[In the following essay, Bly examines Juliet's use of bawdy puns in Romeo and Juliet, and considers the influence of her character on the comic heroines of Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington and Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable.]

Romeo and Juliet is a play crowded with lewd puns. Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo toy with bawdy innuendoes; Gregory, Peter and Sampson delight in the proximity of maidenheads and their own naked weapons; the Nurse both puns and is punned about. The play's lyricism contends with language intoxicated by carnality. Even Juliet, the romantic centre of the play, quibbles with erotic meaning, most notably in her epithalamium of 3.2. Juliet is chaste and desirous, a unique combination in plays of the early 1590s. This essay argues that Juliet's erotic fluency had a marked influence on the shaping of comic heroines in the four to five years after the play's first performances. I look first at Juliet's language, and then at two parodic versions of Shakespeare's heroine, written between 1598 and 1607. Romeo and Juliet was often imitated; what interests me are those balcony scenes in which pseudo-Juliets express erotic desire in clever puns. These imitative plays are among the very few extant Renaissance comedies portraying virginal heroines who make self-referential bawdy jokes. It seems that the act of parodying the enormously popular Shakespeare play created an odd sub-genre, that of romantic comedies whose heroines display a ribald humour.¹

Balcony scenes litter Renaissance plays; the popularity of Romeo and Juliet has caused most amorous balcony exchanges to be labelled imitative. I limit my discussion to Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington (1598) and Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable (1607) because these two playwrights explicitly borrow language as well as plot devices from Shakespeare's play.² I also look more briefly at the balcony scene in an anonymous play, The Puritan (1607). Romeo and Juliet was an enduring favourite with Elizabethan audiences; its language apparently filtered into normal conversation. Several works written after 1600 mock those who borrow its verse. For example, Gullio, the foolish courtier of 1 Return from Parnassus (1606), imitates Mercutio: ‘the moone in comparison of thy bright hue a meere slutt, Anthonies Cleopatra a blacke browde milkmaide, Hellen a cowdie.’ But Ingenioso (an impoverished scholar) leaps on the theft: ‘Marke Romeo and Iuliet: o monstrous theft.’³Romeo and Juliet's popularity suggests that the dual presence of a balcony scene and ‘monstrous theft’ would make the connection immediately apparent to a contemporary audience.

Porter and Dekker make two fundamental revisions of Romeo and Juliet: their plays end with marriage rather than death, and their heroines display skill at erotic innuendo in conversation, rather than in soliloquy. Punning duels are, of course, found in other Shakespeare plays. Berowne's and Beatrice's witty exchanges are sexually charged, if not explicitly sexually allusive. Yet virginal heroines rarely make bawdy jokes. In the context of romance, heroines tend to stay within conventional lyric guidelines.⁴ In Much Ado About Nothing (1598), for example, Hero's maid Margaret tries to cheer up the heavy-hearted bride by joking that she will ‘be heavier soon by the weight of a man’; Hero scolds her for immodesty: ‘Fie upon thee, art not ashamed?’ (3.4.25-6). For the most part, erotic innuendo in drama remains the province of marginal characters. Old women, clowns, malcontents and male sidekicks, Parolles, Pandarus, Iago, lewdly mock and are mocked, but it is hard to find a young heroine referring even indirectly to copulation.

Why, then, should these two plays be among the very few whose heroines are ribald jokers? Significantly, the plays are not simple burlesques; they are romantic comedies in their own right, and their connection to Romeo and Juliet has so far been considered merely a matter for footnotes. If a blunt expression of lust is an inappropriate statement for a virginal heroine, what is the position of a witty expression of desire? The nature of the expression is clearly important. Porter's and Dekker's heroines are not straightforwardly lustful; they speak in puns. If desire is revealed in clever puns, does that wit protect the heroine from a charge of immodesty? Certainly, the very elaboration of rhetoric involved in puns removes them from clear revelation. Puns impose an order on speech: face-value relinquishes its place to paradox, plain definition to the imagination. For example, Porter's Mall's ‘quarterly I must receive my rent’ plays on secondary meanings: ‘rent’ does not, in itself, carry an erotic meaning, although the sexual reference is easily surmised from her definition of ‘income’ as ‘kisses and embraces every day’.⁵ Puns, Walter Redfern writes, ‘are a means of circumventing taboos, as are euphemisms, which play a similar hide-and-seek game with the listener/reader’.⁶ The audience's attention may be redirected from the titillating double entendre to admiration of rhetorical cleverness. This argument assumes that erotic puns act as a masking device for desire, that Porter and Dekker are able to circumvent cultural restrictions on female speech by clever phrasing. However, I would argue that bawdy puns do not mask desire but flaunt it.

A bawdy pun is a word placed in such a context that it points to a secondary, sexual, reference, as in Juliet's ‘Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die …’ (3.1.21). Juliet's ‘death’ is both ceasing to be and erotic ecstasy. The sexual innuendo Juliet uses was a common one in Renaissance literature.⁷ It is important to recognize that in the case of a pun as ordinary as this, a Renaissance audience would definitely grasp its double meaning. As James Brown says of puns, ‘When we know enough … failure to perceive a pun is impossible; we cannot wilfully suspend our ability to see puns.’⁸ Obviously, seemingly non-sexual speech often carries an inference of carnal desire, as when Miranda calls Ferdinand a ‘thing divine’ (1.2.422). But if Miranda had been conscious enough of that carnality to construct a witty play with words, had she offered a bawdy pun, the effect of her statement would have been radically different and quite surprising. Miranda's innocence is stressed throughout The Tempest, and her explicit lack of knowledge is echoed in her speech. As an audience grasps the double entendre behind Juliet's ‘die’, they grasp her sexual knowledge and her consciousness of carnal desire at the same time. That sexual knowledge was a dubious virtue in light of Elizabethan conceptions of a chaste young woman's education; it may explain why witty heroines in Renaissance plays rarely offer immodest puns.

