[In the following essay, Morén contends that Puck is a representative of sexuality in A Midsummer Night's Dream and examines the distinctive meanings of the word “Puck” in the text of the play in order to support this claim.]

The application of a “digressive” approach to A Midsummer Night's Dream¹ has made it possible to unearth Shakespeare's standpoint in one of the play's central issues. Thus several cruces, notably, “‘Puck's name’ … bear no barm … ‘tailor’ cries … cough … loffe,” are given plausible solutions, and, as a consequence, one of Puck's enigmatic passages unravels as a comment on the “imagination vs. reason” theme. In this semantic examination a few outings in other parts of “Shakespeareshire,” as well as extra-disciplinary dittos, have been necessary. These side-tracks encompass areas as diverse as: magical milk-theft as portrayed in Swedish medieval church murals, grotesque popular humor, Rabelais's use of antique fables, insect identification, the linkage between fairies, witches and prostitution, modern medical-nutritional knowledge, and the civilizing process in the history of manners.

Puck's “safe” image has been questioned by many authors. Zern asks himself where Puck of popular tradition is: Has Shakespeare played down the obscenity, painted him without other phallic symbols than a broom?² Puck may not stand up to popular expectations of sexual expressivity throughout the play but there is one scene where his capacity for the sexually grotesque lies hidden in word-play.

FAIRY:
Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm,
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?
PUCK:
Thou speak'st aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab,
And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
And on her wither'd dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And “tailor” cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.

An indication of the insignificance generally assigned such opaque portions of the text as this is the elision in stage productions. In the 1981 BBC TV production, for instance, 11 out of the 26 lines under scrutiny in the present article were left out, viz. the dairy scene, and the last four lines. I suggest that Puck's introduction at II.i.32-57 include some important coarse punning that is now almost lost to oblivion. The synonymy and homonymy implied do not apply in today's English. The semantic pun, says Blake, “involves words which have two meanings, one of which is often obscene. The latter may not be familiar today, for each age develops its own bawdy vocabulary, and so the double entendre is easily overlooked.”³ For the homonymic pun I have, where possible, observed Kökeritz's instruction: “Once homonymity has been proved, the next important step will therefore be to ascertain its plausibility in a given context. Thus if we find that one of two homonymous words occurs in a Shakespearean passage whose coherence and effectiveness would be improved by a play on the other word, then strong probability favors the assumption that such punning was originally intended.”⁴ This article will attempt to reconstruct the necessary contexts. Blake adds, that the homophonic pun “involves words which sounded alike in at least one variant form in the London speech of the Elizabethan period, for the dramatists frequently drew upon less common pronunciations to achieve their wordplay.”⁵ These facts may account for the overlooking of a programmatic “prologue” delivered by Puck. In this instance of double entendre imagery there are references made to Æsop's fable about the cricket and the ant: The carefree cricket plays his violin all summer instead of gathering winter-stores. When autumn winds make his life a misery and he seeks refuge with the wise industrious ant, she maliciously shuts her door on him. In the present MND [A Midsummer Night's Dream] simile the outcome is reversed,⁶ which can be seen as an epitome of Shakespeare's carpe diem stance. We shall see how the cricket/Puck works wonders with his lecherous fiddlestick, as it were, whereas the present ant/aunt that represents the sex industry is made to bite the dust. This seems to be a reflection of one of the principal themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream: that of the contradiction⁷ between carefree sensuous imagination and cool rationality such as is represented by Hippolyta and Theseus respectively at MND V.i.1-6; 23-27,⁸

HIPPOLYTA:
'Tis strange my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.
THESEUS:
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends …
HIPPOLYTA:
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

ORIGIN OF PUCK'S CHARACTER AND NAME

In later tradition Puck is usually brought out with a good heart but bent on mischief. Previous terminological research is summed up by Furness in the Variorum Edition⁹ and by Brooks in Arden. They point to Reginald Scot¹⁰ for possibly the first references to Robin Goodfellow as Puck: “In the same breath with Robin he mentions ‘the puckle,’ though he does not identify the two.”¹¹ An examination of related creatures and phenomena in folklore was carried out by William Bell.¹² In his extensive investigation into the sources of Puck Bell followed leads into ancient history, even prehistoric tradition, especially Nordic. Despite his pointing out as a possible predecessor a “carrier” with a vessel-shaped back,¹³ he did not disclose the connection with the milkstealing puke. Robin Goodfellow's involvement in any coarse joking, as suggested in a piece of writing detected by Collier,¹⁴ is staunchly questioned by Furness. The front page print of Robin Good-Fellow¹⁵ flaunting his attributes, a broom, a lit taper, a horn-like erection, cloven hoofs for feet, horns on his head, a bugle horn/horn for flying ointments (?), links him with fertility rites, or witches, or other fiends.

The fact that “Puck, or pouke, is an old word for devil”¹⁶ accounts for one element of Puck. That Shakespeare's Puck is more than a name is indicated in Puck's epilogue: “And as I am an honest Puck … Else the Puck a liar call.”¹⁷ Here, Puck transcends the category of proper nouns by taking both modifier and determiner. Furness accredits the first of the two instances to Puck's wish to “clear himself from any connexion with the ‘helle pouke.’”¹⁸ The present article argues to the contrary that the notion of a “magical milk-stealing creature” constituting Puck's conceptual background has not been sufficiently considered. Wall maps the field of magical milk-theft very thoroughly in his doctoral dissertation in Ethnology.¹⁹ The Swedish nouns puke and puk-hare, among others, were terms whose sense was restricted to “a magical milk-stealing creature,” in parts of Sweden, whereas in large parts of Northwest Europe puke denoted simply “ominous and unlucky shapes of evil provenance.” Milkstealing women in hares' guises have also been reported in Ireland, where some 150 instances are recorded,²⁰ the first mention being by Giraldus Cambrensis c. 1180 also including Wales and Scotland.²¹ In Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne c. 1300-1310, the first example of a milk-stealing object having been manufactured is mentioned, a sack brought to life. A similar sack is mentioned in a homiletic manual, Homo conditus, approximately 1330-1350, by a Swedish theologian, Magister Mathias.²² He had been a student in Paris for ten years and, being a member of the English students' “guild” there, may well have exchanged views on the matter of magical milk-theft with them. The Councils of Paris and Worms in 829 ad had dealt briefly with the belief that women could use magic to interfere with cows' milk-yield, which indicates that the concept is very old. Cases where imps have been said to steal milk from others' cattle are mentioned in witchcraft court proceedings.²³ In one trial (although not involving milktheft) an imp was termed a puckrel.²⁴

