SOURCE: "What Is Indecency?" in The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare, Longman Group Limited, 1974, pp. 1-21.

[In the following essay, Colman examines the historical contexts of Shakespeare's bawdy language, comparing the mores of Elizabethan and modern times.]

Now it is quite undeniable, that there are many passages in Shakespeare, which a father could not read aloud to his children—a brother to his sister—or a gentleman to a lady:—and every one almost must have felt or witnessed the extreme awkwardness, and even distress, that arises from suddenly stumbling upon such expressions, when it is almost too late to avoid them, and when the readiest wit cannot suggest any paraphrase, which shall not betray, by its harshness, the embarrassment from which it has arisen. Those who recollect such scenes, must all rejoice, we should think, that Mr Bowdler has provided a security against their recurrence; and, as what cannot be pronounced in decent company cannot well afford much pleasure in the closet, we think it is better, every way, that what cannot be spoken, and ought not to have been written, should now cease to be printed.¹

Thus Francis Jeffrey, advocate, Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and formidable editor of The Edinburgh Review. True to character, the future law lord was pronouncing sentence on Shakespeare's indecency with a good deal less circumspection than Dr Bowdler himself. Bowdler, in a preface to his edition, drew a careful distinction between the editor of a literary text and any presumptuous artist who might take it upon him to retouch a painting or sculpture. With literature, Bowdler pointed out, 'the original will continue unimpaired', to be reprinted in toto if the expurgated version is consigned to oblivion, whereas in the plastic arts, 'if the endeavour to improve the picture or the statue should be unsuccessful, the beauty of the original would be destroyed, and the injury be irreparable'.²

For all its modest good intent, however, The Family Shakespeare let its editor in for generations of ridicule, much of it from people who had not read his well-meaning preface. Such are the penalties of having one's name give rise to a household word. But what poor Bowdler's whole exercise makes clear—and Jeffrey's forceful support of it clear still—is that the bawdy passages in Shakespeare should not be shrugged aside as merely frivolous. They can produce a strong emotional effect in certain readers simply by the fact of being bawdy. This remains true even in the comparatively uninhibited 1970s. The cultural world of Lord Jeffrey and the Bowdlers lies at an immense distance, and from the heights of what a John Updike character has called 'the post-pill paradise' we may smile down on their stern pronouncements with detached tolerance. Yet such evidence as we have from sociologists and psychologists suggests that the verbal expression of ideas connected with sex and non-sexual coprology does still elicit a marked emotional response from most English-speaking readers. References to sexual activity, urination and defecation may have lost much of their power to startle, but they remain the literary counterparts of what the law continues to call 'indecent exposure'. People think them healthy, comic, improper, distasteful, offensive or sinister as a result of their tending to defy widely respected (if ill-defined) standards of chastity or propriety. These standards depend on a robust but fluctuating system of taboos—a system that varies between different social groups at any one time and varies still more markedly between one 'generation' and another. Perhaps the most obvious fluctuations in ideas of what is proper, at least as far as the English-speaking nations are concerned, can be seen in conversations about pregnancy, childbirth, contraception, and even just the female legs and feet. All those unmentionables of the nineteenth-century English middle classes are now largely free of taboo: the draped piano limbs of Queen Victoria's Windsor have become only a joke.

Given, then, that standards of propriety, and hence of its opposite, do genuinely shift, it becomes necessary to establish three things before tackling Shakespeare's bawdy. First, exactly what do we now mean when we describe any piece of writing as 'indecent'? Secondly, how far did Elizabethan and Jacobean notions of indecency differ from those most readily acknowledged—permissively or otherwise—among English-speaking people today? And thirdly, how far do Shakespeare's plays themselves draw attention to the special nature of their own indecent passages?

An initial distinction must be made between sexuality in general and indecency in particular. Quite obviously, not all sexual writing is indecent. A medical textbook or a manual on birth control will be much concerned with the sexual organs and their functioning, but cannot be described as bawdy. It lacks both salacity and salacity's usual motive—a desire to shock, even if only fleetingly or mildly. In literature too, a great deal of writing about sex and sexual mores is rendered, by its seriousness, utterly remote from bawdy. Consider, for instance, Madame Bovary. This was, in its day, accused of being indecent and subversive, yet not even the Imperial Attorney claimed that Flaubert's literary depravity had extended to his treating sex flippantly or grotesquely. Bawdy, as distinct from straightforward sensuality, always partakes of the comic, whether through absurdity, grossness or a startling ingenuity. It need not actually be funny, any more than a pun needs to be funny in order to be recognised as a pun, but it often consists in that form of the absurd in which something physical is unexpectedly introduced when something spiritual is at issue. Again, in its least humorous forms, bawdy can be identified by its quality of caricature. It exaggerates, sometimes to the point of being downright bizarre, but sometimes only quite mildly. As with other forms of the grotesque in literature, the reader or listener has to be alert to fine differences in context and fine gradations of tone. To my mind, Macbeth is being neither gross nor (consequently) bawdy when he envisages withered murder who

                        with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his
  design
Moves like a ghost
                                                 II.i.54

—but I imagine that not everybody would accept my opinion. I think most people would agree, on the other hand, that Iago is being bawdy when he implicitly invites Othello to picture Desdemona 'naked with her friend in bed'. Such a phrase is rolled on the tongue, as one critic has put it,³ while its speaker savours both the picture evoked and the torture in inflicts. Similarly, Othello himself is being bawdy, though with deadly seriousness, when he speaks to Emilia and Desdemona as if they were in a brothel. The sexual accusations become indecent by being perversely distorted.

