SOURCE: Kermode, Frank. “Explorations in Shakespeare's Language.” Raritan 18, no. 1 (summer 1998): 73-86.

[In the following essay, Kermode examines the ways in which various critics have interpreted Shakespeare's language, including his use of sexual innuendo and bawdy.]

In his recent book, The Genius of Shakespeare, Professor Jonathan Bate explains that William Empson's concept of ambiguity was a decidedly Cambridge invention; by getting rid of the either/or mentality that had been prevalent in literary analysis, he was bringing to literary criticism a way of thinking inaugurated by Einstein but familiar in the university of Paul Dirac; the young and prodigious Empson, says Bate, was “the first man to see the literature of the past through quantum theory's altered notion of reality.” He is “modernism's Einstein.”

I do not think we need to speak of quantum theory, or indeed of modernism, in the anthropomorphic style the possessives here suggest, but I do agree that we need new terms to praise the early Empson, for it is a return to that body of work, to the spirit of that work, wherever he got it from, that offers us our best hope of restoring and invigorating the practice of critical analysis. Of course this cannot mean that we have no duty to disagree about at least some of the readings offered us in the three great central books. In the course of his essay Bate discusses one of Empson's examples of the seventh type of ambiguity, the type that occurs when “the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the author's mind.” This type was of special importance not only because of the degree of “compaction” to be observed in the relation of the opposites, but because it represents somehow the deepest poetry, what Empson calls, with only a little irony, “the secret places of the Muse,” rather wickedly adapting some lines from Dante which show the poet and Virgil too intimately involved in the body of Satan: another type of ambiguity.

One example of the seventh type, cited by Bate, comes in a speech in Measure for Measure, where Claudio, under sentence of death for fornication, agrees that his sister, the novice Isabella, might, with some hope of success, go to the Deputy Angelo and plead for her brother's life.

                                                                                for in her youth
There is a prone and speechlesse dialect
Such as moue men. …

(I.ii.182-4)

Dr. Johnson “could scarcely tell what signification to give the word ‘prone,’” and after laboring at it for a while he suggests emending “prone” to either “pow'r” or “prompt.” A modern reader may scorn these rather feeble suggestions, and even agree that this passage, far from suffering a loss of sense from that “distortion of words” which “is not uncommon in our author,” comes from the secret places of the Muse where distortions make poetry; a wonderful piece of language, one of those that provoke the sort of attention Eliot had in mind when he spoke of the bewildering minute, the moment of dazzled recognition, from which one draws back and, having regained composure, tries to think of something to say about an experience too disconcerting to be thought of as simply pleasant. Empson found in Claudio's words an example of his “complete opposites”:

This is the stainless Isabel, being spoken of by her respectful brother. Prone means either “inactive and lying flat” (in retirement or with a lover) or “active,” “tending to,” whether as moving men by her subtlety or by her purity, or as moving in herself, for pleasure or to do good. Speechlesse will not give away whether she is shy or sly, and dialect has abandoned the effort to distinguish between them. The last half-line makes its point very calmly, with an air of knowing about such cases; and, indeed, I feel very indelicate in explaining Claudio's meaning. …

Bate now develops this reading, perhaps wanting to strengthen its sexual suggestiveness; Empson, to whom the conflicting senses of “prone” (inactive/active) are the central issue with support from subtle/pure, shy/sly, has “lying flat … with a lover,” and the suggestion about Isabella's movement, and the final hint about Claudio's street wisdom; but more, perhaps, can be done along these lines. Mention of Isabella's youth, it is alleged, brings in “the heat of sexuality,” while “prone” introduces the fleeting idea of Isabella lying flat on her back. But this is a mistake, and Empson just avoided it. Prone can certainly mean an extraordinary number of things, but it never means “flat on the back,” as the O.E.D. (which, surprisingly, does not give this example) makes perfectly clear. Perhaps Professor Bate would have been happier if Shakespeare had written supine, a word he somehow omitted to use anywhere, though it was available and clearly differentiated from prone, as in the Dictionary's example from a book published in 1615 (“the position or manner of lying … eyther prone that is downeward, or supine that is vpward”). Of course it is true that we might still somehow get from the lines the idea that Claudio, delicately, ambiguously, even unwillingly, entertains the notion that his sister may exercise an appeal that is partly sexual—as if, by a masculine intuition that against probability turns out to be shared by the precise Angelo, he sees that her nun's habit could be an element in her success as an advocate, the more apposite in that the Deputy might get from the encounter some sense of the strength of the temptation to which he, Claudio, had yielded, though given the young woman's religious vocation and the celebrated rigor of Angelo's life, one would not have expected either of them to fall. Of course we know that the action of the play will turn on Angelo's inflamed sexual reaction to Isabella, so that we may read this expressly erotic consequence back into Claudio's speech, to the point where it can be overlooked that he could be thinking first of his sister simply as an advocate made the more persuasive by her feminine grace and a habit which, though some might find it provocative, inevitably suggests chastity.