In Scandinavian popular imagination a milk-stealing creature could be assembled out of bits of broken whisks, ladles, brooms, burnt wood-chips from others' cowsheds, pieces of knitting-yarn, shavings of bells, drops of blood from the left little finger, with the addition of a magic charm, or rather by the making of a compact.²⁵ The resulting “emissaries” were a very common-place concept and records date back to late medieval times, all the way through the witchcraft trials and onwards. First, the witch had to establish her milk-stealing territory, the boundaries being the hearing distance of her calling out for the fattest milk, from a hill in the dead of night. After this inaugural rite she could send her puke to suck the milk of the neighbors' cows, to be regurgitated on his return to his mistress. There are a number of church murals illustrating these beliefs, the oldest ones dating back to c. 1440.²⁶ Out of 40 Swedish churches²⁷ that have murals of this kind, eight show a cat/hare-like creature suckling cattle, eight show the creature throwing up milk into a pail/trough, and 36 show churning activities, most of which where the woman is joined by the devil at the staff.²⁸ Theft of human milk was also reported. In a witchcraft trial in 1659 a ten-year-old girl testifies that 1 lb. of butter was the annual yield from a breastfeeding woman. The girl's mistress was accused of having milked a knife stuck in the wall²⁹ thus drawing the milk from this local mother's mammae. Kittredge likewise reports of witches' magical milk-theft in Scotland about 1691 “by drawing a spickot fastened in a Post, which will bring Milk as farr as a Bull will be heard to roar.”³⁰ In 1617-1630 the Swede L. P. Gothus in his Ethica Christiana explains that this kind of milk had been transported there by the dispatched milk-stealing creatures.³¹

The above-mentioned murals where a creature regurgitates milk offer strong support for the theory that the puke milk-theft was on Shakespeare's mind when he created Puck, for a very special reason: Shakespeare mentions a case of throwing up milk, viz. in Jaques's lines in As You Like It II. vii. 139:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

(emphasis added)

This is the first recorded instance of the verb puke. OED says: “origin unknown” and their suggested etymology is expressly mere conjuncture.³² In OED I found that puck is also entered for “nightjar, goatsucker,” a dialectal word, it is true, and without entries before 1883 for the “bird,” and 1834 for “a disease in cattle attributed to the nightjar.”³³ We do not know any terminological connection with Puck outside English. Scandinavian puke, however, is not recorded to have denoted a nightjar, although it was a creature of multifarious forms. The bird's legendary milk-stealing predilection, and capacity to cause disease in the cattle afflicted, has been well-known throughout southern and mid-Europe and has rendered it the German name Ziegenmelker and Danish gedemœlker. The Latin name, in Pliny, is Caprimulgus europœus ‘European goat-milker.’ Aristotle first wrote about it: “The so-called goat-sucker … flies to the she-goats and milks them, from which it has got its name; and they say that after it has milked it the udder dries up and the goat goes blind.”³⁴

Simpson points out that Scandinavian puke is “cognate with English ‘Puck’ and Irish ‘poohka.’”³⁵ Yeats enlarges on the Pooka's shapes: horse, ass, bull, goat, and eagle; and also presents a derivation of Pooka from poc ‘a he-goat.’³⁶ The connection with Shakespeare's Puck is mentioned as speculation, without, however, any reference to the milk-stealing hags in hares' shapes that appear in some of the folk tales in the book. Allowing myself to take this etymological speculation a few steps further, I would include buck. OED traces buck back to OE buc ‘male deer’ and bucca ‘he-goat.’ They date back to a tentative Indo-European word *bhugo-‘male animal of various kinds; stag, ram, he-goat.’³⁷Bacchus, denoting the orgiastic god Dionysys, resembles the *bhugo-derivatives. One of Bacchus's most common representations was the goat. Frazer states that, as “a goat he can hardly be separated from the minor divinities, the Pans, Satyrs, and Silenuses, all of whom are closely associated with him and are represented more or less in the form of goats.”³⁸ Bacchus had a dual image, being at the same time a tree-god and a deity in goat-form. “At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under the title of ‘the one of the Black Goatskin.’”³⁹ Etymological and conceptual links may well exist between, on the one had, wood-spirits, goats and nightjars in woodlands of ancient Greece, and a certain fairy in an Athenian wood in Shakespeareshire, on the other. In England a more general public became acquainted with this peculiar “milk-stealing bird” when William Turner published his book on birds, Avium praecipuarium, in 1544.

THE SERIOUS ORGANIZED IN JEST

The public that Shakespeare turned to needed to be receptive to even less lofty phenomena than an ominous bird that nests on the ground. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin classifies and investigates the background of the different expressions of popular grotesque.⁴⁰ Bakhtin claims that the “analysis we have applied to Rabelais would also help us discover the essential carnival element in the organization of Shakespeare's drama. This does not merely concern the secondary, clownish motives of his plays. The logic of crownings and uncrownings, in direct or indirect form, organizes the serious element also. … Shakespeare's drama has many outward carnivalesque aspects: images of the material bodily lower stratum, of ambivalent obscenities, and of popular banquet scenes.”⁴¹ The present difficulty in comprehending this imagery has applied ever since the classicists: “Rabelais's negative aspects as seen by La Bruyère consists first of all in his sexual and scatological obscenity, his curses and oaths, double entendres and vulgar quips—in other words, the tradition of folk culture in Rabelais's work, laughter and the material bodily lower stratum. The positive aspect is the purely literary, humanist element. The grotesque tradition peculiar to the marketplace⁴² and the academic literary tradition have parted ways and can no longer be brought together. … Obscenity has become narrowly sexual, isolated, individual, and has no place in the new official system of philosophy and imagery.”⁴³

An important clue to these sexually charged ambiguities is the above investigation of the word Puck. For the lines: “Are not you he That … bootless make the breathless housewife churn” the scene is obviously similar to the dairy of the church-murals, but rather depicting the victim of the milk-theft. In this sentence, however, syntax seems to be somewhat jumbled: the modifier bootless can refer to you (i.e. Puck), housewife or churn and the last is the most likely for the surface meaning: “churn fruitlessly, the butter will not form since the magical milk-thief Puck has stolen the cream, skimmed the milk.” Bootless housewife, “unshod” housewife, adds nothing to the meaning, so that variant can be struck off. However, choosing Puck to be bootless, i.e. tentatively “barefoot,” yields a coarse meaning and this syntactic ambiguity marks the pun. The typical description of the pouke that is mentioned by Furness: “an old word for devil” is also compatible with a barefoot Puck. Some of the witch-craft trials record that “the Devil came to her in the likenesse of a man in blackish cloathing, but had cloven feet”; “feit lyk the griffon”; “he had ugly feet uncovered”; “he had Hogers on his Legs without Shoes.”⁴⁴OED has hoger ‘a coarse stocking without the foot.’