So we have an axiom: to be bawdy, a piece of talk or writing has to have behind it the intention to startle or shock. It also has to be at once more and less than sensual. Inasmuch as it labours the physical, it is sensual; but its other aspect is the exercise of wit, and this requires that the speaker remain partly at a distance from what he contemplates. Bawdy is often indirect, metaphorical or allusive. Only at its least subtle does it use blunt, unequivocal terms of sexual description, the familiar four-letter words. Shakespeare invariably suppresses these in favour of euphemistic or pseudoeuphemistic substitutes: a man's yard (penis, as an English word, came later) will less often be joked about under its own name than under the thin disguise of prick or pike or weapon. Cunt and fuck do not reach print in Shakespeare's text at all, except through puns (count, focative). Again you find substituted words carrying the ideas—case, foin and the like. Shakespeare's indecency might well be described metaphorically as a linguistic region, a zone situated between the real and the imagined, between the clinical and the pornographic. The area is shady and ill-defined. Its borders are always uncertain, and they can waver mercurially from moment to moment as a conversation or poem proceeds. The region provides breeding grounds for fantasy, as we have already seen with Othello. If Don John, Iago or Iachimo hints vaguely at a sexual offence ('Even she—Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero'), the imagination of the heater is stirred but still left free to envisage attitudes worthy of the most practised and inventive of concubines.…

At an opposite extreme from the bawdy jibe and innuendo you find Shakespeare's non-scurrilous sexual references. Most of his allusions to the consummation of marriage are of this neutral kind, as also are his references to childbirth, suckling and, quite often, illegitimacy. In the history plays particularly, a character's bastardy will often be discussed simply in the matter-of-fact terms of his limited rights, obligations and social standing. The same is true of adultery when it is discussed with legalistic formality at certain points in the trial scene of The Winter's Tale. Some of this sexually slanted, but non-bawdy, material receives attention in the chapters that follow, but only when it has proved to have a bearing on genuinely indecent passages. More often, serious unexaggerated sexuality can be passed over without special mention. Yet the distinction between the two modes of sexuality will have to be made continually, so it will be worth while at this stage to consider in general terms how far Elizabethan notions of the indecent differed from some of those of the present day. In this, as in any other matter, Shakespeare is not always bound by convention, but we do at least have to be aware of the prevailing conventions of his time if we are to interpret his words sanely.

Non-sexual obscenity has changed comparatively little in England across four centuries. We have no difficulty in recognising, and gauging the force of, Shakespeare's references to chamber-pots, close-stools or flatulence. More remote from a twentieth-century viewpoint, but clear enough from the attitudes of characters within the plays, is the medieval and Renaissance cherishing of bad breath as a source of ribald humour. The joke has lost its popularity—progressively, I would suppose, with the advance of modern dentistry—though like nose-picking and scratching, halitosis remains a topic widely avoided in everyday conversation.

Since these asexual types of impropriety are only marginal to investigation of the sexual, this book could have disregarded them without serious loss. But it happens that when Shakespeare resorts to non-sexual indecency he nearly always does so in a context that is already bawdy in a sexual way. Yeats's Crazy Jane is less than precise, anatomically, when she assures the Bishop that 'Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement', but she would seem truthful enough to most of Shakespeare's characters, as their cheerfully indiscriminate use of such a word as tail makes clear (see glossary). While it would be perfectly logical, then, to rule coprophilous indecency out of this whole discussion, on the grounds of its being asexual, it is easy and usually helpful to consider it alongside the sexual scurrility which tends to accompany it in the plays.

Turning to sexual indecency itself, we find a much wider range of Elizabethan subject matter. To begin with, almost any Renaissance comedy, Shakespearean or not, draws on much the same sources of sexual humour as any mid-twentieth-century television farce. There are likely to be jokes about the male and female reproductive organs; about articles of clothing that have sexual implications (codpieces, points, hose, plackets, smocks, and bodices low-cut or tight-laced); about lust, and especially the lust of bachelors, husbands or widows; about frigidity, and especially the frigidity of wives; about adultery and prostitution; and of course about sexual promiscuity generally. Where the Elizabethan selection does differ noticeably from the parallel list one might compile from popular entertainment of the present day it is chiefly in a preference for jokes about cuckoldry, castration or itinerant friars as opposed to, say, birth control, homosexuality or seductive typists. The causes of some of these differences are too obvious to need comment. The Elizabethans did not have typists or reliable methods of birth control—though some of them had ambitions to contraception:

EPICOENE … And have you those excellent receipts, madam, to keep yourselves from bearing of children

LADY HAUGHTY O, yes, Morose. How should we maintain our youth and beauty else? Many births of a woman make her old, as many crops make the earth barren.⁴

For our part, we do not have itinerant friars. We do, on the other hand, still have adultery, and this makes it interesting that cuckoldry has lost much of the mirthprovoking force which it clearly possessed four centuries ago. Its decline may perhaps be attributable to the loosening of patriarchal ties in a society that has, in general, grown less concerned than it used to be with questions of inheritance. As the first act of King John, with its dispute between the Faulconbridge half-brothers, reminds us, a man's true paternity used to be a matter of pressing importance, both socially and economically. Any act of adultery on the part of a married woman was a potential destroyer of lineage and hence of that ordered security which nowadays depends much more on the independently earned incomes of successive generations. In a milieu where much is at stake when paternity is doubted or challenged, society's fear of the adulterer may well find expression indirectly, both through a high valuation of the notion of 'honour' in relation to sexual behaviour and through a popular view of the deceived husband as a butt, a figure for the time of scorn to point his slow unmoving finger at. The cuckold's horns survive today only vestigially, represented by a two-finger gesture of increasingly vague opprobrium; yet there is abundant documentary evidence to show that our Elizabethan ancestors not only found the horns idea funny but also felt sensitive to its implication of cuckoldry whenever it was used against them. A passage in the anonymous compilation Tarlton's Jests⁵ describes how the famous comic fell out with 'one in the Gallerie':

It chanced that in the midst of a Play, after long expectation for Tarlton, (being much desired of the people) at length he came forth: where at his entrance, one in the gallerie pointed his finger at him, saying to a friend that had never seene him, that is he: Tarlton to make sport at the least occasion given him, and seeing the man point with one finger, he in love againe held up two fingers: the captious fellow jealous of his wife (for he was maried) and because a Player did it, tooke the matter more hainously, and askt him why hee made Homes at him: No quoth Tarlton, they be fingers:

For there is no man which in love to meeLends me one finger, but he shall have three.