It is common for female characters' rhetoric to produce an inadvertent sexual reference, as in Juliet's Nurse's protest: ‘thou must stand by, too, and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure’. Peter replies: ‘I saw no man use you at his pleasure. If I had, my weapon should quickly have been out’ (2.3.145-8). Eyre's wife Margery in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) provides a similar example. Her robust tone leads to puns—when her husband swears to ‘firke’ her if she doesn't stop quarrelling, she responds: ‘Yea, yea man, you may vse me as you please.’⁹ The prolonged scenes between Margery, Firke, and Hodge, in which the servants slyly mock her wrinkles, aged body and social ambition, are typical. These two female characters, the Nurse and Margery, are laughable precisely due to their age, sexual unattractiveness and inadvertent sexual references. It is their choice of words—‘use’ interpreted as ‘copulate with’—that creates a bawdy innuendo. The sexual pun arises from the word's two interpretations, not from the women's deliberate command of those two meanings.

On the other hand, Juliet's invitation to Romeo in 3.2—to ‘Hood my unmanned blood’—offers an elaborately rhetorical, self-consciously erotic image. Juliet's long soliloquy strings together six separate invocations, each specifically alluding to the physical pleasure she expects that night. The epithalamium's metaphorical flourishes allow her desire to be latent and yet obvious; they are particularly surprising in view of the dense Petrarchan rhetoric of the play.¹⁰ Romeo first loves Rosaline who, in a fine Petrarchan tradition, ‘hath forsworn to love’ (1.1.220). She is invulnerable to Cupid's arrow, ‘in strong proof of chastity well armed’ (1.1.207). To Romeo, both Juliet and the absent Rosaline are archetypal Petrarchan mistresses: chaste, undesirous and beautiful. Certainly Romeo believes Juliet and Rosaline to be untouched by desire:

She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide th'encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold.
O she is rich in beauty …

(1.1.209-12)

Romeo's construction of Rosaline's beauty ties it directly to her chastity. He also sees Juliet's beauty as ensuring her chastity: ‘Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear’ (1.5.46). The energy of Romeo's Petrarchan rhetoric is bound up in fruitless pursuit, rather than in an anticipation of lovers' meeting.

It is Mercutio who envisions union: ‘O Romeo, that she were, O that she were / An open-arse, and thou a popp'rin' pear’ (2.1.37-8). Mercutio speaks of sex only in puns. Erotic humour predominates. Love, for him, is a chase towards copulation: ‘this drivelling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole’ (2.3.84-5). Romeo's solemn poetry sits uneasily in a play where it is ridiculed by Mercutio's banter (‘Laura to his lady was a kitchen wench … Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots’ (2.3.37, 39-40)) and mocked by Friar Laurence: ‘Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell’ (2.2.88). Even Juliet offers a mild rebuke: ‘You kiss by th'book’ (1.5.109).

Juliet is unsuited to the role of Romeo's Petrarchan mistress. She is desirous, and moreover, she is long-winded in anticipation: ‘O, I have bought the mansion of a love / But not possessed it, and though I am sold, / Not yet enjoyed’ (3.2.26-8). Juliet is not precisely bawdy—but neither is she modest.¹¹ Remarkably, Shakespeare gives her the epithalamium traditionally spoken by a bridegroom. Act 3 scene 2 opens with her invocation to the night: ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds’, an inversion of Ovid's ‘lente currite, noctis equi’.¹² Juliet's soliloquy is a mixture of plainly expressed invitations and artfully phrased metaphors. Her initial call to Romeo, ‘Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen’ (3.2.7), echoes one of the most beautiful passages in Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido (1587):

                                        If thou wilt stay
Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
If not, turn from me, and I'll turn from thee …(13)

The passage comes from Dido's final plea to Aeneas to remain in Carthage; it is spoken by a sexually knowing woman, intoxicated with love.

Juliet turns from Marlovian invitation to a lengthy series of sexual metaphors: ‘Come, civil night … And learn me how to lose a winning match / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods’ (3.2.10, 12-13). This is a good example of the complexity of Juliet's speech.¹⁴ ‘Winning’ is turned to a pun meaning both victorious and appealing. Moreover, the ‘match’ Juliet hopes to lose and win is, at once, a wedding and an erotic game. At the pun's heart, obviously, is the fate of her virginity: it is a match in which she will lose a ‘stainless’ maidenhead, while she gains a ‘match’ or marriage with Romeo.¹⁵

The rest of her speech is similarly full of doubles entendres:

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle, till strange love grow bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.

(3.2.14-16)

Talking to her Nurse, Juliet's linguistic stress turns from sex itself (‘true love acted’) to Romeo's beauty. Romeo has a ‘flow'ring face’; he is a ‘gorgeous palace’, a ‘mortal paradise of such sweet flesh’ (3.2.73, 85, 82). But the epithalamium itself stands as a lyric anticipation of erotic pleasure:

Come night, come Romeo; come, thou day in night,
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.

(3.2.17-19)

I would suggest that Juliet's cleverly phrased desire for consummation acts as a bridge between desirous, tragic heroines and comic plots. Shakespeare bestowed sexual metaphors on a young heroine; Porter and Dekker follow his example, moving into comedy. They use Romeo and Juliet as a distant subtext, fashioning heroines who are virginal and wittily desirous. Like Juliet, these heroines are intensely interested in the fate of their maidenheads, and their wit similarly reveals a specific understanding of sexual congress.

Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington turns Romeo and Juliet into a subtext for a comedy. Porter appropriates Juliet's wit; at the same time he manipulates famous bits of the play (such as the balcony scene) to jest at Romeo's lyric dedication. Juliet's nimble metaphors are turned wholly to sexual puns. Porter shapes his heroine, Mall, around the epithalamic Juliet. Mall speaks only in erotic quibbles and sexual metaphors.