The bootless innuendo can also be seen to herald the punning below on three-foot in “for three-foot stool mistaketh me.” The foot that is naked may be interpreted as “a penis,” the same meaning as in LLL [Love's Labour's Lost] V.ii.659: “[Adriano De] Arm[ado]. I do adore thy sweet grace's slipper. / Boyet. Loves her by the foot. / Dum[ain]. He may not be by the yard.” Here the implication is the phallic inadequacy of a mere foot as compared with a yard, the most common Elizabethan word for “penis.”⁴⁵ In plain the double entendre would read: “Are not you he that with uncovered penis makes the hussy masturbate you?”

A look into Rabelais may clarify the picture here: The Rabelaisian tradition included the portrayal of grotesque differences in genital size which was to become part of the cuckoldry/emasculation jesting imagery crowding the entries of Williams's dictionary. The resulting laughter in Rabelais, however, has a special quality:

It is also directed at those who laugh. The people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world. … This is one of the essential differences of the people's festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. … Let us here stress the special philosophical and utopian character of festive laughter and its orientation toward the highest spheres.⁴⁶

In Rabelais II.i, I have found an example, the eating of medlar fruits which resulted in swellings:

Others did swell at the shoulders, who in that place were so crump and knobbie, that they were therefore called Montifers, (which is as much to say as Hill-carriers,) of whom you see some yet in the world of divers sexes and degrees: of this race came Æsop, some of whose excellent words and deeds you have in writing: some other puffes did swell in length by the member, which they call the Labourer of nature,⁴⁷ in such sort that it grew marvellous long, fat, great, lustie, stirring and Crest-risen, in the Antick fashion,⁴⁸ so that they made use of it as of a girdle, winding it five or six times about their waste: but if it happened the foresaid member to be in good case, spooming with a full saile bunt faire before the winde, then to have seen those strouting Champions, you would have taken them for men that had their lances settled on their Rest, to run at the ring or tilting whintam:⁴⁹ of these beleeve me the race is utterly lost and quite extinct, as the women say; for they lament continually, that there are none extant now of those great, etc. you know the rest of the song.⁵⁰

The whole antagonism dissolves in a hearty joke. Rabelais's railing here with the industrious Hill-carriers, as opposed to the lusty Labourers of nature, could possibly have inspired Shakespeare to compose those Puckish pranks as addressed in the present article. There is strong textual evidence that Shakespeare used the very same imagery. Rabelais's Hill-carrying [ant-hill!] Æsop⁵¹ represents the ant in his own fable and the Labourer of nature represents the cricket, who succumbs in Winter, alas!

DOUBLE CREAM ENTENDRE—REGENERATION THROUGH METAMORPHOSIS

My proposition that there is an interpretational level where Puck is endowed similarly to Rabelais's second medlar-eater leads to a description where to skim “milk, and sometimes labour in the quern” would include a transformation: laboring inside the butter-churn/quern extending his erect penis through the lid as a churning-staff for the hussy to manipulate.⁵² Rabelais calls the penis the laborer, le laboureur de nature⁵³ in the version that could possibly have been available to Shakespeare. In addition, labor can have sexual overtones.⁵⁴

There may be a synsemantic pun-marker in MND on the line below bootless: [You Puck, who] “sometime make the drink to bear no barm.” For the surface meaning, the infinitive marker to is optional, hence redundant: “sometime make the drink bear no barm.”⁵⁵ When, as here, it is present, it infuses the clause to bear no barm with the sense “in order to.” Through the homonymy bear:bare it opens the sentence to a coarse interpretation: “sometime make the drink in order to lay bare no udder/bosom.”⁵⁶ The innuendoes on bear, wear, and carry were well-known to an Elizabethan audience.⁵⁷ A Shakespearean gem of a quibble was unveiled by Kökeritz at 2H4 [Henry IV, Part 2] II.i.35, where Mrs. Quickly reflects that there is “no honesty in such dealing unles a woman should be made an Asse and a Beast, to beare every Knaves wrong,”⁵⁸ including bear:bare, knave:nave, wrong:rung.

On the surface, the image is, of course, Puck interfering with the froth on the beer, or cream on the milk. On the coarse pun level, one component could be a reference to the capacity of some witches, male or female, to secrete milk through a witch-pap.⁵⁹ They were one kind of “the Devil's Mark,” in witch-craft trials “sufficient for the judge to proceed to give sentence of death.” Murray cites 32 cases between 1597 and 1704 where a bodily examination had revealed, as with Margaret Moone: “teates or bigges in her secret parts, which seemed to have been lately sucked.”⁶⁰ This practice was one from which the witches could obviously derive both pleasure and pain. Alice Duke of Somerset, in 1664,

confesseth that her Familiar doth commonly suck her right Breast about seven at night, in the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish colour, which is as smooth as a Want, and when she is suckt she is in a kind of a Trance.—Christian Green saith, The Devil doth usually suck her left Brest about five of the Clock in the Morning in the likeness of an Hedghog, bending, and did so on Wednesday Morning last. She saith that it is painful to her, and that she is usually in a trance when she is being suckt.⁶¹

The most common position for the supernumerary nipples first mentioned above is cited to have been the pudendum. The medical term is polythelia and they appear familially with both sexes as rudiments from the mammary ridge of the human embryo and can become functional during pregnancy, producing milk.⁶² Murray gives normal population frequencies of 9.1 percent for men and 4.8 percent for women.⁶³ In recent breast-feeding research, relactation⁶⁴ and “induced primary lactation” are well-known phenomena denoting a capability to take up breast-feeding out of turn. When a mother dies in childbirth, it is a matter of course in certain African cultures that the baby's grandmother takes over this capacity too, albeit many years after the birth of her last child. In a recent U.S. survey some women who had never been pregnant would still start breastfeeding, by allowing their adoptive baby to suckle, which triggers milk production.⁶⁵ The high incidence of puerperal deaths⁶⁶ and the wetnurse practice in Shakespeare's day⁶⁷ may indicate that this old knowledge was indeed available to the Elizabethans.

The climax that the hussy's “churning” could lead to presents another drink interpretation. In the Rabelaisian vein Puck's drink goes through a transformation from beer, or milk, to semen. Both Rubinstein and Williams give several examples of such milk-semen similes, and it has also been addressed by Colman 203, and Hulme 140, neither of whom, however, suspicious of Puck. His whereabouts in the churn can be seen as a harbinger to his appearance later in the gossip's bowl. This kind of witches' brew desecration was witnessed in other fiends: In 1614, at Orléans, Siluain Neuillon was convicted of witchcraft. He said that “on baptise des enfans au Sabbat auec du Cresme, que des femmes apportent, & frottent la verge de quelque homme, & en font sortir de la semence qu'elles amassent, & la meslent auec le Cresme, puis mettent cela sur la teste de l'enfant en prononçant quelques paroles en latin … l'eau beniste est iaune comme du pissat d'asne.”⁶⁸

Puck's processing of the drink starts at an upper stratum but is dragged down to being extracted at the lower bodily stratum in a real regeneration. Furthermore, the metamorphoses here are of the same nature as when Bottom wears the ass's head and is loved for it: human, bovine, asinine coalesce. Holland, ed., 69ff. points out the most probable source of Bottom's metamorphosis, Apuleius's ass. A human female's due appreciation of its massive phallus is also addressed, and, like Bakhtin, Holland also mentions the medieval “Feast of the Ass”—mockery of the Holy Mass. The boundaries between man and beast are extinguished and our common instinct desire is foregrounded.⁶⁹ With Puck any dugs will do and any kind of drink be produced. It is all for a laugh and Puck's travesty of the seriousness⁷⁰ of milk-production yields only playful interpretations.