No, no, sayes the fellow, you gave me the homes: true saies Tarlton, for my fingers are tipt with nailes which are like hornes, and I must make a shew of that which you are sure of: this matter grew so, that the more he medled, the more it was for his disgrace: wherefore the standers by counselled him to depart, both he and his hornes, lest his cause grew desperate: so the poore fellow plucking his Hat over his eyes, went his wayes.

Humour dealing with homosexuality shows up another shift in social attitudes, though here the evidence from Elizabethan drama is harder to weigh. In the first place, emotional friendships between men were an accepted part of Renaissance life, and the gradations between simple admiration and homosexual lust seem to have been even wider in range and subtler in kind than they are now. When young men shared a bed, it was likely to be regarded as a matter of mere convenience rather than as the indulgence of a sexual inversion. The same was true, and remained so for much longer, of pairs of young women. To an Elizabethan audience, the friendships between Valentine and Proteus, Antonio and Bassanio, Menenius and Coriolanus ('I tell thee, fellow, / Thy general is my lover', V.ii.13), would have seemed no more homosexual than those of Rosalind and her cousin Celia, Beatrice and her cousin Hero—'although, until last night, / I have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow' (Much Ado IV.i.146). The Sonnets carry us into a different sphere, since the relationships between the poet's persona and one or more young men do suggest active sexual involvement. At least one of the sonnets (number 20 …) shows Shakespeare rebutting the suggestion of physical homosexuality, but, viewed in the light of the sequence as a whole, that attempt to etherealise the love affair looks specious.

When the plays glance at sodomy it is with reticence and distaste. The one fully explicit reference comes from Thersites in Troilus and Cressida when he curses Patroclus as Achilles' male varlet:

PATROCLUS Male varlet, you rogue! What's that? THERSITES Why, his masculine whore. Now, the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping ruptures, … incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries!

V.i.15

The word preposterous here is being used quite literally—'backside foremost'—and this bluntness, like so much else in Troilus, is in marked contrast with Shakespeare's usual treatment of the topic. Generally, his allusions to buggery are few in number and ambiguous in tenor. A typical instance is in Henry V (III.ii.129) where Gower exclaims 'Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other' and Jamy comments, 'Ah, that's a foul fault!" Jamy's remark is ambivalent. It could be condemning only the art of deliberate misunderstanding, as cultivated by Fluellen and Macmorris, but the considerable force of the word foul in early modern English, and the frequent occurrence of a sexual flavour in fault, together suggest a double entendre. If my suspicion is right and this is a joke based on the idea of the two disputants homosexually mis-taking one another, its very ambiguity looks defensive, a kind of evasion.

So far as one can judge, then, Shakespeare seems to have shared in the conventional disapproval of sodomy which found further theatrical expression through Jonson, Middleton, Tourneur and others.⁶ But the evidence for this is mostly of a negative type: the subject was one that he seems to have preferred to avoid—as is scarcely surprising if one considers official attitudes to homosexuality in the reign of Elizabeth I. From 1563 until 1861 buggery 'committed with mankind or beast' was a felony that could, and quite often did, incur the death sentence. Among the many ugly sidelights on the death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593 was the informer Richard Baines's report that Marlowe had affirmed 'That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles'. If Marlowe had escaped Ingram Friser's dagger, this piece of careless talk would not in itself have hanged him—Baines and Thomas Kyd, between them, had notes of far more heinous items of table-talk—but an accusation of homosexuality would at the very least have added weight to charges of atheism. From 1603 to 1625 the official outlook on homosexual activity was presumably less searching than in Elizabeth's reign, if only because James I himself was said to be homosexually inclined, as also was his eventual Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon. The practice of sodomy in such high places, however, would not have been likely to make the dramatists more outspoken about it. And the law remained unchanged: in 1628, the third part of Sir Edward Coke's Institutes of the Laws of England surveyed the history of punishments for buggery, confirming that 'the judgement of felony doth now belong to this offence, viz. to be hanged by the neck till he be dead'. Coke mentions only one Jacobean prosecution for a homosexual offence: in 1608 a man called Stafford had been indicted 'for committing buggery with a boy, for which he was attainted and hanged'.⁷

If Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists were more nervous of sexual inversion on the stage than are their later-twentieth-century descendants, they were a good deal less squeamish over venereal disease. Their comments on 'the pox' are numerous and, on the whole, cheerful, with an unpleasant and dated air, not unlike that of the same period's jocularity over madmen. It was not that the deadly nature of syphilis went unrecognised. The new and virulent strain of this infection that seems to have been brought to Europe by Columbus's men on their return from the New World in 1493 had been recognised as a killer by a number of sixteenth-century physicians. But the writers of medical treatises were not yet able to distinguish between syphilis and the other sexually transmitted diseases—infections that were much less dangerous, but which simultaneously affected many of the syphilitic patients.⁸ From gonorrhoea, in the absence of syphilis, a man or woman might recover, and it was perhaps because of this that the physicians' warnings about brothelry went largely unheard, very much as in our own time cigarette smokers have widely disregarded the findings of research into lung cancer. Shakespeare's plays embody the popular attitudes: up to about 1599 (the probable year of Henry V) they treat the pox as a source of fun; thereafter, they have a good deal to say about death from it, speaking somethings sombrely, sometimes with a brittle kind of hilarity.

Interesting though they are, these various changes in the prevailing modes of sexual humour over the centuries are only a part of what has to be taken into account for the assessment of Shakespearean indecency. An equally important kind of change is the purely semantic. In sexual matters, more than in most others, individual words have tended to change their meaning or force, often under the pressure of changing fashions in slang. Aunt, for example, can no longer mean prostitute, unless in some special stage situation which explicitly sets up the euphemism. Aching bones, coughing, a cracked voice and whitening or thinning hair do not nowadays suggest venereal illness, as they do for Timon of Athens and for Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida. The cart is no longer a standard punishment for prostitutes. Appetite, in modern usage, has lost the sense sexual appetite or lust, just as light no longer invites semantic punning on a secondary meaning forward, wanton. Contrariwise, bastard has lost much of its scabrous weight by declining into common usage as a vague expletive. Such broadening and weakening, the normal fate of abusive terms, can be seen affecting whoreson in the course of Shakespeare's own lifetime. Thereafter the word fails to hold its place in the spoken language even as a soldierly expletive. Cuckold and bawd have also vanished from everyday speech, while bawdy and bawdry survive only in comparatively sophisticated (usually literary) contexts, and pox only in medical compounds such as chicken-pox.