The Two Angry Women is constructed around a breach between two neighbouring families, which the fathers hope to patch by marrying their son and daughter. The young couple, Frank and Mall, are introduced, woo and agree to marry in a bare three minutes. Although the plot summary seems in line with conventional romantic comedies, Mall's character is radically opposed to Petrarchan idealization. She is, her brother says, ‘a wicked wench to make a jest’ (8.25). She is not merely witty, like Rosaline or Beatrice, but lusty, and her jokes are overtly sexual. For example, Mall opens the ninth scene by musing on conies—rabbits but also slang for women:

Good Lord, what pretty things these conies are;
How finely they do feed till they be fat!
And then what a sweet meat a coney is,
And what smooth skins they have, both black and gray.
They say they run more in the night than day …
But when that Francis comes, what will he say?
‘Look, boy, there lies a coney in my way.’

(9.7-11, 24-5)¹⁶

Mall's sexual bravado extends past sly puns. When her father asks Mall if she has a mind to marry, she points out that since she is a maid, she ought to ‘blush, look pale and wan, / And then look pale again’ (3.124-5). However, she decides to ‘speak truth and shame the devil’ (3.133). In fact, she has lately ‘let restrained fancy loose, / And bade it gaze for pleasure’ (3.158-9). Mall urges her father to a quick match: ‘If I shall have a husband, get him quickly / For maids that wears cork shoes may step awry’ (3.163-4). The scene ends with her blunt summary of the evils of letting maids lie alone:

Lying alone they muse but in their beds
How they might lose their long-kept maidenheads.
This is the cause there is so many scapes …
Therefore, come husband, maidenhead adieu!

(3.205-7, 10)

Her mother bitterly labels her ‘lusty guts’; certainly Mall's forthright acknowledgement of her own physical desire is extraordinary. I would argue that Porter is deliberately abrogating romantic ideals—perhaps most clearly in his veiled mockery of Romeo and Juliet.

At various points in The Two Angry Women of Abington, Romeo and Juliet is invoked as a romantic model, and then burlesqued by Porter's rewriting.¹⁷ We can see an echo of Juliet above, in Mall's response to her father's query: ‘hast thou a mind to marry?’ (3.120). Lady Capulet asks Juliet a similar question: ‘How stands your dispositions to be married?’ and Juliet responds ‘It is an honour that I dream not of’ (1.3.67-8). Mall lampoons Juliet's answer on two levels: she announces that she does dream of marriage, and she rejects a modest answer as dishonest. The textual crux behind the Shakespearian line (q2 reads ‘It is a houre that I dream not of’) creates an even sharper counterpart, since Mall specifically alludes to maidens dreaming of that hour:¹⁸

How many maids this night lies in their beds
And dream that they have lost their maidenheads.
Such dreams, such slumbers I had, too, enjoyed …

(12.13-15)

Considering that the balcony scene (in which Juliet initiates the idea of marriage) supposedly occurs only a few hours after the scene between Juliet and her mother, Juliet's demure answer does appear conventional rather than truthful. In the balcony scene Juliet actually emphasizes the cultural restrictions on her speech: ‘For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight. / Fain would I dwell on form, fain, fain deny / What I have spoke; but farewell, compliment’ (2.1.129-31). Mall's refusal to respond with ‘close-clipped civility’ may also point to Juliet:

                                        With true-faced passion
Of modest maidenhead I could adorn me,
And to your question make a sober cursey,
And with close-clipped civility be silent;
Or else say ‘No, forsooth,’ or ‘Aye, forsooth.’
If I said ‘No, forsooth,’ I lied, forsooth.

(3.126-31)

Mall's emphasis on maidenheads is characteristic of Porter's humour: marriage is seen as consummation, not ceremony. Mall and the other characters often conflate the two.

Mall and Frank meet and woo in a balcony scene which apes the parallel scene in Romeo and Juliet. Both balcony scenes involve rapid wooing between near strangers. Juliet takes no joy in a contract ‘too rash, too unadvised, too sudden’ (2.1.160); Frank's reaction is more confident: ‘Now in good faith, Phillip, this makes me smile, / That I have wooed and won in so small while’ (8.135-6). The scenes are remarkably similar in concept and choreography, but quite different in language, a difference which I would suggest grows from the dominant topic of conversation in each scene. Romeo and Juliet, famously, talk of love; Mall and Frank, of sex.

Mall's brother Phillip brings Frank to her bedroom window. Phillip calls up: ‘'Tis I.’ Mall's response is raucously far from Juliet's dignified ‘What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, / So stumblest on my counsel?’ (2.1.94-5). Mall shouts back: ‘'Tis I? Who I? “I, quoth the dog”, or what?’ (8.45). Romeo and Juliet speak in verse strewn with loving metaphors: ‘thou art / As glorious to this night, being o'er my head, / As is a wingèd messenger of heaven’ (2.1.68-70). Their conversation moves adroitly between lyrical metaphors and conventional phrases. Romeo, in particular, strikes extravagant chords in his praise: Juliet is a sun; her eyes are stars; her cheeks are brighter than starlight.

Mall's and Frank's dialogue is diametrically opposed to Romeo and Juliet's balcony scene, in that they fall into metaphors of sexual innuendo, not those of romantic love. They begin by talking of Venus's chariot, punning on the similarity of couch and coach, a joke which also alludes to the ‘carting’ of prostitutes:

MALL
I pray, sir, tell me, do you cart the Queen of Love?
FRANK
Not cart her, but couch her in your eye,
And a fit place for gentle love to lie.
MALL
Aye, but methinks you speak without the book.