But the sexual suggestion can't be wholly dispelled. J. W. Lever in his Arden edition of 1965 allows that “prone,” “move,” and, in the next line, “play,” are “capable of suggesting sexual provocation,” though he insists that the “overt drift” concerns psychology and rhetoric, usefully quoting from T. Wright's The Passions of the Mind (1601): “superiours may learn to coniecture the affections of their subiectes mindes, by a silent speech pronounced in their very countenances. And this point especially may be obserued in women.” Lever thinks prone here suggests “the abject posture of submission or helplessness.” This sense, which doesn't eliminate but probably reduces the flagrancy of the Empson-Bate interpretation, can more easily be admitted if we insist that whatever else it may mean, prone does not mean supine. The commonsense view might be that Claudio is cheering himself up by arguing that Isabella might impress Angelo in two ways, by being submissive and silent, and, alternatively, by proving she is a good arguer; or both, at appropriate moments. Critics are rightly required to be resistant to such simple explanations; as Stephen Booth remarks in his edition of the Sonnets, sometimes “a reader will see the speaker's point without understanding (or knowing that he has not understood and cannot in any usual sense understand) the sentence that makes the point.” He makes this valuable proposition while discussing Sonnet 16, but adds that in general “even where the lines are vaguest and most ambiguous they are usually also simple and obvious.” This is a paradox worth bearing in mind when one is engaged in discussions of the present kind. The ordinary reader and the commentator have somewhat different interests.

I don't feel that Empson, who elsewhere wrote so finely about Measure for Measure, has in this instance quite met the challenge of the lines I've been discussing, and I doubt if Bate has helped him much. So this is a good moment to turn to Hilda Hulme's remarkable book, Explorations in Shakespeare's Language. Hulme, for some years my respected colleague, was, as she remarks in her introduction, “on the language side,” and she knew a lot about Elizabethan English. It is the purpose of her book to apply that knowledge to the language of Shakespeare's plays. She remarks at the outset that an interest in the “total meaning” of units of language has been a “special distinction of recent criticism.” She may have had Empson in mind, though she cites him only once (with approval, although his method, despite his reliance on the O.E.D., is of course very different from hers). Unlike Dr. Johnson, who admired Shakespeare most when he was writing with “ease and simplicity,” and regretted his tendency towards “ruggedness or difficulty,” we now, she remarks, “take pleasure … in all the various modes of complex meaning,” the more various and complex occurring naturally in rugged and difficult passages rather than in easy and simple ones; and so we convince ourselves that our response is closer to that of Shakespeare's contemporaries than to that of his editors from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Hulme reminds us that Heminge and Condell, though they boasted about their author's fluency, acknowledged that his readers would have various degrees of skill, “from the most able, to him that can but spell.” It has always seemed a great mystery of the early Jacobean years that there was an audience able to take in, at a hearing, at least some of the sense of passages in a dozen great plays (think, for instance, of Coriolanus) which in some cases continue to baffle modern editors. Of course they had been taught by Shakespeare and had also listened to some very long sermons ruggedly dividing the word of God. And here Booth's remark is apposite; one can follow, catch the drift, without truly understanding, and even more in a play than in a sonnet, for the onward drive of the action will not permit one to linger over puzzles.