As regards our recognising sexual indecency when we come to it, however, neither old-fashioned subject matter nor obsolete vocabulary represents the major difficulty. The archaic and the puzzling at least alert us, as we read, to the need for research. The trickiest problem lies rather in responding accurately to the sexual innuendo of a bygone age. Two quotations, one from our own day and one from Shakespeare's, will perhaps illustrate this.

What about these crooners, eh? What about these crooners? I don't know what we're coming to. I don't, honest. Look at the stuff they sing. Look at the songs they sing! "The Dark Town Strutters' Ball", "The Woodchoppers' Ball", "The Basin' Street Ball"—it's a lot of rubbish, isn't it?

John Osborne, equipping his Entertainer with that music-hall joke, can count on us to see it, and to appreciate its hackneyed quality, because it is rooted in the subsoil of a popular culture which is still familiar. But with this, compare Ben Jonson inviting a friend to supper.

Yet shall you have, to rectifie your palate,
An olive, capers, or some better sallade
Ushring the mutton; with a short-leg'd hen,
If we can get her, full of egs, and then,
Limons, and wine for sauce: to these, a coney
Is not to be despair'd of, for our money;
And, though fowle, now, be scarce, yet there
 are clarkes,
The skie not falling, thinke we may have
 larkes.

For the twentieth-century reader there is nothing in these lines that points immediately to a secondary meaning behind the surface promise of gustatory joy, yet several possible ambiguities of a risqué kind are treading on one another's heels. Capers can suggest kidlike (even goatish?) leapings as well as a herbal relish: in As You Like It Touchstone patronises Audrey with 'I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths' (III.iii.5). Sallade is the same words as sallet—something improperly tasty, as we know from Hamlet's warning the players not to have 'sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury' (II.ii.435). Mutton crops up frequently in the Elizabethan period as a cant term for prostitute, or at any rate to denote a sexually available woman. A short-legged hen is more innocent, but play-house poultry are prostitutes in Bartholomew Fair (II.v.96), and eggs are aphrodisiacs to Falstaff (Merry Wives III .v.25-6). Coney, although commonest in its straightforward sense rabbit and its slang extension to gull or naive victim, sometimes becomes a term of endearment for a woman, decently or indecently (OED, cony, sb. 5 and 5b). Larks are amongst the 'Good poultry' served to Cocledemoy and the procuress Mary Faugh, in strict privacy, in Marston's Dutch Courtesan (ed. M. L. Wine, I.i.13-18). Now, none of this proves that Jonson's epigram has an underlying pattern of mock bawdy enticement; but the coincidence of half-a-dozen salacious nether-meanings available within almost as many lines does open up some such possibility. Reference to Jonson's source, the forty-eighth Epigram of Martial's tenth book, neither strengthens nor weakens the possibility. The Martial poem is not in any way erotic, but Jonson is, as usual, adapting, not merely translating, so he is not in any way bound by the limits of his Latin original. Again, it may be objected that he himself was not habitually bawdy in his writing, and that he more than once inveighed against 'the immodest and obscene writing of many in their plays'. But he was not so solemn as to practise consistently what he preached, as anyone reading 'On the Famous Voyage' quickly discovers. Where that account of a journey up the noxious Fleet Ditch differs radically from 'Inviting a Friend to Supper' is in the blunt obviousness of most of its ribaldry. Yet if a strain of indecency does run through the invitation, its cryptic, muted quality is exactly what one might expect from that kind of poem. Jonson would have taken care not to expose it plainly, since that would have taken away from the poem's wit. Hilda Hulme has explained the principle well in a discussion of double entendres in Shakespeare:

The more skilfully the improper sense is suggested, the less likely it is that we can prove that such a sense is present. The art of the speaker and of the dramatist will be shown, so to say, by concealment, in the exactness with which the innocent and less innocent meanings can counterchange, the preciseness with which one sense fits the space taken by the other.⁹

So it is with the Ben Jonson epigram. One is left suspicious, but unsure, because the available evidence is indecisive. We live close enough in time to The Entertainer to feel certain of Osborne's calculated suppression of the expected word balls in favour of rubbish, but we are too far removed from the everyday verbal humour of Jonson's world to know for certain whether he is doing something similar.

With Shakespeare, then, page by page and line by line, the possible bawdy ambiguities must be weighed carefully if their value is to be judged at all accurately. On the one hand there is the risk of reading past them; on the other, there is the risk of being so determined to grasp at every innuendo that we proceed to read in to the text lewd meanings which its wording and phrasing will not reasonably support.

An amusing instance of the first of these errors affected the editorial handling of a line in Romeo and Juliet for over two hundred years. One of Mercutio's milder indecencies is his reference to 'Young Abraham Cupid' (II.i.13), which occurs when he is 'conjuring' the hidden Romeo to reappear and join his friends instead of skulking in the Capulets' garden. Puzzled by the apparently incongruous attachment of Abraham to the son of Venus, Lewis Theobald, in 1733, aired a suspicion that Shakespeare had really written 'Young auborn Cupid,—i.e. brown-hair'd'.¹⁰ Other eighteenth-century editors changed Abraham to Adam, having accepted the 'explanation' put forward by John Upton:

Shakespeare wrote, Young Adam Cupid, &c. The printer or transcriber, gave us this Abram, mistaking the d for br: and thus made a passage direct nonsense, which was understood in Shakespeare's time by all his audience: for this Adam was a most notable archer; and for his skill became a proverb.¹¹

Ingenious, very. And the habit of printing Adam instead of Abraham survived right to the middle of our own century—despite the fact that as long ago as 1838 Charles Knight had solved the artificial crux: 'The "Abraham" Cupid is the cheat—the "Abraham man"—of our old statutes.'¹² Mercutio is likening the near-naked Cupid to the rogues who wandered the country stealing and begging, many of them with faked sores showing through their scanty rags. Dekker's book Lantern and Candelight describes with gusto how these villains went without breeches quite deliberately, and how their 'going Abr' am (that is to say, "naked") is not for want of clothes but to stir up men to pity and in that pity to cozen their devotion'.¹³ This combination of the ideas of nakedness and cozenage exactly fits the tone of Mercutio's bawdily derisive speech. Theobald and Upton were unintentionally bowdlerising Shakespeare.