(8.61-4)

Mall's ‘methinks you speak without the book’ is a mocking rewriting of Juliet's ‘You kiss by th' book’ (1.5.109). Whereas Juliet chides Romeo for his ready command of conventional sonnet conceits, Mall's retort to Frank's play on ‘couch’ is a direct recognition of the unconventional manner of their conversation. To woo ‘by th' book’ is to gild one's language with sonnet rhymes and conceits: Romeo and Frank are quite opposite in this respect. Frank does speak ‘without’ the book. Mall's brother Phillip had earlier advised Frank to woo her by setting ‘such painted beauty on thy tongue / As it shall ravish every maiden sense’, a neat summary of sonneteers' ornate love language (8.10-11). Phillip himself speaks in Romeo-esque metaphors. He opens scene 10, one of the nocturnal scenes, with a soliloquy on the night:

The sky that was so fair three hours ago
Is in three hours become an Ethiope,
And, being angry at her beauteous change,
She will not have one of these pearléd stars
To blab her sable metamorphesy.

(10.3-7)

Phillip is faintly echoing Romeo's praise of Juliet:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

(1.5.43-6).¹⁹

Porter's use of Romeo's famous speech (also adapted by Dekker in Blurt, Master Constable) plays to the audience's theatrical knowledge: much of the humour in this play depends on acquaintance with the language of Romeo and Juliet. Phillip's echoing of Romeo refers not only to the play, but to the convoluted phrasing of stately love language in general. However, Frank discards Phillip's advice to use ‘painted beauty’ in wooing.

Mall's retort to Frank's superficially gallant wish to ‘couch’ Venus in her eye leads to an even more explicit dialogue:

MALL
Where will you have room to have the coachman sit?
FRANK
Nay, that were but small manners and not fit.
His duty is before you bare to stand,
Having a lusty whipstock in his hand.
MALL
The place is void. Will you provide me one?
FRANK
And if you please, I will supply the room.
MALL
But are you cunning in the carman's lash?

(8.66-72)

The kind of metaphor by which Mall and Frank build a conversation is very different from the parallel set of metaphors which Romeo and Juliet build between them (their play on ‘tassel-gentle’, for example). Romeo's and Juliet's conceits are elaborately matched: she wears a ‘mask of night’, he has ‘night's cloak’.²⁰ Mall and Frank build a series of metaphors which point not to conventional conceits but to sexual metaphors. Romantic love, and the metaphors of romantic love, are here replaced by puns of sexual wit. Porter's lovers manipulate a rhyming exchange to create not a sonnet, but an extended set of bawdy riddles about Mall's virginity:

MALL
Nun, votary, stale maidenhead, seventeen-and-upward?
Here be names! What, nothing else?
FRANK
Yes, or a fair built steeple without bells.
MALL
Steeple, good people? Nay, another cast.
FRANK
Aye, or a well-made ship without a mast.
MALL
Fie, not so big, sir, by one part of four!
FRANK
Why, then ye are a boat without an oar.
MALL
O, well rowed, wit!

(8.102-9)

The relentless puns on male sex organs—or the lack thereof—are helped by the fact that the dialogue falls into couplets. If puns rely on displacement of face-value meanings, rhyming puns allow an even greater disjuncture from apparent sense, and rhyming puns characterize the entire balcony scene. ‘I had both wit to grant when he did woo me’ Mall says, ‘And strength to bear what ere he can do to me’ (8.209-10). Frank later echoes her: ‘Well, I must bear with her—she'll bear with me’ (9.65). I would argue that Mall and Frank are able to dance further into obscenity because their puns tumble onto each other, delighting the ear before comprehension strikes. Gillian Beer writes that the second rhyme word moves in on the first and tricks it into rhyme, ‘sound dominates sense’.²¹ In one sense a pun is itself a compressed rhyme; fixing one or the other possible definition as correct is less important than grasping the contexts linked together in one syntactic unit.

This joining of contexts makes puns vulnerable to the passing of time. If Mercutio's quibbles with ‘prick’ are still understood, it is only because of the durability of that particular reference. Mall's joke about the danger of wearing cork heels is a case in point. Many such puns are understandable only with a dictionary in hand. The problematics of phallic references in the language of female characters and, therefore, of boy actors point to another context which may be missed by a modern reader. Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington was written for Henslowe's (adult) company at the Rose; the Admiral's Men is not a company generally discussed as employing doubles entendres which reference the boy behind the female role.²² But Mall's and Frank's exchange, quoted above, certainly raises the possibility:

FRANK
Aye, or a well-made ship without a mast.
MALL
Fie, not so big, sir, by one part of four!
FRANK
Why, then ye are a boat without an oar.

On one hand, Frank's jokes refer to Mall as a virgin in need of an oar. At the same time, the dialogue could be construed as a pointed reference to the boy actor's smaller sex organ: ‘not so big, sir, by one part of four!’ Thus Porter's puns link three contexts: literal meaning, erotic innuendo, and extra-textual, actorial reference.

When Mall descends from the bedroom she defines the contract between them in rhyming puns:

MALL
Francis, my love's lease I do let to thee,
Date of my life and thine. What sayest thou to me?
The entering fine or income thou must pay
Are kisses and embraces every day,
And quarterly I must receive my rent.
You know my mind.
FRANK
                                                            I guess at thy intent.
Thou shalt not miss a minute of thy time.

(8.148-54)

The difference between the two romances is encapsulated in Juliet's wish for marriage (‘thou wilt perform the rite, / And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay, / And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world’ (2.1.188-90)) and Mall's demand of ‘rent’. In the majority of Renaissance comedies, well-born heroines speak in Petrarchan measures; low-born females speak a kind of rolling dialect, marked by indecorous jokes and coinages. It is a source of extra dramatic interest if a low-born woman is able to use Petrarchan metaphors. The protagonist of Thomas Heywood's I The Fair Maid of the West (1610), for example, is a barmaid and later a tavern owner who loves chastely and expresses herself in Petrarchan hyperboles. The entire play revolves around this social anomaly. It is similarly remarkable when well-born heroines play with erotic puns.²³ By Elizabethan standards, Mall's punning banter with Frank sails dangerously close to shameful. I would suggest that the popularity of The Two Angry Women of Abington came at least partially from its heroine's defiance of the conventions prescribing a well-born maiden's concerns and behaviour.²⁴ Wit here is not merely verbal dexterity but the daring involved in staging a virgin's expression of sexual desire.