Hilda Hulme, as one would expect, has a look at Claudio's “prone,” reminding the reader as she often did that Latin senses can lurk behind Shakespearean words, and citing Cooper's Thesaurus on the expression aures pronas, for which he gives, as one of a number of instances, “auribus pronis aliquid accipere [to receive something with prone ears]. Tacit. Willingly to hear.”¹ This is useful because it connects “prone” with “speechlesse” in a quite characteristic Shakespearean (and Elizabethan) manner. Indeed Empson uses, in another example of the seventh type, Donne's line “Even my opprest shoes, dumb and speechlesse were,” making the point that “Dumb and speechlesse have the same meaning, but their sound describes the silence and the noise, respectively.” If we remember both Cooper and Wright we can perhaps think of “prone” and “speechlesse” as being two ways of saying the same thing, though we are still struck by the apparent strangeness of “prone” and the oxymoron of “speechlesse dialect”: could it mean making the plea by a kind of eloquence of demeanor rather than in words? Perhaps, but Claudio does add that his sister is an accomplished speaker, as indeed the sequel proves.

It is worth adding that the word prone has other senses some of which, in defiance of the full Empsonian doctrine (though he admitted the need for exceptions) should be ruled out as irrelevant to the present case, some more readily than others. Shakespeare uses the word seven times. Among the other usages “prone to mischief,” “I never saw one so prone,” meaning “ready,” “prone [willing] to labor,” can be ruled out, though Sonnet 141 calls the sense of feeling “to base touches prone” and in The Rape of Lucrece we find “O that prone lust should stain so pure a bed!”(l.684), where, as F. T. Prince correctly and modestly remarks in his Arden edition (1960), one can gloss “prone” as “headstrong, impulsive,” but “the meaning of ‘prostrate’ as ‘face downwards’ enters in.” It is indeed an odd word, for it can mean “servile, submissive, cringing” and also “headstrong and impulsive,” and it can qualify “lust.” Even the commoner senses, surviving into our own English, may not gain admission: “easy, apt, liable, having a natural disposition to something” (as in Hermione's “I am not prone to weeping, as our sex / Commonly are” (Winter's Tale, II.i.108-9). We impose some limits or explanation gets lost in mere noise. The limits can be so drawn as to exclude much, but not to exclude sexual innuendo; and Dr. Hulme, who has a learned chapter on “The Less Decent Language of the Time,” would not disapprove of this.

For the sake of completeness one should here consider the verb “move” in the quotation, since it is plural though its subject is singular. This discord is by no means unusual in Shakespeare. I agree with Lever that the plural occurs by affinity with “prone and speechlesse,” the verb deserting its singular subject “dialect,” and so has the effect of bringing “prone and speechlesse” into an even firmer association than their senses (some forms of proneness being understandably speechless) have already done.

It may be helpful at this point to remark on the prevalence of such affinities in Shakespeare, not least in the plays between Hamlet and Othello, say 1600-1604, the probable dating of Othello and of Measure for Measure. We can call them, in a general way, doublings, as in “prone and speechlesse.” Sometimes these doubles can seem very forced, very rugged. As I expressed it in Forms of Attention, the “ponderous and marble jaws” of Hamlet can be read easily enough as jaws that are ponderous and also marble. But Laertes' “the perfume and suppliance of a minute” is a little different because the “suppliance”—“entertainment” or “passing the time” or such—has got itself scented by the perfume, and the perfume of a minute cannot work without the suppliance. So with “the gross and scope of my opinion,” “the shot and danger of desire,” “the teeth and forehead of our faults,” and a good many other examples in Hamlet, some notably rugged and easily distinguished from more inert couplings like Ophelia's “I of all ladies most deject and wretched” and “the glass of fashion and the mould of form” or Polonius's “gather and surmise” or “heed and judgment” or Guildenstern's “Heaven make our presence and our practices / Pleasant and helpful to him.” All these merely say the same thing twice over. With the more rugged pairings we move across a border between a world of simple doublets and the domain of the rhetorical figure called “hendiadys,” which is used with extraordinary frequency in Hamlet—indeed it might be called its ruling trope, and possibly a reflection of the play's concern with incest. George T. Wright has written brilliantly about hendiadys in Hamlet, pointing out that Shakespeare used it far more often there than anywhere else; in fact he used it very little in earlier work, and his use of it tailed off after this peak. Wright remarks that hendiadys can introduce unease and mystery by means of what Eliot, in another connection, called “a perpetual slight alteration of language,” in this case by doing something other than we expect from words joined by “and”—by a sort of violation of its promise of simple parataxis.