To illustrate the converse, the editorial creation of an indecent innuendo, the eighteenth century may be quoted again. Sir Thomas Hanmer, perplexed over Lear's use of the expression good-years ('The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell', V.iii.24), was apparently unwilling to connect it with the vague imprecation 'What the good-year!' which occurs in Much Ado, 2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives and other plays. Instead, he 'emended' Lear's use of it to goujeres. This intriguing but imaginary word he glossed as 'The French disease', and alleged its derivation to be from the French Gouje, 'a common Camp-Trull'.¹⁴ One cannot help admiring the ingenuity of all this. It seems slightly unchivalrous of Chambers's Dictionary to dismiss it drily as 'an editor's would-be improvement upon goodyear … , from a spurious Fr. goujére'.

At the same time, it would be unjust to create the impression that distortion of Shakespeare's indecency, one way or the other, has been any more common among Shakespeare's editors than among his other commentators. If anything, the reverse has been true, at least in recent decades. The very nature of the modern textual scholar's expertise makes him less likely to corrupt Shakespeare's meaning than are critics who lack such training, and the twentieth-century equivalents of Theobald's or Hanmer's well-meant solecisms are to be found, for the most part, outside the confines of formal textual study. Eric Partridge's book Shakespeare's Bawdy is their best-known repository—not so much through being positively misleading as through failing to provide explicit defence for interpretations which, as H. W. Fowler might have said, will require to be defended every time they are put forward. It might have been possible for Partridge to justify the inclusion of come in his glossary, but the entry under the word certainly does not succeed in justifying it. The gloss 'To experience a sexual emission' is supported by two Shakespearean quotations:

MARGARET Well, I will call Beatrice to you,
  who I think hath legs.
BENEDICK And therefore will come.
                            Much Ado V.ii.23

OLIVIA Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?
MALVOLIO To bed! 'Ay', sweetheart, and I'll
  come to thee!'
                           Twelfth Night III.iv.28

Neither of these, I suggest, is anything like convincing as evidence for the modern orgasmic usage of come which Partridge is attributing to Shakespeare. It is a usage that does occur in Dekker—'a wench that will come with a wet finger', 1 Honest Whore I.ii.4—but that does not make it Shakespearean.

Much the same thing happens with eye, for which Partridge in 1947 claimed a Shakespearean sense of pudendum muliebre. Shakespeare uses the word eye, in singular or plural form, 1311 times. Given the associative habit of the poet's mind, it is not impossible that once or twice amongst all those occurrences the opening or closing movement of this moist, hair-fringed organ—conventionally, with Elizabethan writers, the point of entry for love—could suggest the appearance or function of the vulva. As G. I. Williams has pointed out, eye is used in this way by Middleton and Rowley:

I'll never leave the love of an open-hearted,
  widow for a narrow-eyed maid again.
   Middleton, No Wit Like a Woman's I.ii.295

… for a woman, they say, has an eye more
  than a man.
     Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling
                                  III.iii.74

But the very clarity of these two examples is instructive, for if the limited similarity between eye and vulva is to be part of the sense-pattern in any play, its wording, or at least that of its context, must surely indicate that the comparison is being made. Partridge, in the single Shakespeare quotation he invoked, could point to no such indication.

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed,
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.
           Love's Labour's Lost III.i.186

The last two lines are indisputably bawdy, but it would take more than that, with or without an eyes/ay pun and a mention of balls, to supply for eyes the pudendal significance that Partridge asserted. The weakness of his case becomes still more apparent when his cross-reference to O ('For the semantics') is followed up. From O in the glossary we are further referred to circle where 'the semantics' consist of a note stating, ' Magic circle and—physiologically inaccurate—sexual circle'. When yet another cross-reference leads us back, via ring, to the entries at circle and O, we might be excused for suspecting an elaborate leg-pull.

Even outside the Partridge glossary there have been a number of inadequately supported attributions of indecencies to Shakespeare in recent years. For a long time after the appearance of Dover Wilson's New Cambridge edition of Hamlet (1934; second edition 1936), the repeated use of the word nunnery in III.i was widely accepted as meaning brothel as well as, if not indeed instead of, convent. That a jocularly inverted use of the word would have been available to Shakespeare is not in doubt: OED (nunnery, Ib) quotes its use by Nashe, by Fletcher and on an eighteenth-century title-page. But to know that such a usage was possible in the early seventeenth century is not in itself enough to demonstrate that Shakespeare avails himself of it for Hamlet. As A. L. French has shown,¹⁵ this usage simply does not lend itself to the antithesis that Hamlet is making when he harangues Ophelia—an antithesis, not simply between marriage and the avoidance of marriage, but between sexual activity and its avoidance. 'He cannot be saying "avoid sex by going to a brothel"!'

The nunnery instance effectively demonstrates the importance of the general tone of a passage in determining what is indecent and what is not. William Empson and the New Critics have made us readier than preceding generations to appreciate Shakespeare's habit of combining apparent incompatibles, whether in verse or in stage effect. We have come to accept, too, that the author who devised the mock suicide of Gloucester and Imogen's despair over the corpse of Cloten seems capable of almost any mingling of emotions, however bizarre. But there is nothing to suggest that he would set up such tensions casually, let alone unconsciously, as some of the more avid bawdy-hunters would seem to imply. Take, for example, Cleopatra's lament on the death of Antony.