THE VERSATILE STOOL

In the “popular banquet scene”⁷¹ at MND II.i.44-57 Puck is the jester at Oberon's carousal with some friends of dubitable character. He performs his transformations at incredible speed: now a foal, now a crab-apple, now a stool. The images flicker past and, as we shall see, the other participants at this lascivious party also have several identities. Puck's only aim is the merry laugh and he achieves it through metamorphoses in the Rabelaisian-Bakhtinian vein. In the pranks suggested under the surface, Puck lets the aspect of the cool, rational, and industrious be characterised by the assiduous procuress/prostitute, above euphemistically termed: housewife, horse, gossip, aunt, and hour.⁷² For the purposes of the present article the Q2 and the F reading silly foal is more apt than Q1 semi-tautology filly foal which would also necessitate a sex change for Puck in addition to his other transmogrifications. As opposed to Rubinstein's (at neigh) “seduction of a stallion,” I suggest that it is the prostitute horse that is seduced, especially after a bean diet: the innuendo is probably that the fresh-cut green fodder would render her “mettlesome and sexually eager,” a piece of information applicable here but originally relating to KL [King Lear] IV.vi.122.⁷³ Out of the above collection the aunt is the key to Æsop's fable: the laborious entrepreneur of Shakespeare's day,⁷⁴ the procuress, or possibly prostitute, hidden in the homophony aunt:ant in MND II.i.51, the “wisest aunt.” For the other aspect Puck uses himself, the merry prankster, the carefree cricket. However, in order to establish this counterpart, a laid-back musical insect, we have to investigate the origin of cricket, the game: part of it is actually “a stool.”⁷⁵OED's first evidence is 1643, but the sexual innuendoes appurtenant to stool-ball, make a very good case for an earlier, unrecorded dating.⁷⁶ The three-foot modifier further underlines the connection between Puck and the puke.⁷⁷ In reports dating back to 1750 it is frequently mentioned that the milk-stealing creature in southwestern Scandinavia was three-legged. Some informants give an explantion for this, viz. “that the devil created it, or helped create it and he is not capable of shaping a perfect hare.”⁷⁸ The three-leggedness also applied to the werewolf, a man transformed into a wolf.⁷⁹ In Kittredge 164 there is mention of how, in “1780 Ann Allan, a Yorkshire witch, milked one of the legs of a three-legged stool.” Another belief connecting stools with witches, and phallic symbols (Zern's broom above), is its use to take the place of the witch in her absence. Isobel Gowdie, 1662, used these words to shape an object to beguile anyone looking into her bed when she was out consorting with the Devil: “I lay down this besom [or stool] in the Devil's name, Let it not stir till I come again.”⁸⁰ For tailor, however, we have to look elsewhere. Hilda Hulme is close to solving the tailor crux⁸¹ when she discusses its probable readings. She suggests three possible coarse interpretations for tailor. 1. the posterior, 2. the female pudendum, 3. the penis, (yard with quibble on “tailor's measuring-stick,” not deduced from the three-foot clue.)⁸²The posterior is her choice which is rightly justified, but there is more to it. The connection has to be made between the three-foot stool and tailor: Hulme only argues that tailors can be regarded as obscene because they use a tool which happens to be synonymous with the male member. However, three-foot stool is an image which embraces the penis with its jocular size “a yard” = a three-foot extension, and its “intra-rectal placement” = stool. Thus, it makes perfect sense for the aunt to cry out for the tailor when he “finishes courting her rear” = slip I from her bum, as a tailor would certainly be the partner to suspect to have used a yard.

It may not be common knowledge now, but in Shakespeare's day the cricket you could hear in the winter would be a specimen of one of the “best-known species … the common house-cricket, Acheta domestica, ‘an insect that squeaks or chirps about ovens and fireplaces’” (OED). This is probably the background for the other Puck-cricket venue in “Shakespeareshire.” In MWW [The Merry Wives of Windsor] V.v.43ff it is Puck (only in the Quarto edition) who orders, “Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap: Where fires thou find'st unraked and hearths unswept, There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry: Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery.” I suggest that this image is a forerunner of the scene 50 lines below where Falstaff's burning fires of lust are to be jestingly punished by pinching.⁸³ Williams has examples of chimney ‘vagina,’ sweep ‘coit with,’ and puns on chimney-sweep. Kökeritz gives many examples of -th:-t homophony.⁸⁴ Applied here it would render hearth: heart homonymous. As there is an anal connection with heart ‘arse’ that Rubinstein enlarges on we can once again see how Puck is involved in rear treatment of prostitutes via a cricket. Oliver admits the possibility of a quibble in Evans's instruction to the other fairy at V.v.52: “Raise up the organs of her fantasy” thus giving credence to my assumption that indecency lurks under the surface here.⁸⁵ Falstaff as an “Aunt: Ant”⁸⁶ is another composite character: “A witch, a quean, an old cozening quean!” Quean ‘harlot’ comments Oliver. In his Arden Introduction, lxii, he also notices that it “is the Quarto that has Mistress Page twice identify the old woman as ‘my maids Aunt Gillian of Brainford’ (though the second time it is ‘my maidens Ant’) but makes no comment about the insect ant. Colman has also addressed Aunt Gillian extensively.

