Shakespeare, William - Forms of Swearing, Damnation, Cursing, Bawdy and Obscenity

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was “not for an age, but for all time,” wrote his great friend and fellow dramatist Ben Jonson (1572–1637), a cantankerous and difficult man not given to idle praise, but a contemporary of unique authority. Virtually every major critic and author in world literature has agreed. For, unlike his contemporaries, who tended to focus on particular themes, locales, characters, and styles, Shakespeare’s imaginative creations are astonishing for their cultural diversity. Renowned for his psychological insights, subtle characterization, and capacity to coin original expressions, Shakespeare would not at first sight seem to have much to contribute to the topics of swearing, profanity, foul language, obscenity, and ethnic slurs. But even though his plays are in a highly popular and public form of entertainment, they explore the polar opposites of man’s angelic and diabolical potential, and daringly test the conventional limits permitted in these dangerous and taboo verbal areas.

It has taken some time for these aspects to attract scholarship. Earlier linguistic studies either treated the plays generically, as did I for Evans (1959), or in terms of language varieties, as did Hilda Hulme (1962), or individually, as did Frank Kermode (2000). The major exception was Eric Partridge’s groundbreaking study, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1947), explicating numerous sexual double-entendres masking crude insult and bawdy humor to a degree not generally appreciated, clearly ingenious responses to censorship. E.A.M. Colman (1974) developed the theme of dramatic bawdy, while the major glossarial studies of Gordon Williams (1994 and 1997), elucidated multitudes of sexual innuendoes. Shakespeare’s creativity, even in this linguistic area where idiom usually reigns supreme, was remarkable.

He was also fascinated by outsiders and foreigners, especially those who had status in the social hierarchy but were nevertheless regarded as aliens and subject to all manner of insults. Elizabethan England was not really multicultural, so that foreigners such as Jews, blackamoors, Italians, and Spaniards stood out. The entries for Jews and Blacks focus on the stereotypes and prejudices surrounding them, while that for disability and deformity considers his treatment of an outsider of another kind, the deformed Richard III. The traditional sanitized view of “sweetest Shakespeare” derives to some extent from censorship and bowdlerized versions of his texts, especially in school editions. In fact some plays articulate an alarmingly pessimistic, even misanthropic, ferocity. His status as the national literary figure and the attitude of “bardolatory,” or worship of Shakespeare, have brought with them a reluctance to recognize these disturbing negative qualities.

As the entry for Renaissance makes clear, the period was a complex mixture of freedom and restraint, creativity and censorship. Although Shakespeare is rightly regarded as “a Renaissance man,” he had, ironically, less artistic freedom than his great medieval predecessor Geoffrey Chaucer, whose work is both subtly and overtly critical of many professions and institutions, most of all the Church. Chaucer is also full of an exuberant abundance of savage religious oaths and wicked words. The semantic link between word and religious referent was then still vital, whereas Renaissance attitudes toward language and oaths were more skeptical. Furthermore, the Elizabethan theater, a new, thriving public activity, was regarded with suspicion as being a potentially subversive medium, both politically and spiritually, and was subject to censorship by the official known as the Master of the Revels. Following An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players in 1606, profanity became a major consideration, leading to various disguise-mechanisms, such as the use of minced oaths, which have their own entry.

Amazingly little is known with certainty about the man who became the most famous and popular playwright in English. The bare familiar facts of his personal life leave a surprising number of gaps, into which legends and hypotheses have been fitted. Although Ben Jonson commented that Shakespeare “had small Latine and less Greeke,” he was certainly able to harness all the resources of the rapidly expanding vocabulary with extraordinary facility. His capacity to coin neologisms or new words extends to over 600 Latinate terms, some of them rare, like exsufflicate, assubjugate, multipotent , and oppugnancy , but many of them now common words, like accommodation, assassination, compulsive , and sanctimonious . There are also hundreds of original demotic terms and phrases, such as foul-mouthed, leak (urinate), do it (copulate), make the beast with two backs, seamy side, puke, blinking idiot, boggler, cur, tyke, foppish, fob off, good riddance, what the dickens , and even O hell! Many of his greatest lines have a terrifying power, in which the simplest, plainest words still burn on the page.

When Shakespeare appeared in London in 1592 on the fringe of the new theatrical companies as an obscure actor and aspiring playwright, the theater was not a respectable occupation. Actors were regarded as little better than vagrants, and the new playhouses were sited in a seedy quarter of London surrounded by “stews” (brothels) and other dens of vice. For some twenty years he lived and worked in London, only visiting his family occasionally. His marital relations are a matter of speculation, but he suffered the tragedy of his only son’s death at the age of eleven. When he retired in 1612, having made a considerable fortune, largely through his excellence the theater had been transformed from a dubious marginal enterprise into a great national institution appealing to all classes. It has been calculated that by 1600, the London theaters sold between 18,000 to 20,000 seats per week (Loomba 2002, 8).