                                O, see, my women,
The crown o' th' earth doth melt. My lord!
O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fallen! Young boys and
  girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
                             [Swoons IV.xv.62

Commenting on these lines, Virgil K. Whitaker writes of 'an all too appropriate though indecent double meaning of the kind that Shakespeare uses elsewhere to deflate the emotion of a potentially tragic situation'.¹⁶ The alleged double meaning is, I take it, in the phrase 'The soldier's pole is fallen', which in a comic context could no doubt make reference to a detumescent penis. To accept that as an available meaning here, however, is to read with the distorting eye of early adolescence. At a literal level, one could oppose the sexual reading by remarking Cleopatra's steady emphasis on soldierly triumph as contrasted with ordinariness. Young boys and girls find a place in the flow of images not because they are sexually immature but because they are powerless, uncelebrated; grown men have become like them, unremarkable. But Whitaker's interpretation can surely be disposed of more simply. In the theatre, where Cleopatra has to faint ('She's dead too, our sovereign'), a joke would either prove unactable or, if actable, atmospherically ruinous. To suppose that Shakespeare has blundered so absurdly at this of all moments in the play is to carry critical openmindedness to the point of vacuity.

Not all allegations of indecency can be so firmly proved or disproved. Bawdy, as I have said, is an indefinite region, and between the demonstrably decent and the demonstrably indecent lies much that is neither. It is hard to be sure, for example, whether Cleopatra is being flippant or serious, improper or heedlessly urgent, when Shakespeare has her exclaim

Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears,
That long time have been barren.
                                          II.v.23

Then again, what does one decide about two of the most famous lines of song in Twelfth Night?

Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.
                                          II.iii.41

If the word son were to be given the heavy stress that the tetrameter allows, it could conceivably be argued that progression from lovers meeting to son implies copulation—and hence a risqué insinuation of the kind which pointedly omits explicit reference to sexual activity, as in the John Osborne passage I quoted earlier. Yet it seems doubtful, to say the least, whether many readers or audiences would detect so muted a hint; and to ignore it would not necessarily be imperceptive, especially in view of the near-proverbial commonness in Elizabethan literature of phrases like 'every wise man's son' and 'every mother's son'. This is also why such sayings as 'woo her, wed her, and bed her' (The Taming of the Shrew I. i.141) are rarely if ever indecent.

A more complex illustration of the same interpretative difficulty may be drawn from the title Much Ado About Nothing. This lends itself to at least two possible interpretations, and perhaps also a third. First there is the obvious sense of the phrase, appropriate as the name of a light comedy in which characters fuss over what seems to have occurred but in fact amounts to nothing. Secondly there could be the nothing/noting pun which occurs only innocently within the play itself (II.iii.52-5) but which is to be found in a context of prostitution in Marston:

FRANCESCHINA … You ha' brought mine love, mine honor, mine body, all to noting!

MARY FAUGH To nothing! I'll be sworn I have brought them to all the things I could. I ha' made as much o' your maidenhead—and you had been mine own daughter, I could not ha' sold your maidenhead oft'ner than I ha' done.

The Dutch Courtesan, ed. cit., II. ii.7

This would give us not only much ado about nothing but also much ado about noting—noting in the sense observing or 'branding with disgrace' (OED, note, v., 1, 7b, 7c).

But there still remains the third possibility, that Nothing carries the bawdy implication vulva, as the letter O probably does when Juliet's Nurse demands of Romeo, 'Why should you fall into so deep an O?' (III.iii.91). Another possible parallel is in Hamlet:

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.112

After the pun in country, we need not doubt that Hamlet is making a further bawdy joke with 'Nothing.' But what joke, precisely? Does this nothing, with or without a circular gesture of the fingers, represent the female pudend, as Dover Wilson and Thomas Pyles both proposed?¹⁷ Or does Shakespeare only mean—as F. W. Bateson has suggested to me—that nothing, no penis, ought to be lying between maids' legs? Either meaning is possible, and neither seems provable.

The difficulty of finding solid corroboration for Nothing as a pudendal joke in Much Ado increases rather than decreases when we face the bewildering variety of nothing-quibbles displayed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Many are based on the idea of somebody's lacking sexual organs (male or female) altogether. In The Lover's Melancholy III.i.74, Ford has the foolish courtier Cuculus exclaim, 'I will court any thing; be in love with nothing, nor nothing'. Essentially the same idea, this time in a quibble conflating the want of a vagina with the want of a dowry, occurs in the anonymous King heir (printed 1605):

RAGAN
  She [Cordella] were right fit to make a
  Parsons wife:
  For they, men say, do love faire women
  well,
  And many times doe marry them with
  nothing.
GONORILL
  With nothing! marry God forbid: why, are
  there any such?
RAGAN
  I meane, no money.
GONORILL
  I cry you mercy, I mistooke you much.…
                                             B4

Many other nothing-jokes only approach the physiological, steering clear of it at the last moment. When Pistol asks, 'Come we to full points here, and are etceteras nothings?' (2 Henry IV II.iv.174) his meaning is unmistakably sexual, but it is also obscure. The same applies to Leontes's ranting to Camillo in The Winter's Tale:

                     Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh?—a note infallible
Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more
  swift?
Hours minutes? Noon midnight? And all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs
  only,
That would unseen be wicked—is this
  nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is
  nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia
  nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these
  nothings,
If this be nothing.
                                      I.ii.284

A speech like this would seem to be the last word in what Thomas Pyles called 'pudendal suggestiveness': nothing, note, foot, honesty in a hymenal form that will break—all these are words which, in one place or another, Shakespeare uses sexually. But in the pell-mell flow of Leontes's diseased imagination, 'suggestiveness' is the most we can claim. Of the nine nothings in those twelve lines, we cannot point to a single one and say with confidence, 'Just there he means vulva.'