Some of the importance of this observation lies, I think, in the fact that hendiadys, the doubling that transcends mere doubling, can induce a sort of giddiness not unlike the effect, according to Eliot, of a sudden meeting with another person, perhaps never before known. As it happens Shakespeare uses it most often in a series of plays that have strong sexual themes, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Othello. Of course there are instances where the effect seems to be merely rhetorical and offers no coup de foudre; but the point to notice is the sexual element in the pleasure we, as against Dr. Johnson, seem to take in certain rugged passages where this criticism does not apply. I have already mentioned that Eliot in particular sought some way of explaining what it meant to feel “the full surprise and elevation of a new experience of poetry,” and he insisted that the first response to some great line—an impression of “overpowering beauty”—is emotional rather than intellectual. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he cites, for the first but not the last time, those lines of Tourneur which gave him his words for the experience of poetry: “the bewildering minute,” the quasi-sexual, quasi-orgasmic moment of recognition, an explanation which is not unlike the cooler Empson's coming upon and recognizing the secrets of the muse.

If we have any interest at all in poetry, we are likely to have a reasonable idea what Eliot and Empson are talking about; in our own measure we feel it when we encounter a piece of prone and speechless dialect. When we have recognized it, as Eliot says, we draw back, and, if we are critics, try to think of something to say. That is what Empson was doing, and he found plenty to say. He was, as I've remarked, a great believer in the O.E.D. But the O.E.D. is far from knowing everything, and anyway is concerned to separate senses rather than compact them—a point valuably discussed in the closing pages of The Structure of Complex Words. Whether we seek simply to make sense of a passage, or to understand why we have found it obscurely thrilling, we need as much help from other sources as we can muster. And we have good reason to be grateful to all the scholars, commentators, and lexicographers, who, in a cumulative endeavor, have applied to Shakespeare their knowledge of the writings of his contemporaries. A good deal we take as self-evident we owe to their labors. The work of Hilda Hulme is in that tradition. She seeks to explain rather than to emend.

I have often heard myself saying that the emendations of eighteenth-century editors, who knew nothing about modern Shakespearean bibliography, were usually the ones we have come to value, or have come to accept without much more inquiry as part of the received text; and I had a particular admiration for an emendation proposed by Hanmer. The Folio reads “The hearts / That pannell'd me at heeles, to whom I gaue / Their wishes, do dis-Candy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar” (Antony & Cleopatra, IV.xii.20-23). This could be another of those dismaying, even orgasmic passages; an investigation of its power might lead one to attribute it partly to the way it expresses the disappointment, sexual dismay, or disgust of Antony and partly to the obscurity and richness of the word pannelled, of which the O.E.D. has nothing to say except that it is “app. an error of some kind.”

Sharing this view, Hanmer proposed the emendation I have cited as an admirable instance of editorial acumen. He must have noticed the context of dogs and slavering, and seen or sensed an image-cluster long before Miss Spurgeon described it in 1935 in Shakespeare's Imagery, and he must have noticed the relation of the passage to an earlier speech by Cleopatra (III.xiii.158ff) which introduces the notion of melting (“discandying”) that started Antony off on his fantastic hearts-candy-dog idea. He therefore suggested that what Shakespeare wrote was not “pannelled” but “spannelled,” later identified by the Oxford editors as a dialect form of “spanieled,” which is usually the reading in modernized editions and even “spannell'd” in the Oxford Original Spelling edition. (The O.E.D. recognizes the dialect form “spannell.”) For almost any emendation that seems fairly sane, it is usually possible to find reasons in the vagaries of secretary hand or in the working habits of Elizabethan compositors as they are now understood, and there seemed no reason why one shouldn't accept “spannelled” or the modernized “spanielled” as the right reading. I certainly did so, and warmly applauded the intuitive brilliance of Hanmer, who after all was working, unlike the Oxford editors, without the benefit of modern scholarship.

But doubts were to arise about this pleasant conclusion (a piece of disinterested flattery addressed to an eighteenth-century editor who, according to G. Blakemore Evans in the Riverside Shakespeare, “may, so far as the text is concerned, be passed over quickly,” and, by implication, to me, for having the insight to applaud him in this single instance, in spite of his general incapacity). I was following Johnson, who said often of this emendation that “it was reasonable to expect that even rival commentators would be satisfied.” But then I read what Dr. Hulme, a rival commentator who saw no need to follow Johnson and preferred something a bit more rugged, had to say about “pannelled” in her chapter on “The Less Decent Language of the Time.” She wondered, as Upton had done before her, and as all editors should, whether any sense could be made of the original “pannelled.” And her acquaintance with “the less decent language of the time” suggested that there was some sense to be made, provided one could “suspend belief” in that persuasive eighteenth-century reading. It turns out that “pannel” or “panel” is an attested dialect word for prostitute, alluded to in Dekker's almost contemporaneous Satiromastix (1602) and also, it seems, enshrined in colloquial American, in which bawdy-houses are, or more probably were, called “panel-houses.” Since the O.E.D. shows that panele was also, at least from 1562, a word meaning brown sugar, we don't need the spaniel to account for either the venality of Antony's cowardly followers or for the image of candy and sweets, and Hanmer's emendation might now be thought more ingenious than necessary.