What is known least of all is where Shakespeare stood in relation to the major contemporary issues of politics and religion. He has been seen, variously, as a royalist, a “church papist” or closet Catholic, a conservative, a radical, and a subversive. He remains a mysterious figure, managing to dramatize these profound and controversial topics without getting into trouble or being imprisoned, punishments meted out to several of his contemporaries. Although England was officially Protestant and there had been a religious settlement, there were still many Catholic sympathizers, possibly including Shakespeare’s own father, John. Extreme caution was thus necessary in the treatment of religious topics. The devil was then a disturbing real presence, provoking a revival of the Faust legend in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592) and studies as diverse as Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), King James I’s Dæmonologie (1597), and Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603), a treatise on diabolism and an attack on the Jesuits. All these texts were known to Shakespeare, whose reading was extraordinarily diverse, and who exploited them judiciously. For those of his tragic figures who are ostensibly Christian, dying in a state of grace is crucial.

A century ago Otto Jespersen noted, very pertinently, that “such words as Bible, Holy Ghost and Trinity do not occur at all in his writings, while Jesu, Christ and Christmas are found only in some his earliest plays” (1962, 203). The names of saints are also greatly reduced. Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet is a rare exception, appealing to “Holy Saint Francis” (Francis of Assisi) and “Jesu Maria” (II iii 65). Such obvious omissions are very significant, and can be set against the concentrations of other lexical uses, which modern concordances, such as that compiled by Marvin Spevack (1968), set out in detail, both under play and individual character.

Forms of Swearing

In presenting characters in extreme situations of love, passion, vengeance, and suffering, Shakespeare explored the complexities of swearing and exclamation from both individual and cultural perspectives. His plays show the whole gamut of swearing, namely asseveration, invocation, malediction, blasphemy, profanity, and obscenity, ranging from the most solemn oaths and deadly curses to the most absurd and trivial exclamations. Other forms of provocation, such as the insulting gestures used in the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet are discussed in the entry for body language.

In terms of content, the name of God is often abbreviated to Od , euphemized as gar , and omitted completely as in ‘sdeath . The names of Christ and Mary are also commonly euphemized to Jesu and marry , while the names of saints are greatly reduced in comparison with medieval times. By the Mass, by my faith, upon my soul , and many such Christian notions also feature numerously, as do forms such as in good troth and upon my honour . In Twelfth Night , when Feste the Fool appears disguised in a priest’s habit, Sir Toby Belch greets him with the stagey euphemism “Jove bless thee, master Parson” (IV ii 10). On the other hand, the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost says playfully “Saint Cupid, then!” (IV iii 366). There were, thus, clear signs of self-censorship and evasion even prior to the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606). On occasion, characters swear by less obvious items like their head, hands, gloves, and hats, even the day, the elements, and the clouds. The plays set in classical and pagan periods have an appropriate range of foreign deities.

There is an equal range of attitudes toward and credibility in swearing. As A.P. Rossiter has shown, in the History plays, especially in Richard III , curses come true with an alarming precision (1961, 1-23). Yet in a powerful scene in Henry VI, Part II , Queen Margaret and the Earl of Suffolk oscillate between violent curses on their enemies and an awareness of their inefficacy. Suffolk’s speech, “Would curse kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan,” admits the element of folklore, while Margaret’s response is more pragmatic:

Enough sweet Suffolk, thou torment’s thyself
And these dread curses, like the sun ‘gainst glass [a mirror]
Or like an overchargèd gun, recoil,
And turn the force of them upon thyself.
(III ii 328-31)

Modern psychological insights abound: in some cases, oaths are substitutes for action, in others they disappear into the “empty, vast and wandering air.” Furthermore, Shakespeare’s creation of character was so sophisticated that the great tragic heroes have individuated oaths, as well as diction and imagery.

Considering the convention of “swearing as commitment,” there are a number of variations. One is this touching but ironic exchange from Romeo and Juliet (1595):

Romeo:   Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear,
       That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops,—

Juliet:    O! swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
       That monthly changes in her circled orb,
       Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Romeo:   What shall I swear by?

Juliet:    Do not swear at all;
       Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
       Which is the god of my idolatory,
       And I’ll believe thee.

(II ii 107-16)

Beneath the surface of these expressions of juvenile passion, Shakespeare is exploring the twofold problems of amorous commitment faced by his characters, and his own artistic expression of some notion of the divine, without using the name of God. Juliet’s simple injunction is, significantly, taken straight from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “But I say unto you, Swear not at all” (St. Matthew, 5:34).

By contrast, when the duty of vengeance falls upon the hero in Hamlet (1601), he is extremely insistent that all the witnesses, even his personal friends, should swear formally upon a sword that they have not seen his father’s Ghost. In this strange ritual, which is really a form of perjury, even the Ghost participates:

Marcellus: We have sworn, my lord, already.

Hamlet: Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.

Ghost:   [beneath] Swear.

(I v 155-57)

In a play fundamentally concerned with Heaven and Earth, Purgatory, and the Last Judgment, Hamlet is spiritually sensitive to an unusual degree. At the first appearance of the Ghost, he is clearly fearful that the spirit may be a devil: “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” (I v 18). This diabolical possibility is never entirely removed, so that when the Ghost reappears in Act III scene iv, he again cries out “Save me and hover o’er me / You heavenly guards!” After the Ghost’s first hideous revelations of murder, adultery, and “damned incest,” the most articulate of Shakespeare’s characters is simply overwhelmed, not knowing what superhuman force to appeal to:

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? O fie!
(I v 92-93)

Juxtaposing the extremes of swearing, Hamlet is outraged at “marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths” (III iv 45). He himself utters a great variety of oaths, also providing insights into the practice and validity of “swearing at” or vituperation. After the Ghost’s revelations he swears “by St. Patrick” (I v 141) appropriately choosing the saint who is the keeper of purgatory. ( Saints’ names, so profusely used in the Middle Ages, were becoming politically incorrect in the new religious climate of Protestantism.)