Murray claims, without ever mentioning Shakespeare at all in her book, that the “name Robin is almost a generic name for the Devil, either as a man or as his substitute the familiar. The other name for the fairy Robin Goodfellow is Puck.”⁸⁷ Further, that there is a strong correlation between fairies and witches. This extra dimension sheds light on several images discussed in the present article.⁸⁸ The gossip/sponsor for instance is hardly expected company for Puck and Oberon unless viewed as a sponsor at a witches' Sabbath baptism, such as the above-mentioned in the Orléans trial. According to Brooks, Huon of Burdeux is one of the main sources of the Oberon character.⁸⁹ I suggest that the surface meaning of the gossip's bowl may well have been derived from Huon of Burdeux: Shakespeare has probably added to the intertextual rapport by blending in snippets, from Huon, such as the baptism of Oberon, where a bad-tempered fairy “sponsored” him with growth-arrest at three. Another component is the drinking-cup owned by Oberon in his adulthood, constantly brimming after the sign of the cross had been made over it. Only the righteous could drink out of it, however. When Puck in MND is instrumental in carrying out such magical punishment by causing the gossip to spill the ale, the fairy-witch connection is further amplified. Murray's claim is appurtenant for the present article, what with the numerous descriptions of the devil's genital endowments and his capacity for zooerastic shape-switching that she presets from the witchcraft trials: Lorraine, 1598: “-hätte einen [Glied] so starcken etc allezeit gehabt, wenn ihm gestanden, und so gross als ein Ofengabel-Stiel”; a Hamburg account 1693: “qu'elle auoit empoigné plusieurs fois auec la main le membre du Demon, qui la coignoissoit”; Jeannette d'Abadie in the Basses-Pyrénées, 1609: “le Diable luy faisoit baiser son visage, puis le nombril, puis le membre viril, puis son derrière”; Isobel Gowdie and Janet Breadheid of Auldearne, 1662: “I fand his nature als cold within me as spring-well-water … He wold haw carnall dealling with ws in the shap of a deir, or in any other shap, now and then. Somtym he vold be lyk a stirk, a bull, a deir, a rae, or a dowg, etc., and haw dealling with ws.”⁹⁰ Indeed, the Fairy did not at all mistake his “shape and making quite.” Another source of inspiration for Shakespeare may have been Revelation XVII:1-5 where Babylon, the mother of harlots, has a golden cup “full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.”⁹¹ This image enhances the connection between prostitutes and the Devil, and adds another link to the blasphemous witches' Sabbath baptisms above. Rubinstein's interpretation of the gossip's bowl has much the same genital ring about it also, as she reads, for instance, crab ‘testicle.’⁹² In his attempt to attribute the flaring-up of witch-hunts in the 16th century to the near-concurrent epidemic spread of the Great Pox,⁹³ Andreski stresses the link between witches and prostitutes, especially syphilitic ones.⁹⁴

The coughing problem that Puck's aunt/procuress ended up with can be explained as her deliberate attempt to mask an inconvenience in agreement with prevailing etiquette. When Puck, i.e. the yard i.e. the three-foot stool, suddenly withdrew from her anus she had an acute attack of wind. In situations of being cut short for flatulence, Erasmus suggested, in his widely read etiquette book for boys, that rather than letting withheld wind hazard one's health “a cough hide the explosive sound. … Follow the law of Chiliades: Replace farts with coughs.”⁹⁵ A jocular comment on this practice is the cough in the breech from “A New Merry Ballad I Have Here [1692]” where “the ribald sense = both fart and diarrhea, based on the analogy of a chronic cough which expels phlegm.”⁹⁶ Rubinstein, at dewlap, disambiguates the aunt-imagery solely as a scatological pun with no sex involved, seeing Puck as “dung” = slip (derived from OE cúslyppe ‘cow-dung’), but not in relation to any code of etiquette. At laugh she has loffe ‘fart’ for JC [Julius Caesar] I.ii.251 without, however, citing MND. Florio also has loffe ‘farts.’⁹⁷

Puck's treatment of the aunt was really in the true Rabelaisian vein: the entire company broke out in hearty laughter, witnessing that a merrier hour was never wasted there = “a more sexually wanton whore was never seduced there.”⁹⁸ The wise industrious ant leaning on a cricket, telling the sad tale/fable about the cricket succumbing to the elements is reborn through a metamorphosis. From being anally penetrated by the lusty cricket she is brought to experience enjoyment and rejuvenating laughter via the “lower bodily stratum.” Shakespeare well illustrates Bakhtin's words about the contradictory unity of the “private and the universal” in Renaissance literature: “Two types of imagery reflecting the conception of the world here meet at crossroads; one of them ascends to the folk culture of humor; while the other is the bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being. The conflict of these two contradictory trends in the interpretation of the bodily principle is typical of Renaissance realism.”⁹⁹

THOROUGH MEASURES

Another ant-cricket dichotomy is hinted at in The Taming of the Shrew IV.iii.107 [Arden] where the tailor who receives an unprecedented string of maledictions from the rational gentleman Petruchio, is also called a cricket:

O monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail,
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou!
Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread?
Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant;
Or I shall so bemete thee with thy yard
As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st!
I tell thee, I, that thou hast mar'd her gown.

Petruchio's looming measures can appear fairly civil on the surface. What with knowledge of Renaissance manners and the cover-up of bodily functions, the inherent threat seems more “impressive.” In the future the tailor's silly prating would come from his “rear” = prat.¹⁰⁰ His garrulitas alvi would be a result of Petruchio bemeting: bemating¹⁰¹ him with his own sexual tool, causing gas incontinence: “I shall so bemete thee with thy yard As thou shalt think on prating whilst thou liv'st!” But, why would he stoop to such thorough measures? Amongst his mock-abuse, could monstrous be an indication of the tailor having made a monster of Petruchio, put horns on his head? Is he a cuckold-maker? Hamlet makes the same well known accusation against womankind at III.i.140 [Arden]: “for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.” Spencer comments: “monsters (probably) cuckolds (who traditionally wear horns and look like monstrous animals. The actor can make the gesture of horns with his fingers on his head).”¹⁰²

Shakespeare's wordplay around tailor is sparkling exuberantly. Rubinstein, at size, has added to Hulme's tail etymology¹⁰³ by complementing its sizing component via Fr. taille ‘size.’ Hulme mentions the effeminate connotations of tailor obtaining to Oswald in KL II.ii.60, and even interprets same-sex encounters, and discloses an anal penetration innuendo at 2H4 III.ii.150 [Arden]: “Shal[low]. Shall I prick him, sir? Fal[staff]. You may; but if he had been a man's tailor he'd ha' pricked you.” Another probable link to effeminacy is the waterfly connection: In TrC [Troilus and Cressida] V.i, Patroclus has been accused of being a male whore and has had curses heaped upon him by Thersites. The climax is: “Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies, diminutives of nature!” I suggest that the connection is the tailor insect. Its first entry in OED is: “A tipula or daddy-long-legs. 1682 LISTER Gœdart Of Insects 131 A creature furnished with 2 wings and 6 long Feet called by us when boyes, the Tayler.” In Hamlet (V.ii.82) the waterfly epithet is given to foppish Osric. Curiously enough, the Swedish language also has a lakeside insect termed after the clothing maker: Gerris Fabr., the water-strider, is recorded since 1862 in the Swedish Academy Dictionary at skräddare ‘tailor,’ with no known etymology.

“Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail!” is part of Petruchio's retaliative scaling-down of the tailor's penile endowments.¹⁰⁴ By lashing out against the tailor, already generically effeminate, he is pretending to have realised that he himself has been emasculated, cuckolded, “braved in mine own house.” I suggest that Petruchio uses musical imagery to say that his prick, note, has been shortened, braved, become a breve note by the discovery that the tailor has marred Kate's gown ‘pudendum.’¹⁰⁵ To this effect I suggest that marred can read married ‘to enter into intimate union’ (OED).¹⁰⁶ A similar well-known¹⁰⁷mar:marry pun appears 19 lines above in the play. The pretended vehemence of Petruchio's reaction supports this interpretation.

Yet another reminder of the strength of the anti-Æsop imagery is when Lear's Fool derides Kent, sitting in the stocks for having attacked Oswald, the tailor-cricket type. Kent has to learn his lesson from the ant: there is no laboring in the winter.¹⁰⁸

In consequence with the characterisation of the ant:aunt, Theseus can be said to be a promoter of the rational arranged marriages, i.e., a father's investment based on financial considerations, and legitimate. The sexual matches that the procuress offers are also arranged, orderly and primarily economic transactions, however with a slight difference of legitimacy, and so Shakespeare seems to say that Theseus is no better than a bawd. Through lusty mismatchings on several levels he drives home this point to a happy synthesis in a typically Rabelaisian-Bakhtinian way.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ed. H. E. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1979) II.i.32-57. See below for text excerpt. Unless otherwise stated, all Shakespeare quotations follow the Arden edition.

2. Leif Zern, Älskaren och mördaren (Stockholm: Alba, 1984) 75-115. The broom is mentioned at MND V.i.375.

3. Norman Francis Blake, Shakespeare's Language (London: Macmillan, 1983) 25.

4. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953) 64.

5. Blake 25.

6. Æsop's outrage against artists has troubled many writers throughout the centuries. In a grotesque version (see below), Rabelais merely shifts the angle of observation, whereas a more synthetical modern replica by Ingemar Unge, “Gräshoppan som spelade och sjöng [The Grasshopper That Played and Sang],” was published in a collection of children's fairy tales, Min Nya Skattkammare, Fyran [My New Treasury, Number Four] (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1979). In it, the cricket was actually invited to share the ants' stores, and was lauded for all his lovely music that had helped them finish building their ant-hill well in time for the cold season. He stayed all winter, playing and singing to the ants: “For how else would they be able to while away the time, the little dears, food already collected and the hill already finished?” [My translations, UM].

7. This above-board contradiction is pointed out by Zern 106ff. It has long been a matter of dispute whether the play celebrates imagination or not. In Shakespeare's Early Comedies. Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993) 187, Gunnar Sorelius illustrates this vacillation when he states that “this play recommends the rule of reason. At the same time it illustrates better than the other comedies the limitations of reason.”

8. At MND V.i.3, note, Brooks makes the observation that antique here means “‘ancient’; but also ‘grotesque’ (antic),” however without pinpointing specific fables, let alone grotesque. Another word-play that can be read into antique is ant-ique “pertaining to ants.”

9. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. H. H. Furness, A New Variorum Edition (New York: Dover, 1963).

10. Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of witchcraft (London: W. Brome, 1584).

11. Arden 1979:lx f.

12. William Bell, Shakespeare's Puck, and his folkslore illustrated from the superstitions of all nations, but more specifically from the earliest religion and rites of Northern Europe and the Wends, 3 vols. (1852-1864; New York: AMS Press Inc., 1971).

13. Bell II:14, 16.

14. Collier, ed., Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes, and merry Iests, Full of honest Mirth, and is a fit Medicine for Melancholy (London: for F. Groue, 1628).

15. The print is reproduced in The Oxford Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1998) 37, whose editor Peter Holland, like Zern above, acknowledges Robin's phallic image but adds no further evidence of obscenities in Shakespeare's text.

16. Furness, ed., 3, Dramatis Personae, note for line 18. The form puke is also recorded for 13th-14th century at puck, pook in OED = Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

17. MND V.i.417, 421.

18. Furness, ed., 3, Dramatis Personae, note for line 18, about Puck as an appellative, and 243 note for V.i.425, about his denial of any connection with the Devil.

19. Jan Wall, Tjuvmjölkande väsen I, II [Magical Milk-stealing Creatures I, II.] (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977, 1978).

20. Wall I:6.

21. For a more recent account, from the United States, “The Witch Hare,” see Buying The Wind. Regional Folklore in the United States, Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964) 316. Motifs cited are D655.2, “Witch transforms self to animal so as to suck cows,” and G211.2.7, “Witch in form of hare.”

22. Wall I for the various sack references: 73f and 85f.

23. Witchcraft, ed. B. Rosen, Stratford upon Avon Library 6 (London, 1969) 88, 184. Cited in Wall I:120.

24. Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1921). Cited in Wall I:120.

25. Wall I:128 from 1597 court proceedings and, for an 18th century charm: Wall I:101-2 “Du skall för mig på jorden springa, jag skall för dig i helvetet brinna [You run for me on Earth right well, and I shall burn for you in Hell].” Wall I:108, also relates an Icelandic alternative manufacturing method from 1670, quoting a manuscript on witchcraft, D. Jónson, Landbókasafn Íslands (JS 606). In it, the woman would take a dead man's rib, wrap it up in a piece of grey yarn, and, placing it between her bare breasts, go to Holy Communion. She would spit out the consecration-wafer and wine into this “Devil's tool.” The secrecy of the actions must have been accidentally left out here. In similar accounts that have been translated and edited by Jacqueline Simpson in Scandinavian Folktales (London: Penguin, 1988) 150ff, stealthiness was of the utmost importance since the creature would eventually be “so strong and lively that it tries to leap out of her bosom.”

26. Wall I:31.

27. Wall I:56f. Three German, sixteen Danish and four Finnish churches also have similar murals.

28. Murals from the porch vaults of the parish church at Söderby Karl. The murals are dated at 1490-1500. Captions: “1. Panoramic photograph which shows that these murals are part of a sequence showing magical milk-theft and butter-production. 2. The milk-stealing creature is seen throwing up milk.”

29. Wall I:100, 200 and 142.

30. Dorson 314-15, illustrates, in a relatively modern Illinois legend, one of the more familiar motifs, D2083.3.1, “Milk transferred from another's cow by squeezing an ax-handle (and the like).” According to Wall 1975:5, this motif has been derived from the publication in 1490 of the notorious Malleus Maleficarum [The Hammer of Witches] by Heinrich Institoris and Jakob Sprenger (Berlin: H. Barsdorf, 1906) 148. A pictorial illustration of the motif is seen in Johannes Geiler von Kaiserberg's Die Emeis (Strassburg: Johannes Grienniger, 1517).

31. George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1928) 164. Cited in Wall I:98.

32. An obvious derivation, pukishness, is dated at 1581, but that does not take away from the fact that Shakespeare's ejecta are milk both here and with Puck in the dairy.