Of course some might say the same of Hulme's conjectural restoration of the original reading.² But it is worth repeating that she offered not a single emendation; indeed one purpose of her work was to get rid of emendations that were redundant because founded on misunderstandings of the original texts. Of course not all of her arguments have won acceptance, and her book often reminds us that what it offers is merely a sample, merely one contribution to what she believed must be a continuing scholarly process. And it is true that all attempts to establish a wider semantic horizon for the language of the original texts are valuable. Of course that language has to continue its existence within horizons much changed, and established according to different principles; narrowed, in Johnson's edition, broadened again in our modern commentaries.

It will be obvious that I have a simple motive in bringing together, with the excuse of those lines from Measure for Measure, the work of two scholar-critics, roughly contemporary, one “on the language side” and the other now acknowledged by many to be the most distinguished literary critic of our time. The years during which they flourished were also the years of F. R. Leavis and L. C. Knights and of the now despised and rejected American New Critics, a time when rugged reading was the rule. And they were the years when in most English universities there was still a simple dual structure—“language and literature.” Sometimes these separate parts, though occasionally at odds, came together to very good effect. Empson benefited from the Cambridge arrangement, which allowed him to be a critic as well as a mathematician and offered him I. A. Richards as his teacher. It did not offer him anything as strenuous on the language side as he might have had in many other universities, Oxford for instance, but he was of course passionately and idiosyncratically interested in language, as his titles suggest—ambiguity, complex words—and in the remarkable history of particular words such as sense and dog. Of course he benefited from the work of many more learned philologists. They in their turn needed well developed critical faculties, for the intimate study of Elizabethan language is of use to the interpreter of Shakespeare only when the scholar capable of it is also capable of critical reading.

All this probably sounds very obvious, but it must be said in order to allow me to make the point that this kind of complementarity seems to have become rather rare. As Empson himself remarked, in a letter to the Hudson Review in 1966, “the basic problems before Eng-Lit in our two countries are much the same. Gross misuses of it for political and sectarian purposes are bound to crop up, and might destroy it; but with periodic sanitary efforts it can probably be got to continue in a sturdy, placid way, as is needed.”

It's unnecessary at the moment to commend the prescience of this remark, but it is worth observing that the kind of reading it implicitly commends as valuable is not nowadays in vogue, and the reason why it is not is precisely that the study of literature is now frequently misused for political and sectarian purposes. I hardly need to adduce evidence that this is so; on the very morning I was writing these words I came across Denis Donoghue's remark in a recent Sewanee Review that he has “found it hard to convince students that a work of literature is not an editorial or a political manifesto and that the experience of reading a novel does not consist in finding one's prejudices confirmed.” Not that I doubt the existence of readers who still understand the prone and speechless dialects of poetry; but they are not as easily to be found in the universities as they were, and there is less of the kind of teaching that trains such readers in the work of reading and recognition.

I return finally to Shakespearean exploration. An incautious student, reading Hilda Hulme or Stephen Booth, to say nothing of specialist works on Shakespeare's dirty jokes, might come away with the impression that almost anything said in Elizabethan English has a bawdy sous-entendre. Yet presumably there are also more innocent connotations of which we are not aware, or won't be until somebody explains them. So the possibilities for further Hulmean work are virtually endless. I will end with one more instance of endless exploration in one particular area, and this time I have no help from Hulme, because she excluded the Sonnets from her quest. But there is no shortage of guides.