The Oedipus Complex which Freud and his disciple Ernest Jones saw embodied in Hamlet’s situation manifests itself in his schizophrenic language. Hamlet is unable to articulate his detestation of the murderer-usurper Claudius directly, using irony and bitter puns. Instead he turns his verbal aggression against himself, his mother, and Ophelia. His almost hysterical reiteration of the key terms “lecherous” and “incestuous” is as obvious a symptom as his lecture to his mother not to succumb to her husband’s amorous advances with his “reechy [filthy] kisses” and his “damned fingers” (III iv 184-85). In the great soliloquy ending Act II, he gives us insights into his self-hatred and into other contemporary provocations:

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate [skull] across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, and gives me the lie in the throat [accuses me of lying] … Ha? [Hey?]
‘Swounds [God’s wounds], I should take it.
(II ii 560-64)

He first succumbs to a frenzy of execration, then berates himself for descending to the verbal level of a whore or kitchen servant:

Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! Ay sure. This is most brave [fine],
That I …
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab [prostitute]
A scullion!
(II ii 568-75)

(Scullions were the lowest of kitchen servants, notorious for their foul language. The association of cursing with whores was also commonly stressed.)

Throughout the tragedy the tone of Hamlet’s public speech oscillates between low abuse and the dignified utterance of a prince and scholar. Obsessed by his own misogynist generalization, “Frailty, thy name is woman” (I ii 146), he unleashes volleys of savage bawdy against Ophelia. His cruel rejection, “Go thy ways to a nunnery” (III i 131) is a double entendre , since nunnery in Elizabethan underground slang meant “a brothel,” in addition to the conventional sense. (It still had the sense, according to Francis Grose, in 1785.) An extended series of public insults lies in this exchange with Ophelia:

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Ophelia: No, my lord.

Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia: Aye, my lord.

Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia: I think nothing my lord.

Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

Ophelia: What is, my lord.

Hamlet: Nothing.

(III ii 120-28)

The key puns, which an Elizabethan audience would understand, are the sexual senses attaching to lap, nothing , and country . The first could mean the female sexual organs, especially in the phrase “in your lap,” also so used in Henry VI, Part II (III ii 390) and Much Ado About Nothing (V ii 99). The title of the latter play naughtily puns on the old slang sense of nothing in the sense of “cunt” through the symbolism of “an O thing.” Clearly Hamlet intends this sense by his reference to country matters , explained by G.R. Hibbard in the Oxford Shakespeare edition: “sexual intercourse, quibbling indecently on the first syllable of country ,” (1987, 254). Dr. Johnson in his edition of 1765 proposed country manners , which even the contemporary scholar Edmond Malone summarily rejected in 1793: “What Shakespeare meant to allude to, must be too obvious to every reader to require any explanation” (cited in Hulme 1977, 92).

The degree to which Hamlet is assuming the “antic disposition” of madness remains an insoluble critical problem. No such doubt exists in the case of the traumatized Ophelia, who in her mad scene recalls her seduction and poignantly resuscitates strange oaths:

(She sings) By Gis and by Saint Charity,
           Alack and fie for shame!
Young men will do ‘t, if they come to ’t,
        By Cock, they are to blame;

Quoth she “Before you tumbled me,
        You promised me to wed.”
(IV v 56-62)

Gis , often spelt jis , is an old “minced” form of Jesus. Cock is a similar form of God , dating from the fourteenth century. The context, the revelation of a “buried” sexual experience, clearly invites a Freudian interpretation, since “cock” had been used metaphorically for “penis” for some two centuries, and is used punningly in several contexts.

The uncensored and disturbing sexuality in the speeches of Hamlet and Ophelia derive from the contemporary stereotypical notion that the insane suffered from a sexual fixation. The same condition surfaces in Edgar in King Lear when he assumes the role of the lunatic Poor Tom, uttering such odd riddles as “Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill” (III iv 76). Here Pillicock is “a term of endearment for the phallus,” the ancestor of modern British English pillock , while Pillicock Hill corresponds to the Mons Veneris. Edgar continues in this bawdy vein for several lines (III iv 76-92). When Lear descends into true madness, the sexual obsession is unambiguous, expressed in steadily descending register and disintegrating control, starting with the absurd edict, “Let copulation thrive!” proceeding through alarming Manichaeism or extreme dualism, to ultimate horror and disgust at the female sexual appetite, likened to the mouth of hell:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s.
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
(IV vi 127-33).

Another aspect of Edgar’s assumed lunacy is diabolical possession, shown in his repeated references to “the foul fiend” and his ironic disclosure that “the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman” (III iv 146). Both aspects derive from Samuel Harsnett’s Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures (1603).