33. Hilda Hulme in Explorations in Shakespeare's Language (London: Longmans, 1962) 244ff, reasons along similar lines: “I shall argue that a number of hitherto unexplained words in Shakespeare's text can be seen to have full meaning within linguistic and dramatic context if we are prepared to accept what ‘fits the sense’ and is exactly confirmed by earlier or later Dictionary evidence.” “Dictionary” here implies NED, the forerunner of OED.

34. From Aristotle, History of Animals (book VIII: XXX), ed. DM Balme (London: Harvard UP, 1991) 295.

35. Simpson 153.

36. Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, ed. W. B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1973) 87.

37. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, ed. Calvert Watkins (Boston: Houghton, 1985) 10.

38. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Papermas, 1987) 464f.

39. Frazer 390.

40. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (London: The MIT P, 1968).

41. Bakhtin 275.

42. The “cris de Paris”—street vendors' slogans—of The Winter's Tale and Jonson's Volpone will be addressed in a forthcoming article, “Autoclycus and the Great Pox.”

43. Bakhtin 109.

44. Murray 33f, 38.

45. William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, ed. Richard David, The Arden Edition (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1994). David V.ii.661 notes that yard is the “organ of generation.” For foot ‘penis,’ see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone, 1994) and Frankie Ruda Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1989). Another risqué interpretation of bootless has been uncovered by Rubinstein, at bank entry, for 1H4 III.i.67, where the coarse innuendo follows another trail indicative of emasculation. This is an illustration of the versatility of a number of Elizabethan taboo words as suggested also by Hulme 99ff., at tailor below. According to EAM Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974) 224, yard was the normal English word for “penis” previous to 1693. Also in OED: yard ‘penis.’

46. Bakhtin 12.

47. Here nature undoubtedly has the sense “copulation” with records from 1604 onwards in Williams 936.

48. Note in François Rabelais, Œuvres Complètes, ed. G. Demerson, Éditions du Seuil, from the 1532-1542 editions of Pantagruel, (Paris, 1973) 218: “Dressé comme sur les statues ou les stèles priapiques de l'antiquité. [Erect, as on the Priapic statues or stelæ of Antquity].”

49. I.e. quintain [UM]

50. Francis Rabelais, The Lives, Heroic Deeds & Sayings of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel, trs. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux, 1653-1694, English edition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928) book II, chapter 1:189.

51. Vibeke Stybe, in Från Snövit till Snobben. Barnbokens ursprung och utveckling [From Snow White to Snoopy. Origin and Development of Children's Books], revised and enlarged by Lars Furuland and Stefan Mählqvist (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1970) 18, ascribes the Byzantine monk Maximos Planudes of the late 13th century an account of the life of Æsop where he is described as a witty, wise, hunchback slave in Asia Minor. Cf “crump and knobbie” shoulders above.

52. OED: quern ‘a variant of churn.’ Furthermore, a Finnish milkstealing creature mentioned in a witchcraft trial in 1663 was for its manufacture to be churned inside the butter-churn on Easter Sunday morning. Paul Heurgren, Husdjuren i nordisk folktro [Domestic Animals in Nordic Folklore] (Örebro: Örebro Dagblads Tryckeri, 1925) 222-3, citing Valter. W. Forsblom, “Bjäran,” Hembygden [Helsinki periodical] 7.1.(1916): 37.

53. Rabelais 218.

54. At labour Williams has “sexual exertion,” with a first instance 1557, and Rubinstein “copulate” but unrelated to Puck's whereabouts in the quern.

55. The redundancy does not, of course, apply with regard to prosody.

56. OED barm ‘bosom.’ The related Swedish word, barm, has only this sense, hence its prominence to the author of the present article.

57. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy. A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Colman has also addressed these puns.

58. Kökeritz 94.

59. For learned Renaissance accounts of male lactation see Thomas Laqueur, Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990). Among others, he cites Laurent Joubert, one of the great medical popularizers of the sixteenth century; Dr. Joubert gives the example of “a Syrian count who nourished his child for more than six months.” An English doctor held it that men “‘of a cold, moist and feminine complexion’ were quite likely to have milk in their breasts,” (Laqueur 106).

60. Murray 90-96.

61. Murray 221.

62. Keith L. Moore, Before We Are Born. Basic Embryology and Birth Defects (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1977) 231.

63. Murray 90.

64. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing. A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 46, 266.

65. Personal communication, 1997, from Elisabeth Kylberg, nutritionist, doctoral student at the Unit for International Child Health of the Uppsala University Hospital.

66. Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies. A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1986) 406: Maternal mortality rate in a group of 13 English parishes for 1600-44 was 14.6 per mille, i.e., one mother out of every 69 died in childbirth in Shakespeare's day. Oxford Handbook of Clinical Specialties by J. A. B. Collier, J. M. Longmore and T. J. Duncan Brown (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 164 shows that for the entire U.K. the 1994-1996 figures are 12.2 deaths within 42 days post partum (6.1 direct deaths) per 100,000 maternities, i.e., one mother out of every 8,000 to 16,000.

67. See “Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms” above. Fildes 1986, 157, claims that the “system of sending children to nurses many miles outside large towns was clearly a highly developed and important social institution in the 16th and 17th centuries.”

68. Murray 247-8: [“one baptizes children on the Sabbath with Ointment, that the women take with them, & rub the member of one of the men, & bring him to pass semen that they collect, & mix it with the Ointment, then put it on the child's head while pronouncing a few words in Latin … the holy water is yellow like an ass's piss.”] [My translation, UM].

69. Zern 91, cites History of Learning scholar Ronny Ambjörnsson who describes how, in Shakespeare, [“the new and contradictory hopes that desire attaches to the ego”] had caused Dante's and Petrarch's myth of love as [“a personality moulding principle”]—a means to self-realization and self-creation, as it were—to crumble. [Quotations translated by UM]. Ronny Ambjörnsson, Familjeporträtt [Family Portraits] (Avesta: Jannersten, 1978). See chapter: “Den utopiska kärleken [Utopian Love].”

70. Milk, and, especially, butter production was an important economic factor in the medieval farmers' housekeeping (Wall I:2-4). Consequently, magical milk-theft was looked upon seriously in the agrarian society. (Wall II:70).