Sonnet 20 is a famous puzzle, and much depends on the solution. “A Womans face with natures owne hand painted, / Haste thou the Master Mistris of my passion …” Is the poem about homosexual affection? How do we read “master-mistress” (the usual modern version of the Quarto's “Master Mistris”)? Stephen Booth says that “this sonnet has been carelessly cited as evidence of its author's homosexuality”; he is sure that the sonnets tell us nothing whatever on that subject, and is also sure that they are right not to, and that it is wrong to expect it of them. As to “master mistress,” he denies us the hyphen inserted by many editors, and says the expression “plays on ‘supreme mistress’ and ‘male beloved,’” reminding us that “mistress” was not yet a euphemism for “concubine.” Anyway, the allusion may be to the game of bowls, in which the jack was called both “master” and “mistris.” Directly contrary is Joseph Pequigney, who regards the sonnets as deeply homoerotic, and this sonnet as a turning point in a narrative of love; having exhausted himself explaining the need to perpetuate the young man's beauty, and his intention to preserve it in verse anyway, the poet moves on to the point where he says “you are so beautiful that I have fallen passionately in love with you, my ‘Master Mistris,’ and I seek your love in return, though I am willing to leave your genitals to women's pleasure.” According to Pequigney there is another stage, in which the last proviso is dropped; and either from Sonnet 24, or Sonnet 33, or Sonnet 52, the young man and the poet have become lovers in the full sense. He ignores Booth's strictures about the possible senses of “Mistris” (pertaining more to the object of courtly love than to “a man's illicit woman”). Other readings are the “evasive ploys” of commentators.

The Penguin editor, John Kerrigan, unresponsive to Pequigny, remarks that “the hint of eroticism flusters the commentators and drives them into extremes,” either of exculpation or homoerotic endorsement; in his judicious and learned Introduction he warns us that it is remarkably difficult, in view of the savage Elizabethan official attitudes to homosexuality, to interpret certain sorts of language when they are applied to same-sex addressees. He decides that Sonnet 20 is “shiftily comic,” and proves neither one thesis nor the other. In a more recent edition G. Blakemore Evans calmly surveys this endless controversy and agrees with the poet that a young man may be very like a young woman, though one thing spoils the resemblance. He does concur with Pequigney that the whole sequence takes a new turn with Sonnet 20. We have now a new and extraordinarily full commentary by Helen Vendler, who calls the poem a jeu d'esprit, and “a little myth of origin”: nature changed her mind between planning this person and adding the finishing touches—deciding to reserve the product for her own use, she made it male. Vendler also stresses the element of the less decent language of the time, but does not explain the final couplet:

But since she prickt thee out for womens pleasure,
Mine be thy loue and thy loues vse their treasure—

which means, roughly, I'll have the capital and women can enjoy the interest. Booth suggests that the interest may not just be sexual pleasure but children.

In one respect most modern commentators are in agreement—they are not interested in who this young man may have been. Their eyes are chastely on the poem itself. Yet even within these limits, interpretative variations are of course endless, ingenious, and always interested in the less decent language of the time. If I in my turn have seemed to draw rather heavily on that language, that is because there was evidently so much of it about, unsuspected by earlier and less knowing commentators. Bowdler, who used to be celebrated for his skill in detecting dirty bits, is now blamed for his failure to spot a good many of them. Of course I don't believe that all complex words have sexual undersenses, only that there is a continual need to understand the language of Shakespeare in as full a context of contemporary usage as possible. And Hilda Hulme, following the tradition she admired, worked always towards that end.

Finally, we must not forget the necessary complement, the need for accurate and imaginative critical reading in the Empsonian tradition. I have dwelt on these two requirements, largely because one shouldn't lose an opportunity to do some propaganda for the skills that our profession seems at present most prone to neglect. They are both essential to the practice of vigilant reading; and that ought always to be our primary business.

Notes

1. The Latin sense of pronus is “leaning forward,” and by extension “inclined towards,” “favourable,” and, mostly in post-Augustan Latin, “easy, without difficulty.” Later still it could mean “ready, willing.” (So Lewis and Short.) Note that although the word is capable of so many senses, it never seems to mean “lying face upward.” One sense of the Latin that may persist in Shakespeare's usage is “willing to obey, anxious to please,” though to press that might take us back into the matter of sexual ambiguities.

2. Professor Gould informed me that in Ireland a “parnel” means “a priest's concubine or mistress, a harlot, a wanton young woman,” and that in Lincolnshire dialect there is a variant form, “panel.” The origin of the word is said to be Old French “peronelle” or “Pernel.” Professor Gould therefore wonders if Shakespeare wrote “parnelled.”