Damnation

Although Othello is essentially a secular tragedy, the hero’s language and world-view consistently juxtapose heaven and hell, the inspiring and the degrading impulses in man. Unlike Hamlet, Othello lacks the skepticism to examine the evidence against Desdemona and the spiritual reluctance to use violence. Initially he certainly shows heroic status, maintained up to his great vow of vengeance, beginning “Like to the Pontic sea” and ending

Now by yond marble heaven,

In the due reverence of a sacred vow,
I here engage my words.
(III iii 467-69)

Thereafter he declines remorselessly, cursing Desdemona furiously (“Damn her, lewd mix, O damn her!” III iii 475), becoming so tormented by the poison of jealousy that he descends into a nadir of subhuman and incoherent ravings littered with oaths:

Lie with her, zounds, that fulsome! Handkerchief—confessions—
Handkerchief!… Pish! Noses, ears and lips. Is’t possible? Confess?-
Handkerchief?—O devil! [ falls into a trance .]
(IV i 35-43)

Othello never completely recovers his heroic status nor his wits, greeting his Venetian in-law Lodovico distractedly: “You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus … Goats and monkeys!” (IV i 259). (Goats and monkeys were traditional symbols of lust.) His most reiterated oath is simply “Devil!,” together with many others with diabolical associations, such as “Fire and brimstone!” (IV i 229) and the final characterization of Iago as a “demi-devil” (V ii 301). His increasing abuse of Desdemona in outbursts such as “Impudent strumpet!” (IV ii 82) is matched by her increasing dignity. In death he addresses her alternately as “O ill-starred wench!” and “Cold, cold my girl! / Even like thy chastity.” Eventually he recognizes the terrible spiritual consequences of his act, damnation gruesomely depicted in apocalyptic medieval terms (“Whip me ye devils … roast me in sulphur!” V ii 273-78). The stereotypes surrounding Othello are also discussed in the entry for Blacks.

Macbeth (1605) alone of the tragedies has little focus on swearing or oaths per se . It is also a strange religious anomaly, being nominally set within the Christian era (the real Macbeth having been king of Scotland from 1040 to 1057) but having remarkably few explicit Christian references. In the moral structure of the play the Witches are clearly the agents of chaos and evil, yet their diabolical status is problematic. Shakespeare was evidently pandering to two of the new king’s passionate concerns, namely witchcraft, on which James I had written Dæmonologie, in forme of a dialogue (1597), and the political/religious notion of the Divine Right of Kings. Banquo and Macduff alone use religious language, but of an unconventional kind, shown in the arcane symbolism of Macduff’s reaction to the “sacrilegious murder” of the King (II iii 64-69). His direct spiritual condemnations of Macbeth are “devilish” (IV iii 117), “hell-kite” (IV iii 217), “this fiend of Scotland” (IV iii 233), and finally “hell-hound” (V vii 32). Despite the increasing horror of Macbeth’s tyranny, there are few appeals to the Almighty and no miraculous interventions. When told of the massacre of his entire family, Macduff asks incredulously: “Did heaven look on, /And would not take their part?” (IV iii 223-24).

Macbeth and his wife technically invoke only the powers of darkness (“Stars, hide your fires”; “Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell”), but they do not conjure up the Devil specifically, as Marlowe’s Faustus does. Though he alludes once to having given “mine eternal jewel” to “the common Enemy of man” (III i 68), Macbeth still invokes “Fate [to] champion me to the utterance” (III i 72), as if Fate were partial. Yet he invokes the Witches to create chaos:

I conjure you …
Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the Churches.
(IV i 50-53)

Macbeth’s invocation is on a cosmic plane, fundamentally destroying “the treasure of Nature’s germens” (IV i 59). Alongside this, his curse “The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon” (V iii 11) is fairly trivial. His final soliloquy, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” (V v 19-28) is not an expression of spiritual horror like that of Othello at facing the Last Judgment, but a remarkable articulation of meaninglessness, seeing life as a brief charade. Though the final judgments of Malcolm on “this dead butcher and his fiend-like Queen” (V vii 98) are simplistic and harsh, perhaps the Devil has indeed entered into them, as perhaps it does into Othello.

The most explicit and daring references to swearing and the Devil occur in the least expected scene, that of the Porter, who in his apparently drunken farrago expands on two major themes relating to false swearing, namely equivocation (the deliberate use of ambiguity to deceive) and treachery: “Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven” (II iii 9-11). A contemporary audience would immediately recognize a topical reference to the Gunpowder Plot, the unsuccessful conspiracy by Catholic dissidents in the same year (1605) to kill King James and blow up the Houses of Parliament. At his trial, the Jesuit conspirator Father Garnet (who assumed the name of Farmer, used by Shakespeare in this scene) finally confessed to having sworn falsely. When accused of perjury, he explained “that so long as he thought that they had no Proof he was not bound to accuse himself: but when he saw they had Proof, he stood not long in it” (from a contemporary letter by John Chamberlaine dated April 5, 1606, quoted by Muir, 1962, xviii). King James himself commented: “for the Jesuits are the worst and most seditious fellows in the world. They are slaves and spies, as you know” (Muir 1962, xxi). The stereotype is discussed further under Catholics.

Cursing

Several of Shakespeare’s tragedies are set in pagan times. Although not entirely consistent in his religious references, he often exploits an alien religious setting to explore the psychology and rituals of belief. His first exploration of the ancient world, Titus Andronicus (1590), contains this penetrating exchange between the cynical villain Aaron the Moor (also discussed in the entry for Blacks ) and Lucius, one of the sons of Titus:

Lucius: Who should I swear by? Thou believ’st no god:
        That granted, how cans’t thou believe an oath?