The whole matter is further complicated by the fact mat nothing is synonymous with nought, which Elizabethan spelling did not consistently differentiate from naught. Such a quibble as Flute's 'A paramour is—God bless us—a thing of naught', or Richard Ill's 'Naught to do with Mistress Shore?' is not necessarily anatomical. It may simply be invoking the general idea of sexual sin (as in naughty). The same is true of nothing itself when Iago dwells on it. 'Nay, but be wise: yet we see nothing done, / She may be honest yet.… So they do nothing, 'tis a venial slip' (Othello III.iii.429, IV.i.9).

We arrive, then, at a semantic impasse. If Shakespeare had called his comedy Much Ado About Nought we could at least have claimed one ribald nether-meaning, nought/naught/naughty, with some confidence. As it is, Much Ado About Nothing might conceivably involve a sexual double entendre, since the plot is concerned with Hero's virginity and, in a way, with Beatrice's. Hero, although doing nothing wrong, finds herself accused of 'doing nothing' in a conceited sense of that phrase. But since not even Borachio or Don John anticipates Iago's quibble, we have to face the fact that the play itself does not establish this kind of connection between its title and its content. A reader comparing that title with the quite unconceited names of companion pieces—The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well—has no choice but to return the same verdict as for the Ben Jonson poem: non-proven.

Enough has been said to indicate the hazards surrounding the analysis of indecent material in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As I hope several of the foregoing quotations have made clear, not only single words and phrases but even whole speeches, whole episodes, will sometimes steer close to being bawdy, yet will just shave past its true sexual-absurd tone. An 'averagely indecent' Shakespeare play (As You Like It, perhaps, or 1 Henry IV) is likely to have roughly as many near-bawdy lines as it has actually bawdy lines. Fortunately, Shakespeare himself gives extensive help towards our telling the difference. As has often been remarked in other connections, he was never an author to waste his effects by allowing them to pass unnoticed. Whatever the dramatic functions of his sexual references—whether made lightly (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost), in aggressive jest (Hamlet, Troilus, Cymbeline) or in grim earnest (Othello, Lear, Timon)—they are very often shaped and pointed by their context. Key words or phrases are sometimes repeated to give the theatre-audience time to grasp double meanings.

HOSTESS Here's a goodly tumult! … Alas, alas! put up your naked weapons, put up your naked weapons.… Are you not hurt i'th' groin? Methought 'a made a shrewd thrust at your belly.

2 Henry IV II.iv. 194-201

Besides the guidance given by the general tone and drift of meaning, we also get, in the plays, the explicit responses of a variety of characters, 'registering' indecency in their different ways. Sometimes the speaker of a bawdy line will hesitate over it or apologise for it in advance:

BURGUNDY Pardon the frankness of my mirth, if I answer you for that. If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind.

Henry V V.ii.287

POMPEY Sir, she came in great with child, and longing—saving your honour's reverence—for stewed prunes.

Measure for Measure II.i.86

On other occasions the apology comes after the lapse into impropriety, and it will often be addressed directly to the audience.

NURSE
  Sleep for a week. For the next night, I
  warrant,
  The County Paris hath set up his rest
  That you shall rest but little. God forgive
  me!
  Marry, and amen!
                      Romeo and Juliet IV.v.5

In some of these comic passages, Shakespeare's characters will pointedly bowdlerise their own expressions.

Touchstone avoids saying jakes by calling Jaques 'Master What-ye-call't'; Lafew refers delicately to Lavache's 'lower part', and Launce to 'another thing' that his milkmaid may perhaps be liberal with; Pompey speaks of the pox as 'the thing you wot of; and in the brothel at Mytilene, Boult suppresses thorn or prick when he is praising the fresh rose, Marina, to Lysimachus.

On the occasions when a suggestive remark is not signalled by the character speaking it, there should still be small danger of our missing the point if the dramatist has another character at hand to clarify the line for the audience through his or her reception of it, whether amused, guffawing, coy, reproving, shocked, brusque or indignant. Reproof comes most commonly—as one might expect—from the women.

MARIA Come, come, you talk greasily; your
  lips grow foul.
              Love's Labour's Lost IV.i.130

KATHERINE Le foot, et le count? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh! Le foot et le count!

Henry V III.iv.48

Needless to say, Shakespeare's females vary widely in their attitudes to verbal impropriety, but the variations are based on a recognisable Elizabethan norm. Once again it is Marston who expresses it most plainly:

Fie, Crispinella! you speak too broad.… Faith, sister, I'll be gone if you speak so broad.… Good quick sister, stay your pace. We are private, but the world would censure you; for truly severe modesty is women's virtue.

The Dutch Courtesan, ed. cit., III .i.24, 28, 45

Shakespeare is invoking this social inhibition when he has Lavinia, in Titus Andronicus, seek a euphemism for some such word as ravishment ('one thing more, / That womanhood denies my tongue to tell'), and when he has Desdemona hesitate over saying whore: 'Am I that name, Iago? … I cannot say "whore": / It does abhor me now I speak the word'. In Much Ado, the stock convention is simultaneously acknowledged and disrupted. It rules Hero, but not her lively cousin Beatrice or the blunter Margaret.

HERO God give me joy to wear it [her wedding gown], for my heart is exceedingly heavy.

MARGARET 'Twill be heavier soon, by the weight of a man.

HERO Fie upon thee! Art not ashamed?

MARGARET Of what, lady? Of speaking honourably? Is not marriage honourable in a beggar? Is not your lord honourable without marriage? I think you would have me say, 'saving your reverence, a husband'; an bad thinking do not wrest true speaking, I'll offend nobody. Is there any harm in 'the heavier for a husband'? None, I think, an it be the right husband and the right wife; otherwise 'tis light, and not heavy; ask my Lady Beatrice else, here she comes.

III.iv.22

A similar difference in freedom of expression between ladies of comparable social position can be seen in Henry VIII (II.iii) when the Old Lady teases Anne Bullen about chastity and ambition. More likemindedness and a still less 'refined' attitude can be noticed in Cleopatra's attendants:

CHARMIAN Well, if you were but an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it?