In this regard, the discrepancies between the bad quarto (q1) of Romeo and Juliet [1597] and the ‘newly corrected, augmented, and amended’ q2, published in 1599, are interesting. q1 retains only the first four lines of the epithalamium. The Arden editor, Brian Gibbons, suggests the lines may have been cut in anticipation of a provincial audience, and there is some evidence that travelling versions of plays were deliberately shortened in such a way as to tone down sexual content.²⁵ I would suggest that the excised epithalamium points to the fact that Juliet's expression of erotic desire represented a breach of cultural expectation. Mall's transgressive speech is acknowledged in the play itself: her suitor says her wit is ‘held a wonder,’ and her brother acknowledges that she can ‘make blush / The boldest face of man that ere man saw’ (8.127, 5.10-11). The heroine of the anonymous play The Puritan has similarly impressed her suitor: ‘th'art a mad wench Moll’.²⁶

If Romeo and Juliet influenced Porter's creation of a bawdy heroine, Porter's play, in turn, seems to have garnered an imitator. The Puritan was printed in 1607 as having been acted by the Children of Paul's. The play involves foolery plotted by a witty scholar and his nefarious compatriots, who pretend to raise both the devil and a man from the dead, in order to wrangle freedom from prison and the hands of a rich widow and her eldest daughter, Franke. The younger daughter, Moll, is in love with Sir John Penny-dub, and is fluently bawdy: ‘Ide as soone vow neuer to come in Bed. / Tut? Women must liue by th'quick, and not th'dead’ (a4r, lines 6-7).

The heroine is known as Moll, basically the same name as Porter's Mall, and at various points the Puritan Moll appears to echo the earlier character. In The Two Angry Women, for example, Mall is agonized by the frustration of her wedding plans: ‘A starved man with double death doth die / To have the meat might save him in his eye / And may not have it—so am I tormented’ (12.17-19). When the Puritan Moll's marriage plans are thwarted, she is similarly wrought: ‘A double torment … a double curse’ (d2r, lines 3, 27). The most notable parallel between the plays is found in The Puritan's balcony scene. Sir John appears below: ‘Whewh Mistris Mol, Mistris Mol.’ Moll appears above, ‘lacing of her clothes’. Like the earlier Mall, she calls ‘Who's there?’ And just as does Phillip in Porter's play, Penny-dub replies, ‘Tis I’ (h2, lines 26-7). What ensues is a wild series of puns, instigated solely by Moll, not by Penny-dub. In The Two Angry Women of Abington, Mall generally answers Frank's sallies with a rhyming couplet; but this Moll is bolder than her predecessor: ‘O you'r an early cocke ifayth, who would haue thought you to be so rare a stirrer’ (h2r, lines 28-9). Penny-dub offers to climb into Moll's bed-chamber, but she refuses. ‘No by my faith Sir Iohn, Ile keepe you downe, for you Knights are very dangerous if once you get aboue’ (h2r, lines 31-32). She explains her refusal by a bawdy quibble: ‘Sir Iohn you must note the nature of the Climates your Northern wench in her owne Countrie may well hold out till shee bee fifteene, but if she touch the South once, and come vp to London, here the Chimes go presently after twelue’ (h2, lines 34-6 - h2r, lines 1-2).

One subject which seems to mark the group of heroines I discuss in this paper is an anxious regard for their virginity. Porter's Mall is a gentlewoman who three times explains her urgent desire to lose that virginity. Her own family jokes about her maidenhead: ‘by my troth, my sister's maidenhead / Stands like a game at tennis: if the ball / Hit in the hole or hazard, fare well all’ (3.327-9). Juliet's epithalamium speaks to the same issue; hearing Romeo is banished she takes to her bed: ‘I, a maid, die maiden-widowèd. / Come, cords; come, Nurse; I'll to my wedding bed, / And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead!’ (3.2.135-7). Her maidenhead is a topic of conversation, notably of the Nurse, but also of her mother. Quibbles about virginity are common throughout Renaissance drama, particularly when spoken boastfully by male characters (Sampson's vow that he will cut off the heads of Montague's maids is a good example). But in these plays virginity skips from the provenance of Sampson and the Nurse, to that of the upper classes: Juliet's despairing attention to her maidenhead, Mall's dreams of her wedding night.

Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable (1602) is another play which exploits the ribald potential of a desirous virgin. Like Porter, Dekker borrows both plot and language from Romeo and Juliet. The main plot grows from the love of Violetta and Fontinelle, who meet at a ball. Fontinelle is a member of the enemy (France) and is later thrown into prison by Violetta's aristocratic suitor, Camillo. In Act 4, the lovers are secretly married by a friar. Thus marked parallels exist between the two plays: a ball-room scene depicting instantaneous love between members of warring factions, a secret marriage, even borrowed language. Violetta's admirer, Camillo, adapts Romeo's praise of Juliet:

And of Beautie what tongue would not speake the best, since it is the Jewell that hangs upon the brow of heaven, the best cullor that can be laide upon the cheeke of earth?²⁷

Fontinelle also adopts Romeo's language. He refuses to dance: ‘bid him whose heart no sorrow feeles / Tickle the rushes with his wanton heeles’ (1.1.181-2), as does Romeo, who lets ‘wantons light of heart / Tickle the sense-less rushes with their heels’ (1.4.35-6). Romeo characterizes himself as having a ‘soul of lead’ (1.4.15); Fontinelle declares he has ‘too much lead’ in his heart (1.1.183). Falling in love at the ball, Fontinelle is as bombastic and Petrarchan as Romeo: ‘Oh what a heaven is love! oh what a hell!’ (1.1.212).