Aaron: What if I do not? As indeed, I do not;
        Yet, for I know thou art religious
        And hast a thing within thee called conscience,
        With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies,
        Which I have seen thee careful to observe,
        Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know
        An idiot holds his bauble for his god,
        And keeps the oath which by that god he swears.

(V i 71-80)

The unique reference to “popish tricks and ceremonies” is obviously anachronistic and one of the very few instances of Shakespeare making risquè contemporary reference to controversial religious matters. There are similar anachronisms in the Roman plays in Cassius’s reference to “th’ eternal devil” ( Julius Caesar I ii 160) and in Antony’s oath “gods and devils” ( Antony and Cleopatra III xiii 89).

Shakespeare was to return to the ancient world repeatedly: in Julius Caesar (1599), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Antony and Cleopatra (1606), Timon of Athens (1607), and Coriolanus (1608). He depicts Rome as a secular society deeply riven by class differences expressed very crudely, the most powerful animus appearing in savage invectives directed at the plebs or lower classes. Thus the tribune Marullus in Julius Caesar berates the plebs as “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” (I i 40). The class hatred of Coriolanus, the patrician war hero, is visceral and unrelenting, right from his first entrance when he confronts the starving “company of mutinous citizens” with “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues?” (I i 170). When he is later labeled “an enemy to the people and his country,” he is justifiably provoked by the political insult, but he welcomes exile and arrogantly rejects the plebs:

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.
(III iii 118-21)

As the entry for dogs makes clear, Shakespeare’s use of cur as a term of insult is original. Coriolanus’s catalogue of caustic physical abuse, dismissing the plebs as “garlic eaters” and “the mutable, rank-scented meiny” (“the changeable, evil-smelling mob”) is compounded with social labels like “apron men” for artisans. His devastating frankness reflects an ugly intolerance of human physicality, pyorrhoea, and body odor. However, he is not alone in his class attitude, articulating in public what most of his class dare say only in private. Thus the more benign patrician Menenius makes a similar observation in IV vi 130-33, while in Julius Caesar , Casca is cruelly ironic about the Roman crowd’s miasmic hysteria, which, he suggests, might have brought on Caesar’s epileptic fit: “the rabblement shouted … and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swooned and fell down at it” (I ii 242-46). Shakespeare seems to have been the first author to depict such class hatred based on stereotypes of physical repulsiveness (attributed solely to the lower orders). Significantly, no such class antipathy is expressed in his English plays.

In addition to the class aspects of the vituperation in Coriolanus , Shakespeare explores less predictable features of personal insult. Coriolanus the fearless national war hero is, by a Freudian irony, mother-bound. When his rival and enemy Aufidius mocks him with the schoolboy insult “thou boy of tears,” alluding to his tearful reconciliation with his mother at the gates of Rome, the insult drives Coriolanus berserk, into a tirade of frenzy and despair (V v 101-17).

Troilus and Cressida (1602) gives a jaundiced subversive view of the Trojan War, chiefly from the perspective of Thersites, “a deformed and scurrilous Greek,” who trivializes the theme immortalized by Homer, claiming that “all the argument is a cuckold [Menelaus] and a whore [Helen]” (II iii 78). What Othello memorably called “the pomp and circumstance of glorious war” is degraded by sordid infighting in both camps and degrading insults, such as those traded by Ajax and Thersites:

Ajax:    Thou bitch-wolf ‘s son, canst thou not hear? Feel then. [ Strikes him ]

Thersites: The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!

The exchange continues in this vein, Ajax scoring points with such unsubtle barbs as “Cobloaf!” (a small rounded loaf), “You whoreson cur!,” and “You dog!,” but relying more on his fists, while Thersites replies with “Thou sodden-witted lord!,” “thou scurvy valiant ass!,” and so on (II i 5-25). This trading of insults is a low-grade example of flyting, which has a rich but discontinuous history in English, as the relevant entry shows. Julius Caesar also contains an example in V i 27-66, prior to the crucial battle at Phillipi, an exchange not found in the major source for the play, Plutarch’s Lives .

Thersites is a devastating truth teller, referring to Patroclus as Achilles’ “masculine whore” and cursing him with a catalogue of diseases (V i 20-27). This theme, especially that of syphilis, culminates in the Epilogue of Pandarus, diseased himself, addressing his fellow pimps, their prostitutes, and the audience: “Good traders of the flesh … Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade … [I] bequeath you my diseases.” His allusion to “some gallèd goose of Winchester” (V xi 55) is a topical reference to London whores under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester, discussed further under prostitutes.