IRAS Not in my husband's nose.

CHARMIAN Our worser thoughts heavens mend!

Antony and Cleopatra I.ii.55

The well-bred female's sense of propriety is thus a highly variable, but also very useful, indicator of Shakespearean indecency.

Scoldings for outspokenness are not always well deserved. Sometimes it is the reprover, not the reproved, who has invented the indecency that Shakespeare is pointing up. In The Taming of the Shrew, for example, Petruchio's lackey Grumio (madcap servant to a madcap master) abuses the already victimised tailor by making him the butt of a series of quite imaginary scurrilities:

PETRUCHIO [to the tailor's man] Well sir, in brief, the gown is not for me.

GRUMIO You are i'th'right, sir, 'tis for my mistress.

PETRUCHIO Go, take it up unto thy master's use.

GRUMIO Villain, not for thy life! Take up my mistress' gown for thy master's use!

PETRUCHIO Why sir, what's your conceit in that?

GRUMIO O sir, the conceit is deeper than you think for. Take up my mistress' gown to his master's use! O fie, fie, fie!

IV.iii.151

The whole process of imputing indecency is at its most intricate with those characters whose scurrilising tendencies go deepest. Mistress Quickly could vie with any police prosecutor in the art of uncovering what she—but scarcely anyone else—would take to be cunningly worded sexual innuendo. Much the same is true, in a more serious way, of Othello and Leontes in their jealous phases. Luckily, this habit of mind is easy to gauge.

Finally, we have to consider those instances of possible bawdy in which the speaker makes no hesitation or apology, and no other character is suitably placed to register licentiousness. When this happens, the reader will be thrown back on his assessments of mood, connotation, implication, dramatic circumstance and the nature of the person speaking. The occurrence of several potentially indecent words in rapid succession can also strengthen one's suspicions, as we saw with Ben Jonson. Even then, at any one time, our reading of 'doubtful' bawdy will embrace a whole range of semantic possibilities, with the result that our precise interpretation can differ between one reading (or performance) and the next. These ambiguous indecencies, fortunately, are seldom crucial to the interpretation of an entire speech or scene.

One result of this whole enquiry into indecency has been my own growing conviction that the golden rule is to be slow in assuming ribald significance anywhere in Shakespeare—above all when reading or directing the plays in the sexconscious and irony-loving atmosphere of the later twentieth century. There has been unintended warning for us all in productions of Othello rendered nonsensical by tarty, ogling Desdemonas; in some orgiastic Midsummer Night's Dreams; and in the odd extensions of homosexual emphasis in at least one Troilus and Cressida. The lesson needs to be written plain: only where the text of Shakespeare fully supports a bawdy interpretation can we make deductions of any worth regarding his dramatic or thematic use of indecency.

Notes

¹The Edinburgh Review, xxxvi (1821-22), 52-3: part of an unsigned notice of Thomas Bowdler, ed., The Family Shakespeare (10 vols, London, 1818). In an article in Notes and Queries (n.s. xiii (1966), 141-2) Noel Perrin pointed out that, strictly speaking, the 1818 Family Shakespeare was not the first but the second edition. The true first edition, containing only twenty of the plays, had appeared in 1807 and had been the anonymous work of Bowdler's sister, Henrietta Maria Bowdler.

²The Family Shakespeare (London, 7th edn, 1839), p. vii.

³ G. I. Williams, 'Serious uses of sexual imagery in the Elizabethan drama', Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1964, p. 313.

⁴ Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. Edward Partridge (1971), rV.iii.50.

⁵Tarlton's Jests (edn of 1613), [B2^v]. In this extract, as in all other old-spelling quotations in this book, I have adopted modern typographical conventions, expanding Elizabethan contractions and altering v, u, i and long s to u, v, j and short s wherever modern usage would have them so. (I am grateful to Professor P. H. Davison for drawing my attention to the Tarlton incident.)

⁶ See, for example, Jonson, Sejanus, ed. J. A. Barish (1965), I.i.212-16, or Epicoene, ed. cit., I.i.23-4; Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1885-86), More Dissemblers besides Women V.i.l90ff., or A Game at Chess IV.ii.108-10; Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy, ed. R. A. Foakes (1966), I.iii.35, or The Atheist's Tragedy, ed. Irving Ribner (1964), IV.iii. 205-10; Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (1953-61), Satiromastix I.ii.21-166; Webster, The White Devil, ed. J. R. Brown (1960), V.i.122-4.

⁷ The quotations from Sir Edward Coke are taken from H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love (1970), pp. 37-41.

⁸ See, for example, William Clowes, Treatise, touching the cure of the disease called Morbus Gallicus (London, 1579; 1585).

⁹ Hilda M. Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare's Language (1962), p. 118.

¹⁰ Lewis Theobald, ed., The Works of Shakespeare (7 vols, London, 1733-34), vii, 151-2.

¹¹ John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare (London, 1746), pp. 234-5 (quoted, with slight alterations, in H. H. Furness's Variorum Romeo and Juliet (Philadelphia, 1874), p. 87).

¹² Quoted in Variorum Romeo and Juliet, p. 88.

¹³ Thomas Dekker, The Wonderful Year, The Gull's Horn-Book, Penny-Wise Pound-Foolish, English Villainies Discovered by Lantern and Candlelight, and Selected Writings, ed. E. D. Pendry (1967), p. 289.

¹⁴ Sir Thomas Hanmer, ed., The Works of Shakespear (6 vols, Oxford, 1743-44), vi, Aaaa.

¹⁵ A. L. French, 'Hamlet's Nunnery', English Studies (Amsterdam), xlviii (1967), 141-5.

¹⁶ Virgil K. Whitaker, The Mirror up to Nature (1965), p. 295.

¹⁷ Cf. J. Dover Wilson, ed., New Cambridge Hamlet (2nd edn, 1936), p. 199, and Thomas Pyles, 'Ophelia's "Nothing" ', Modern Language Notes, lxiv (1949), 322-3.