The last act appears to offer a startling reversal of Shakespeare's play: Fontinelle falls in love with another woman, a prostitute, and Violetta is forced to arrange a bed-trick to consummate her marriage. Yet one of the aspects of Romeo's character that has interested many commentators is the passion of his initial love for Rosaline, instantly displaced by an equal ardour for Juliet. Fontinelle shows that same inconstancy, and makes a similar use of Petrarchan rhetoric to describe both women. In the last act he defends his (supposed) night with the courtesan, Imperia: ‘who dyes / For so bright beauty, is a bright Sacrifice’, and returns to language nearly identical to that which he applied to Violetta in the first act: ‘She is my heaven; she from me, I am in hell’ (5.3.77-8, 183).

If Fontinelle is a Romeo pushed to the extremes of Petrarchan shallowness, Violetta is also a parodied version of Juliet. In the ballroom scene of Blurt, Master Constable, Fontinelle dances with another woman, while Violetta watches: ‘In troth a very pretty French man; the carriage of his bodie likes me well; so does his footing, so does his face, so does his eye above his face, so does himselfe, above all that can bee above himselfe’ (1.1.187-90). Violetta repeatedly swears by her maidenhead and answers respectful questions with bawdy puns: ‘What breeds that desire?’ asks Camillo when she ends their dance. ‘Nay I hope it is no breeding matter: tush, tush, by my maiden-head I will not …’ (1.1.173-5). As a whole, the play is bawdier than Romeo and Juliet; jokes to do with maidenheads embellish virtually every scene, and many of these scenes burlesque Shakespeare's play. In 4.1, for example, a would-be lover tries to climb a rope to his mistress's window, borrowing Romeo's phrasing—‘Ile hang a Jewell at thine eare, sweet night’—but he is doused with urine when he pulls the cord (4.1.20).

The balcony scene in Blurt, Master Constable takes place in 3.1, between Violetta, her suitor (but not beloved) Camillo, and her brother Hippolito. Camillo, in response to Fontinelle's presumption in loving Violetta, has thrown the Frenchman into prison. Camillo and Hippolito are accompanied by musicians singing in an effort to ‘pleade to a stonie heart’ (3.1.120). The scene which ensues is marked by Violetta's lusty wit. She baits the anger of Camillo by risqué references to her desire for Fontinelle: ‘Let him pleade your love for you; / I love a life to heare a man speake French / Of his complection’ (3.1.164-6). She uses Fontinelle's nationality as a metaphor for consummation: ‘I would undergoe / The instruction of that language rather far, / Than be two weekes unmaried (by my life)’ (3.1.166-8). Like Mall, she ties a wish for marriage specifically to a desire for sex: ‘Because Ile speake true French, Ile be his wife’ (3.1.169). Her defiance is underlined by the boldness of her expression: ‘the French-man's mine, / And by these hands Ile have him’ (3.1.157-8). After Camillo and Hippolito leave, Violetta receives a letter from the imprisoned Fontinelle. Her response evokes Juliet's wish that night come with her ‘black mantle’: ‘Blest night, wrap Cinthia in a sable sheete, / That fearefull lovers may securlie meete’ (3.1.188-9).

One very important shift has occurred between Shakespeare's play and its parodic siblings. When Mercutio juggles puns, as in his ‘Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down’ (1.4.28), he does so to display his wit. He relies for humour on the fact that he has wrangled three priapic references into one sentence. But Juliet's erotic puns and metaphors are not directed, for the most part, at a display of her wit. Eroticized humour does steal into the balcony scene. Romeo cries ‘O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?’ and Juliet responds ‘What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?’ (2.1.167-8). Satisfaction, in her hands, becomes a demure play on the sating of desire. But in general Juliet's wordplay does not demand laughing applause. Mall's and Violetta's puns, on the other hand, are spoken in joking exchanges, similar to those Shakespeare gives to Romeo and Mercutio. In fact, Mall's quibbles about Venus's coach can be matched to Mercutio's jokes about Queen Mab's chariot. The Queen Mab speech ends in a bawdy pun: ‘This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, / That presses them and learns them first to bear, / Making them women of good carriage’ (1.5.93-5). Yet Mall is not simply a female Mercutio. Her puns, like Juliet's, are self-referential. Juliet's epithalamic images of Romeo lying on her, like snow on a raven, like day on night, are personally referent. Mercutio does not address his own desire; Juliet, Mall and Violetta do. Thus while Mercutio jokes about maids being taught ‘to bear’, Mall makes the same joke about herself, boasting she has ‘strength to bear what ere he can do to me’ (8.210).

These women offer self-referential sexual puns, not bawdy quibbles which rise solely from the punning potential of the English language. I would argue that Mercutio's delight in ribald double meanings leads to a different kind of banter than that which Mall and Frank engage in. If Mercutio's quibbles are funny, bawdy puns spoken by virgins are both comic and transgressive. The woman's revelation of desire may strengthen the audience's belief in the romantic relationship being staged, but it also violates a fundamental convention regarding the behaviour of a marriageable young female.

Puns desert surface rationality, turning instead to an emphasis on linguistic cleverness. I would argue that it is this emphasis on cleverness which precludes them from the language of virginal heroines in the majority of romantic comedies. Puns challenge a claim to chastity; the speaker is too knowledgeable. To understand the connotation of ‘die’ is to reveal carnal knowledge. To apply such a pun to one's own desire is even more damning. Thus these puns cannot operate as a mask, using ambiguity of interpretation to allow transgression of cultural expectations regarding virginal female speech. Not only does the commonplace nature of puns such as Mall's on ‘oars’ and Juliet's on ‘die’ preclude a censorious audience member from mistaking them, but the particular parallelism involved in a romantic balcony scene also operates to dispel the necessary ambiguity. The puns of parodic Juliets bring together more contexts than surface meaning and erotic implication. The audience sees yet another balcony scene, yet another desirous ‘Juliet’.