Timon of Athens (1607) is the most extreme expression of detestation and rejection of humankind, although “Most critics accept that it is either unfinished or the product of a collaboration, or both” (Kermode 2000, 231). Like Lear, Timon becomes obsessed with ingratitude, of those who parasitically enjoyed his prodigal displays of hospitality but then abandoned him. “I am misanthropos ,” he announces (IV iii 53), unleashing alarming curses upon the citizenry. His imprecations, unlike Lear’s, are all-encompassing, willing upon Athens a regime of chaos, savagery, and disease. More bizarrely, they are directed, not at divine or supernatural agencies, but at inanimate objects:

O thou wall
That girdlest in those wolves, dive in the earth,
And fence not Athens!
(IV i 1-3)

This insane address to the wall is a reminder of its comic counterpart, the hilarious scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V ii 178):

Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink to blink through with mine eyne [eyes]!
[ Wall holds up his fingers ]

Timon wishes to destroy wholesale all social and familial cohesion: (“Obedience fail in children!”; “Do’t in your parents’ eyes!”) urging antisocial and criminal imperatives (“Bankrupts, hold fast!”; “bound servants, steal!”; “Maid, to thy master’s bed, thy mistress is o’ the brothel”). These come from the initially terrifying but increasingly absurd tirade in Act IV scene i, quoted in the entry for Dr. Thomas Bowdler, since it expurgated in from The Family Shakespeare (1818). As with Lear, a sexual obsession takes hold of Timon, and when he encounters the whores Phrynia and Timandra he urges them in a horrific invocation to spread venereal disease, even specifying its gruesome symptoms:

Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man …
         Down with the nose,
Down with it flat, take the bridge quite away …
         Make curled-pate ruffians bald …
                                    Plague all,
That your activity may defeat and quell
The source of all erection.
(IV iii 152-65)

Timon’s final misanthropic words on his gravestone are entirely typical:

Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate
Pass by, and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait.
(V iv 72-73)

In King Lear (ca. 1605), the benighted paganism of ancient Britain is sharply evoked from the first act, when the headstrong King invokes against his daughter Cordelia primitive natural forces: “By the sacred radiance of the sun” (I i 111). Protests by the honest Earl of Kent provoke this furious but absurd exchange:

Lear:    Now by Apollo—

Kent:                      Now by Apollo, King,
      Thou swear’st thy gods in vain.

Lear:                      O vassal! Miscreant!
(I i 162-65)

In this context miscreant is a highly ironic term, since it means “a heretic or unbeliever,” rather than “rascal or villain,” as used in Bolingbroke’s insult to Mowbray in Richard II: “Thou art a traitor and a miscreant” (I i 39).

In a profound sense King Lear depicts a return to nature. In this dark world of primitive mind-sets and the law of the jungle, the attractive villain Edmund the Bastard announces that “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (I ii 1), dismissing the whole establishment belief in “legitimacy” and finishing with the bawdy appeal, “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” (I ii 22). When the King is crossed by Goneril, he exclaims “Darkness and devils!” and denounces her as a “degenerate bastard” (I iv 258-60), uttering the terrifyingly unnatural curse:

Hear, Nature, hear!; dear Goddess hear!…
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up in her the organs of increase
(I iv 282-86)

He persists in the following act:

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall
On her ungrateful top! [head] Strike her young bones,
You taking airs, with lameness.
(II iv 161-63)

Take , meaning to exert a malign influence, is laden with primitive beliefs in the evil powers of nature which witchcraft or cursing could unlock. It is also used in Hamlet (I i 144-45): “then no planets strike, / No fairy takes.” In the great mad scene beginning “Blow winds and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow,” Lear invokes all the forces of natural disorder, winds, cataracts, hurricanes, lightning, and “all shaking thunder” to

Crack Nature’s molds, all germans spill at once
That make ingrateful man.
(III ii 8-9)

The last two lines have an alarmingly modern resonance, meaning “destroy the templates creation and the basic seeds of life.”

The tragedy is a great chorus of such invocations, curses, and desperate appeals, including Regan’s “O the blest gods!” and Cordelia’s later prayer “O you kind gods!,” when she uses spells and charms to heal Lear. Both polytheistic forms like “the gods” and the monotheistic “God” are appealed to. But in the end the gods appear to be silent and indifferent. For the cruelest irony in all Shakespeare is surely the moment when Albany utters the prayer for Cordelia, “The gods defend her!,” only to be answered by the stage direction Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms and the excruciating line

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones.
(V iii 259)

Bawdy and Obscenity

On a totally different secular level, King Lear has many racy insults. Those of the Fool tend be subtle and oblique, but the remarkable tirade with which the Duke of Kent berates Oswald, Goneril’s effete steward, seeking to provoke him to a duel, is cruelly direct:

A knave, a rascal, eater of broken meats [scraps]; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking [legalistic] knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical [overfastidious] rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that would be a bawd [pimp] in way of service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.

(II ii 14-22)

The passage is a rich compendium of established insults, such as knave, rascal, whoreson, bawd , and son of a bitch , all of which have their own entries, as well as sharper barbs, alluding to Oswald’s limited wardrobe, wealth, courage, and capacities as a pander or pimp. Kent’s next speech ends: “You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!” (II ii 34). Here barbermonger would mean “a patron of hairdressers,” implying narcissism. Cullion , from Old French coillon, couillon , meaning a “testicle,” is used literally in Chaucer, but by Elizabethan times it had become a coarse term of abuse, meaning “rascal,” found in other dramatists and elsewhere in Shakespeare ( Henry VI, Part II I iii 38; Henry V III ii 22; and The Taming of the Shrew IV ii 20). Shakespeare’s formation cullionly is original.