71. Cf. Bakhtin above.

72. 1. For the hussy entry OED has a “light, worthless, or pert woman or girl. Obs. Usually huswife, now HUSSY.” The Variorum spelling is in fact huswife, not housewife. 2. Horse ‘prostitute’ is part of a hoarse:horse:whores homonymy with Kökeritz 115. Rubinstein also has extensive examples. 3. The surface level gossip is the OED sense (see below): “woman invited to be present at a birth.” The double entendre sense is more likely another OED sense: “A woman of light and trifling character. …” where a couple of Elizabethan examples point to prostitution. 4. Aunt ‘bawd’ is found in Rubinstein at dewlap. Also in Williams beside “prostitute,” as in OED, which latter two, however, only point to later instances. Rubinstein has some support from Furness, who writes, in way of discussing that instance: “Unquestionably ‘aunt’ was at times applied to a woman of low character.” He further establishes that, what with her wisdom, here “it means merely ‘the most sedate old woman.’” (Furness, ed., MND II.i.51 note.) Moreover, at aunts in The Winter's Tale IV.iii.13 Furness admits that, dependent “on the connection, this may mean a woman of a character rather more free than a mere hoyden.” At dewlap (and furthering references) Rubinstein has extensive coarse explications for the gossip activities in MND, implying fellatio or genital liaison, which perfectly allow for my prostitution interpretations. 5. For hour ‘whore’ see Kökeritz 58f, 117, quoting AYL [As You Like It] II.vii.27: “And so from houre to houre, we ripe, and ripe, And then from houre to houre, we rot, and rot, And thereby hangs a tale.” Kökeritz senses syphilis here.

73. Pointed out by Colman 214, at soiled horse.

74. For an account of this trade, see Johannes Fabricius's Dr. Med dissertation Syphilis in Shakespeare's England (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1994) 104-146.

75. OED: “It has been surmised that it is the same as CRICKET Sb.3, and the game a development of that known as STOOL-BALL, to which there are many references from 1567 to 1725, as a game at which especially girls and women played; but this is very doubtful: cricket, a stool, is itself not in evidence till a later date … sb.3 … A low wooden stool; a foot stool.” A late time reflection of the aunt:ant pun may be the “nickname for a wicket-keeper” recorded from 1898 in OED as Aunt Sally.

76. Williams has found “stoolball associated with sexual activity as a ball game.” His first instance is 1621. An instance from 1703 states that “he that can Jerk furthest at another sort of Stool-Ball, will be accounted, by the Maids, the best Bedfellow.”

77. Wall II: 19, 123-4. (Murray 166).

78. My translation. UM.

79. E. Odstedt, “Varulven i svensk folktradition [The Werewolf in Swedish Folk Tradition],” Skr utg genom Landsmåls—och folkminnesarkivet i Uppsala [Publications of the Uppsala Archives of Provincial Dialects and Folklore] Ser. B:1 (1943): 116, 119f.

80. Murray 166.

81. Hulme 99ff.

82. Items 2 and 3 are disputed by Colman 217f, who proposes women's tailors' lack of manliness and exceptional opportunities for adultery as sufficient explanations. The effeminacy of tailors has been addressed by several authors. Simon Shepard in “What's so funny about ladies' tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance,” Textual Practice 6 (1992): 17-30, suggests there exist a code for the Renaissance stage, such as e.g. apparel, to single out the type.

83. Rubinstein: pinch ‘bugger.’

84. Kökeritz 320.

85. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. H. J. Oliver, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen & Co LTD, 1971).

86. MWW IV:ii.157.

87. Murray 238ff.

88. In Europe's Inner Demons (London: Heinemann International Literature and Textbooks, 1975) 114, Norman Cohn disputes Murray's Dianic cult hypothesis for witches' fairy kinship, and suggests a variant explanation: Isobel Gowdy's inclusion of fairy folklore in her confessions would have been the result of her desperate efforts to tap her memory “to find enough material to satisfy the interrogators and torturers …”

89. MND Arden 1979:lix.

90. Murray 176ff, 129f: “had allegedly had one [member] that was so strong etc all the time, when it was standing, and as big as the shaft of an oven-rake”; “that she had several times, with her hand, seized the member of the Demon who knew her”; “the Devil made her kiss his face, then his navel, then his virile member, then his behind” [My translation, UM]. Against this background of popular belief and that of the Orléans trial above, Puck's carnal dealings, and the gossip's bowl ‘godmother's christening cup’ (Holland, ed. II.i.47 note), and the abducted Indian changeling boy, and his mother the “votaress” of the “order” of the Fairy Queen seem to make complete sense for a witches' coven.

91. The Holy Bible (Cambridge UP, n. d.).

92. Rubinstein 75, at dewlap entry.

93. For an account of its repercussions in Elizabethan England, see Fabricius 1994.

94. Stanislav Andreski, Syphilis, Puritanism and Witch Hunts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989) 82.

95. Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium Recognized by the author, and elucidated with new scholia by Gisbertus Longolius Ultratraiectinus (Cologne, 1530) 33, cited in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978) 129f.

96. Cited in James T. Henke's Gutter Life and Language in the Early “Street” Literature of England (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1988) 66. The ballad is found in The Pepys Ballads, 8 vols., Hyder E. Rollins, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1929-32). Also, by analogy, neeze would be part of the same explosive discourse.

97. Giovanni Florio, A Worlde of Words, or Dictionarie in Italian and English (1598: Ann Arbor, Mich.: U of Michigan, U Microfilms, n.d.).

98. Merry ‘sexually wanton’ in John Stephen Farmer & William Ernest Henley Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1914; New York: Arno Press, 1970). Hour ‘whore’ in Kökeritz 58f, 117, see note above. Waste ‘seduce’ in analogy with Colman 222, waste ‘a metaphor for seduction’ with a reference to MWW IV.ii.198 where Mrs. Page assures that Falstaff “will never, I think, in the way of a waste attempt us again.”

99. Bakhtin 24.

100. In Partridge, as well as in Farmer & Henley.

101. Mate ‘to pair … for the purpose of breeding’ in OED that cites Shakespeare AW [All's Well That Ends Well] I.i.102: “The hind that would be mated by the Lion Must die for loue.”

102. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (London: Penguin, 1980) 27, The New Penguin Edition. Colman, Rubinstein and Williams also have monster ‘cuckold.’

103. Hulme 99-102.

104. In Shakespeare, the terms for different penile sizes are instanced, inter alia, in AW II.ii.26: “As fit … as the nail to his hole.” Rubinstein, Williams: nail = “penis” and “2[frac12] inches.” R&J II.iv.75 cheveril, ‘glove leather,’ that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad” is instanced by Rubinstein; at cheveril also ell = “penis” and “45 inches.”

105. At note, nothing Rubinstein disambiguates another few instances of coarse musical punning: note, stave, and clef. She also has house = “codpiece,” or “penis” via homonymic hose. Kökeritz 75, explains gown = “pudendum,” for another Shakespearean instance: H5 [Henry V] III.iv.54.

106. The mar:marry homonymy is understood in Blake 26: “When Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice threatens that he will ‘mar the young Clarks pen’ (V i. 237) if Narissa marries him, many modern listeners and readers may not recognise that pen has the second meaning ‘penis.’”

107. William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. A. Thompson, the New Cambridge Edition (Cambridge, 1990) IV.iii.96f.

108. KL II.ii, II.iv.