I would suggest that the sexual jesting of Porter's and Dekker's heroines certainly looks in part to Juliet's remarkable epithalamium. She expresses, if in metaphor, a joyful anticipation of sexual pleasure not found in the language of a virginal heroine preceding her in English drama. Imitation of this aspect of Juliet's character seems to be divided: on the one side, a few Renaissance balcony scenes stage outspoken, lustful pseudo-Juliets, and on the other, there are the punning pseudo-Juliets I have discussed in this essay. The balcony scene in Jonson's Poetaster (1601), for example, takes place between Caesar's daughter, Julia, and the newly banished Ovid. Julia's wrath at Ovid's banishment grows from anticipated celibacy: ‘Let me vse all my pleasures: vertuous loue / Was neuer scandall to a Goddesse state.’²⁸ Notably, Poetaster is no romance. Parody traditionally attacks the ideals of a famous predecessor: when Julia hysterically invites Ovid to climb up to her room (‘enioy me amply, still’ (4.9.691)), Jonson burlesques Juliet's chastity at the same time as he mocks her sexual desire. Both types of balcony scenes involve a brutalizing of the passion that permeates the Shakespeare play, but Porter's and Dekker's emphasis on punning wit creates a very different kind of burlesque.

In the punning balcony scenes, Juliet's deeply felt sexual metaphors are turned to shallow banter, but the emphasis on wordplay as an appropriate vehicle for a female revelation of desire remains. Shakespeare used puns in two ways in Romeo and Juliet: as witty conversation (between Mercutio and Romeo, for example) and as a device by which Juliet expresses erotic anticipation. Dekker and Porter conflate the two. Bawdy conversation turns to self-referential sexual wit, an important shift.

When Porter and Dekker move Mercutio's decorative puns to the central female figure of a romance, the playwrights explicitly renounce the lyric concept of wooing. Their lovers speak ‘without the book’ as Mall observes. Romantic hyperbole is abandoned for a heady acknowledgement of sexual interest. Petrarchan idealization is mocked as representative of blind foolishness, and desire that grows from bodily appreciation is contrasted to insincere similes comparing eyes to suns. That alteration is certainly foreshadowed in Shakespeare's play. It is Juliet—so adroit at wordplay that reveals carnal desire—who tells Romeo that he kisses ‘by th' book,’ and begs him not to make empty vows. Perhaps the presence of that distant subtext, Romeo and Juliet, can explain why Mall and Violetta are practically unique among Renaissance heroines in their use of bawdy puns. If puns themselves cannot operate as an excuse for the expression of female desire, the faint burlesque of Juliet may. In this case, parody offers protection.

Notes

1. Since I spend most of this paper discussing bawdy puns, I want to address a problem with terminology. The puns I discuss are difficult to label. ‘Bawdy’ is a word used by Shakespeare, and it carries a definition, according to Webster's, of humorously coarse. On the other hand, it also has connotations of obscenity and Victorianesque naughtiness. Other adjectives tend to be more pejorative (licentious, lewd, indecent, obscene); I use ‘ribald’ or ‘bawdy’ because of the implication of humour as well as sexual reference.

2. Another play which exhibits a similar combination of Romeo and Juliet tags, desirous virgins, and ribald jokes is Edward Sharpham's Cupid's Whirligig (1607). Sharpham borrows Shakespearian metaphors, describing the court, for example, as a place where ‘so many earth-treading starres adornes the sky’ (see Capulet's description of his dance, 1.2.22-3). Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600) also stages a parodic balcony scene. Marston satirizes cloying love language, but his Katherine offers no sexual puns. Michael Scott, while making a claim for a parody of Shakespeare's balcony scene in The Insatiate Countess, argues that Romeo and Juliet was at a height of popularity around 1600. See ‘Marston's Early Contributions to “The Insatiate Countess”’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 24, 222 (1977), 116-17, and Andrew Gurr, for a discussion of the play's influence on Henslowe's repertory. Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), pp. 189-200.

3. 1 Return from Parnassus, The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London, 1949), 3.1.988-92. In another example, John Marston's 10th satire mocks the play's followers: ‘Luscus, what's play'd to-day? Faith now I know / I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow / Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.’ ‘Satire xi’, The Scourge of Villainie, Works, vol. 3, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1887), pp. 37-9.

4. See Linda Woodbridge's discussion of dramatic treatments of female desire, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana, 1984), especially pp. 244-63.

5. Henry Porter, The Two Angry Women of Abington, ed. Marianne Brish Evett (N.Y., 1980). Modern editors have divided the play into thirteen scenes. 8.150-2.

6. Walter D. Redfern, Puns (Oxford, 1984), p. 91.

7. ‘Die’ is frequently used by female characters, as in Marston's and Barksted's The Insatiate Countess (1610). Isabella goes to her nuptial bed reluctantly: ‘When my loath'd mate / Shall struggle in due pleasure for his right, / I'll think't my love, and die in that delight!’ John Marston and others, The Insatiate Countess, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester, 1984), 1.2.259-61. For further examples, see James Henke, Courtesans and Cuckolds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare) (N.Y., 1979), p. 67.

8. James Brown, ‘Eight Types of Pun’, PMLA, 71 (1956), pp. 15-16.

9. Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday, The Dramatic Works, vol. 1, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1953), 2.3.39. Firke and Hodge view the Wife as a natural butt of sexual innuendo. For example, Hodge: ‘Maister I hope yowle not suffer my dame to take downe your iourneymen.’ Firke: ‘If she take me downe, Ile take her vp, yea and take her downe too, a button-hole lower.’ 2.3.29-32.

10. See Gayle Whittier's definitive study of Petrarchan conceits in the play, ‘The Sonnet's Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), pp. 27-41. Also M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), p. 61, and Jill Levenson, ‘The Definition of Love: Shakespeare's Phrasing in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Studies, 15 (1982), pp. 21-3.