Similar tirades occur in the bantering scenes between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I . Falstaff mocks the Prince’s thinness with increasingly provocative obscenities: “‘Sblood, you starveling, you eelskin, you dried neat’s-tongue [ox’s tongue], you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish—” (II iv 274-75). Falstaff’s bawdy metaphors overstep the boundaries of decorum, since a bull’s pizzle is its penis, dried and often used as a whip, while stock-fish , a long dried-up piece of cod, had similar phallic connotations, often implying impotence. However, the context of comic role-playing both encourages exaggeration and defuses provocation.

Bawdy is more obviously apparent in the comedies, but is found in virtually all Shakespeare’s plays. In characters like Mercutio and Edmund it seems intended to give a nonchalant, macho appeal. Hamlet’s bawdy, on the other hand, conforms to the Freudian analysis of being both obscene and bitter. Elsewhere it surfaces in some unexpected contexts. A classic instance occurs in Twelfth Night , a comparatively “clean” play, when the professedly puritanical Malvolio publicly deciphers the forged and planted letter apparently written by the lady Olivia: “By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus she makes her great P’s” (II v 72). Malvolio has unwittingly spelt out what a recent editor has termed “a slang reference to the female pudenda” (Donno, ed., 1985, 90). As if to rub in the bawdy point, Shakespeare has the aristocratic idiot Sir Andrew Aguecheek ask the naive question: “Her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s: why that?” (II v 75). Elsewhere Sir Toby Belch also uses the term in a proverbial phrase of abuse, assuring Sir Andrew “if thou hast her [Olivia] not i’ th’ end, call me cut” (II iii 156).

Whereas obscenity is the direct and undisguised use of taboo language, the vital ingredient of bawdy is the stage dynamic, since it becomes a game whereby the author chooses terms that are sufficiently suggestive in their innuendoes to amuse the audience, but superficially innocent or disguised to avoid censorship. It is essentially a form of humorous dramatic irony in which certain motifs become familiar, even standing jokes with the audience. The difference can be illustrated in the treatment of cuckoldry, a major theme in Shakespeare. Real or imagined, it is seminal to the plots of Othello, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida , and The Winter’s Tale , where it surfaces alarmingly in Leontes’s tormented and embarrassing aside to the audience: “There have been … cuckolds ere now,” including many a husband in the audience unaware that his wife, whose arms he now holds, has “been sluic’d [seduced] in his absence … by Sir Smile, his neighbour” (I ii 194-200). Bawdy, alternatively, defuses the horror and violence of sexual jealousy by indirect allusions to infidelity through the key word horns , the traditional emblem mocking the cuckold, who becomes a comic scapegoat. Variations are found in horn used as a verb: horned, horner, horn-mad, horn-maker , and even the Italian term cornuto . As the studies of Partridge (1947), Colman (1974), and Williams (1997) show, bawdy was a highly developed code language.

Shakespeare’s actual use of taboo terms is not as daring as his contemporary Ben Jonson. Starting with the excretory category, piss occurs in a few contexts, notably in the phrase a pissing while in Two Gentlemen of Verona (IV iv 21) and horse-piss in The Tempest (IV i 199). Shit , on the other hand, never appears; nor does arse , but the slang equivalent bum is used three times. Fart occurs only in the euphemistic form fartuous , a comic version of vertuous used by Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor (II ii 100). Fuck is similarly avoided, being amusingly euphemized in the seemingly dry grammar lesson in the same play via the technical term vocative , which when put into the mouth of the Welshman Sir Hugh Evans, comes out as the obviously suggestive focative (IV i 53):

Sir Hugh Evans: … what is the focative case, William?

William:        O vocativo, O .

Sir Hugh Evans: Remember, William, focative is caret [it is missing].

Mistress Quickly: And that’s a good root.

Sir Hugh Evans: ’Oman, forbear [be quiet].

( Merry Wives of Windsor II ii 53-57)

Root is a fairly obvious phallic symbol, the symbolic meaning of “O” has been discussed, and case could mean “genitals.” Elsewhere he uses some of the standard terms and euphemisms for “penis,” namely prick (Romeo and Juliet II iv 121) and yard (Love’s Labour’s Lost V ii 676). Perhaps most surprising is the frank expression of xenophobic penis-envy in Henry VIII : “Have we some strange Indian with the great tool come to court, the women so besiege us? What a fry of fornication is at the door!” (II ii 115-16).

The other major pseudo-euphemism for fuck is foot , from French foutre , although the French form is also flamboyantly used by the outrageously uncensored fire-breathing braggart Pistol in absurd oaths such as “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!” and “a foutra for thine office!” ( Henry IV, Part II V ii 98, 120). Although several of his contemporaries (Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher) used windfucker , originally a name for the kestrel, as a personal insult, Shakespeare was more cautious. His euphemistic allusions to cunt via “country matters” in Hamlet (III ii 124) and “cut” in Twelfth Night (II v 72) have already been discussed. He clearly relished contriving scenes in which the most obscene terms were put into the most polite mouths. Thus the English lesson given to the French princess in Henry V turns out to be a parody of the “facts of life” routine, full of earnest delicacy:

Katharine:   Comment appellez-vous le pied et la robe.

Alice:      De foot, madame; et le coun.

Katharine:   De foot, et le coun? O Seigneur Dieu! Ces sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user .

