of swearing, which had already been flourishing since the time of Chaucer, developed new varieties. Among the new referents were animal terms such as cur and viper ; genital and excretory modes, such as base cullion [testicle], dungworm , and excrement ; vituperative words for women such as drab, harlot, filth, slut , and trull , as well as combinations such as whoreson filthy slave . In addition there are powerfully imaginative epithets like “toad-spotted traitor!” and “abortive rooting hog.” In addition, new modes of racist insult emerged, discussed in the entries for Blacks and Jews. There were even new specialists in verbal aggression, like the roarers and the rufflers, who have their own entries. In all, the limitations of censorship were matched by new forms of creativity.