11. Juliet's erotic epithalamium has distressed many critics, particularly those from the nineteenth century. I quote from the appendix to the Variorum edition: N. J. Halprin argued in 1845 that bridal ceremonies must have been common in the 1590s: ‘hence may be inferred her familiarity with thoughts and expressions not likely in any other way to have obtained entrance into the mind of an innocent and unsophisticated girl of fourteen’ (374); Massey in 1866 argues for emendation of the speech, or ‘the sole incentive of this appeal for night to come was Juliet's eagerness for the perfecting of her marriage. It is not so. That would make of Juliet a forward wanton, and of her speech an invocation most immodest’ (392); and A. de Lamartine rants in 1865: ‘the most scandalous obscenity usurps the place of that virgin purity’ (440). A New Variorum Edition of Romeo and Juliet, vol. 1, ed. Horace Furness (Philadelphia, 1871).

12. Noted by Harry Levin, ‘Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet’, Romeo and Juliet: Critical Essays, ed. John F. Andrews (N.Y., 1993), p. 49. See Gary McCown's thorough study of the genre of epithalamium in terms of Juliet's speech. McCown points out that the bridegroom should speak the epithalamium and the bride, like Junia in Catullus 61, is supposed to be afraid and weep to demonstrate modesty. ‘“Runnawayes Eyes” and Juliet's Epithalamium’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 27 (1976), pp. 150-76.

13. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage, Works, vol. 1, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (London, 1933), 5.1179-81.

14. I have tried to limit my discussion of sexual puns to those I think audiences would readily grasp. Frankie Rubinstein finds a more obscure series of puns in the following line from Juliet's epithalamium: ‘Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night’ (3.2.5): ‘Juliet's amorous impatience is conveyed in (1) the spreading of the “close” (genitals) curtain; (2) the love-performing … “night”, her “knight”, as she calls Romeo in the last line of the scene.’ A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (London, 1984), p. 251.

15. See Brown, ‘Eight Types of Pun’, pp. 20, 22.

16. In John Day's Isle of Gulls, Dametas uses ‘coney’ with a similar implication: ‘I would thou shouldst know, we olde Courtiers can hunt a Cony, and put her to the squeake, & make her cry out like a young married wife of the first night.’ The Isle of Gulls, ed. Raymond S. Burns (N.Y., 1980), 1.4.16-19. For an extended discussion of the sexual implications of ‘coney’, see James Henke's glossary, Courtesans and Cuckolds.

17. One of the most exact borrowings occurs between Lady Capulet's ‘I would the fool were married to her grave’ (3.5.140) and Mistress Barnes's ‘I'll rather have her married to her grave’ (8.175). R. W. Dent lists Porter and Shakespeare as the only users of the phrase until Fletcher's The Night Walker in 1611. See Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare 1495-1616 (Berkeley, 1984). For a list of all verbal parallels between the two plays, see Evett, The Two Angry Women, pp. 51-4. An unlikely argument has been made that Porter's play was written earlier than 1597 and that Shakespeare looked to his play, rather than the reverse. See J. M. Nosworthy, ‘The Two Angry Families of Verona’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 3 (1952), pp. 219-26.

18. The generally accepted reading of this line (an ‘honour’) is taken, in fact, from q1 (the ‘bad’ Quarto). The ‘newly corrected’ q2, q3 and q4 all read ‘It is an houre that I dreame not of.’

19. See Shakespeare's sonnet 27: ‘Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night / Makes black night beauteous and her old face new’ (27:11-12).

20. See Edward Snow for an intricate analysis of the gender differences in Romeo's and Juliet's use of matched metaphors. ‘Language and Sexual Difference in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare's ‘Rough Magic’. Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark, 1985), pp. 168-92.

21. Gillian Beer, ‘Rhyming as Comedy: Body, Ghost and Banquet’, English Comedy, eds. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan (Cambridge, 1994), p. 181.

22. Boys' companies are generally singled out as prone to boy-actor innuendo, a fact often attributed to a more exaggerated acting style. On the other hand, considerable work has been done on proposed doubles entendres in Shakespeare's plays. Many studies of the erotic potential of transvestism have been recently published: see, for example, Susan Zimmerman's claim that Jacobean playwrights deliberately privileged transvestism for purposes of erotic titillation. ‘Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy’, Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. S. Zimmerman (N.Y., 1992), p. 39.

23. Puns and malapropisms, writes William C. Carroll, ‘offer the sexual low road, the eruption of the carnivalesque sexual into high discourse …’ ‘The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), p. 109.

24. The Two Angry Women of Abington is surmised to have been popular, considering Henslowe paid the sum of £7 (as against a standard £6) for its sequel. The sequel went into production in February 1598, and Porter was paid the final £2 on 12 February. There was apparently a third sequel planned (The Two Merry Women of Abington); on 28 February Henslowe records the following payment: ‘Lent unto harey porter at the Requeste of the company in earnest of his boocke called ij mery women of abenton the some of forty shellengs & for the Resayte of that money he gave me his faythfulle promysse that I shold have alle the boockes wch he writte …’ Qtd. Evett, The Two Angry Women, p. 5. The only comparable arrangement was made with Chettle. While the entry indicates Porter's desperate financial straits, it also points to the popularity of his first two plays.

25. See Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London, 1980), p. 8. The British Library owns a copy of the first quarto of Edward Sharpham's The Fleire, bowdlerized some time in the seventeenth century with cuts congruent with a provincial performance of the play. Apparently many bawdy jokes, in particular, were cut. See Clifford Leech, ‘The Plays of Edward Sharpham: Alterations Accomplished and Projected’, Review of English Studies, 11 (1935), 70-4.

26. W. S., The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street, ed. John S. Farmer (London, 1911), p. h2r, line 3.

27. A Critical Old-Spelling Edition of Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable, ed. Thomas Leland Berger (Salzburg, Austria, 1979), 1.1.90-3. See Romeo 1.5.44-6.

28. Poetaster, Ben Jonson, vol. 4, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1952), 4.9.63-4.