(III iv 55-58)

By emphasizing the French terms for fuck ( foot ) and cunt ( con and coun ), which are innocent or meaningless in English, Shakespeare is making the nominalist point that words are simply sounds and their meanings merely cultural and conventional. The princess puts it simply: “Ces sont mots de son mauvais.” (“These are words with a bad sound.”)

The notion of “feminine delicacy” is further enhanced by the dramatic irony of the staging. The parts of Mistress Quickly, who enters eagerly into bawdy, and Katharine and Alice, who are embarrassed by it, were, of course, played by men or boys. So were the roles of Mistress Overdone (“a Bawd”) in Measure for Measure , the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet , and Kate the Shrew. Several Shakespearean heroines indulge enthusiastically in bawdy, parrying the puns with men. Beatrice in the bawdily titled Much Ado About Nothing , discussing “the man of parts” with her uncle, the Governor of Messina, comments: “With a good leg and a good foot, uncle, and money enough in his purse, such a man would win any woman in the world, if ’a [he] could get her good will” (II i 15-18). Here the double entendres are leg (= “penis”), foot (= “fuck”), and will (= “sexual appetite”). Her uncle responds that she will never get a husband if she is “so shrewd of tongue.” Cleopatra herself, who utters such extraordinary romantic sentiments and a yearn- ing for eternity, also uses a multitude of frank sexual images, allusions, and innuendoes. “I take no pleasure in aught an eunuch has” is followed by the envious fantasy “O happy horse to bear the weight of Antony!” and reminiscing of her great lovers, when she was

A morsel for a monarch [Caesar]: and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow … and die
With looking on his life.
(I v 30-34)

In sexual contexts (which stand obviously suggests here), die meant “to experience orgasm,” a sense not even recorded in the original Oxford English Dictionary , being first elucidated by Eric Partridge in Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1947) with the supporting quotation from Much Ado About Nothing where Benedick says to Beatrice: “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thine eyes” (V ii 99-101). When Antony tells Cleopatra of the death of his wife, Fulvia, she responds with mocking incredulity: “Can Fulvia die?” (I iii 58). Shakespeare’s bawdy clearly has no class or sexual barriers, being uttered and relished by servants and noblemen, heroes and villains, kings and queens alike. The same range is only partly apparent in oaths, which are covered more fully in the entry for swearing in women.

As this overview has sought to show, Shakespeare was both subtle and daring in his use of oaths, invocations, foul language, ethnic slurs, and vituperation. He went to the very limits, and sometimes beyond, in his expression of souls in terrible anguish, fury, and despair, as well as in scenes of the most uproarious and lewd comedy. In his own lifetime, belief in magic, the spell, and the curse were still genuine, despite Renaissance skepticism, and many of his plays deal openly with their potency. The Tempest (1611) is commonly interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage (“Our revels now are ended”) and to his art, especially in his alter-ego Prospero’s renunciation of magic in the last act. His wonderful abilities obviously stand at the furthest remove from those of the debased slave Caliban who complains:

You taught me language; and my profit on ‘t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid [destroy] you
For learning [teaching] me your language!
(I ii 363-65)

Prospero’s speech begins with fanciful invocations to the “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves.” But he claims magical powers over the elements and even over the dead. To the accompaniment of “solemn music,” he undertakes to break his staff, bury it,

And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
(V i 57-58)

Prospero thus abandons magic willingly, an action that Faustus finally offers to do out of desperation (“I’ll burn my book!”) in his final futile plea to avoid damnation. Like Chaucer before him in his Retractions, Shakespeare ends the Epilogue to The Tempest with a Christian awareness of the power of prayer and of mercy:

As you from crimes would pardoned be
Let your indulgence set me free.

A curious anonymous footnote lies in the inscription beneath Shakespeare’s bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. It is a vehement, almost profane, wish to be left in peace:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbear,
To digg the dust enclosed heare.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

After Shakespeare’s death his texts were toned down, notably in the First Folio (1623), edited by his friends John Heming and Henry Condell. These alterations were, however, confined to religious oaths, as can be seen in these instances from Hamlet: O God > Heaven I ii 150, 195; O God Horatio > O good Horatio V ii 297; Swounds > Why II ii 564 > Come V i 264; ‘Sblood > Why III ii 352; Do you see this, O God > you Gods IV v 201. The language of a liberal swearer like Falstaff was similarly edited: ’Sblood > Why III ii 352; i’faith (II iv 438) was simply expunged; God help the wicked was altered to Heaven help the wicked II iv 464. A recent editor of Othello has counted fifty cases where profanities in the earlier Quarto text are deleted or modified in the Folio (Honigmann 1997, 352).

These were symptoms of the Puritanism which was becoming a major force in the land, eventually closing the theaters in 1642. Nor did the passing of Puritanism guarantee a return to the purity of the source. As the entries for Dr. Thomas Bowdler and Bowdlerization make clear, the expurgation of sexual references continued, and the inroads made into the Shakespeare text in the Victorian era were drastic. Thomas Bowdler’s sanitized and enormously popular Family Shakespeare did not originally even include Romeo and Juliet in the anonymous first edition of 1807, and by 1894 there were some forty expurgated editions of Shakespeare on the market. Even in modern times few school editions are completely unexpurgated.