[In the following essay, Ross studies the dual effect of certain word groups, or “bawdy clusters”—words that take on indecent meanings when they occur in clustered references.]

CELIA:
But love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither, than with the safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honor come off again.

(AYL [As You Like It], I.ii.27-29)

There is no question that the most important twentieth-century innovation in Shakespeare scholarship is textual criticism. But a close second is the rediscovery of his multiple meanings, including his bawdy innuendo. Eric Partridge was the great pioneer, despite his occasional unscholarly exuberance. In E. A. M. Colman's study of the dramatic uses of bawdy in the plays and poetry there is a more disciplined sensitivity to these meanings.¹

Neither Partridge nor Colman has, however, paid sufficient attention to the indecent meanings in clusters of references. These groups of words have a dual effect: first, they communicate on an innocent level, camouflaging sexual imagery behind a series of allusions to, let us say, archery or birds' nests; second, they create a countereffect to this first one—producing a mutual influence, one upon the other, that increases the probability of latent indecent meaning. This dual effect permits the reader to enjoy the sport with the “safety of a pure blush.” He can read the lines on two or more levels—something that is of course possible in all poetry.²

I shall examine three such clusters, centering about caper, shin, and conceit. I have chosen these three words because they illustrate three different kinds of methods one may use in providing glosses for Shakespeare's poetry. None of the three is supported by the kind of internal evidence which states outright that the word has an indecent second sense. In the plays involved, no character provides us with an anatomy of the word that proves its wickedness. And nobody interrupts the speakers of these words with a “stop there!” that is supposed to prevent more scurrility. Shakespeare's bawdy wit would be a dull enterprise indeed if each such occurrence were accompanied by speeches of this sort.

The basic evidence for the meaning of each of my three words is to be found in its matrix, in the clusters of words in which we find it. For caper and shin I also have evidence from a recently published collection of seventeenth-century jests. Furthermore, in a familiar piece of Elizabethan nondramatic poetry, caper has an indecent sense; and shin plays a bawdy role in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries. For conceit, Shakespeare himself offers the external evidence from other passages, other plays. To support my interpretations, therefore, I have employed contemporaneous prose, poetry, and drama.

All three words are sexual rather than scatological in their secondary meanings. All are comical, not revolting.³ When isolated from their infectious clusters, all are innocent. Shakespeare most often uses them in honest and untainted ways. I shall offer a single example of a neutral meaning for each (and the reader can multiply these at will): in Henry VI, Part 2, York describes Jack Cade in battle, his thighs bristling with enemy darts like a sharp-quilled (and presumably fretful) “porpentine”:

                                                                                                    I have seen
Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.

(III.i.364-66)⁴

Cade's performance is bizarre but not bawdy. His caper is simply a leap or a dance step.

Shin is most often simply that part of the leg most vulnerable to thorns, as in The Tempest when Ariel, with unearthly glee, describes to Prospero the plight of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo:

                                                                                                    So I charm'd their ears
That calf-like they my lowing follow'd through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns,
Which ent'red their frail shins.

(IV.i.178-81)

Conceit can also have a perfectly innocent meaning—indeed it usually does, in Shakespeare's works and in other Elizabethan writing. It has its older “etymological” sense of “concept, idea, fancy”—as in Hastings' evaluation of Gloucester's mood in Richard III:

His Grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning;
There's some conceit or other likes him well,
When that he bids good morrow with such spirit.

(III.iv.48-50)

Hastings' diagnosis is quite wrong: he cannot know that the Duke's happy “conceit” is the delicious thought of sending Hastings himself to the block. Elsewhere Shakespeare gives Richard of Gloucester phrases that reveal a prurient sexuality (for instance, when he calls the young princess' womb a “nest of spicery” [IV.iv.424]),⁵ but there is no sexual innuendo here.

Caper, shin, and conceit: tried and found innocent—at least in these passages. When grouped with other kinds of terms, terms with a demonstrated “criminal past,” they suffer (or flourish) from guilt by association. This heightened effect is, for some readers, enough to indicate the presence of a bawdy meaning; others require additional evidence, which I shall muster below—evidence from varied sources, here used for the first time.

Some skeptics will never be satisfied without the sort of proof that the poet himself provides for the changes in meaning through which occupy moves, into and out of bawdiness, in Henry IV, Part 2, II.iv.147-50. Doll Tearsheet, a whore, bewails the tarnished reputation of this good, clean word which had come to mean “fornicate with.”⁶ An explanation like Doll's is rare in Shakespeare's works. Less explicit are the lines in which one character stops another from proceeding with his (presumably) obscene innuendo, as does the sober Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet:

MERCUTIO:
… like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bable in a hole.
BENVOLIO:
Stop there, stop there.

(II.iv.91-94)

Or Maria in Love's Labor's Lost:

COSTARD:
Then will she get the upshoot by cleaving the pin.(7)
MARIA:
Come, come, you talk greasily, your lips grow foul.

(IV.i.136-37)

Comically enough, neither Benvolio's remark nor that of Maria is sufficient to stop the flow of indecencies. But Shakespeare has achieved the desired effect, to call attention to the obscenities both before and after the “stop there” speeches.

When Shakespeare himself explains an obscenity or calls our attention to one, we can with assurance smile at the witticism, or perhaps turn up our noses in disapproval if we are that way inclined. Internal evidence, from the plays themselves, casts a shadow of guilt upon the words in the foregoing passages. Without this kind of evidence we must exercise due scholarly caution in interpreting a writer's meaning, whether it be Shakespeare's bawdy or Dryden's topicalities. The reader is uncomfortable if he does not understand allusions or jokes. Critics and editors should do what they can, in good conscience, to help him. But both reader and critic are embarrassed if they see an indecent jest where the evidence is dubious. We should heed Colman's prim warning that to find bawdiness where it is not “is to read with the distorting eye of early adolescence.”⁸

I turn, then—with the twenty-twenty vision of maturity, I trust—to external evidence and to the clusters in which caper, shin, and conceit occur. A generation after Shakespeare's time Sir Nicholas Le Strange (or L'Estrange) compiled a jestbook.⁹ It was evidently intended for private use. The “jeasts” are unashamedly bawdy, though many are attributed to the compiler's genteel neighbors, relatives, and even his own wife. Since Sir Nicholas probably did not plan to publish the collection but wrote it out, in his own hand, for amusement or as an aide-mémoire for his table talk, there was no need to use euphemisms: shit, turd, fart, and fuck are all there amongst the jests. The following Jeast No. 161 does not use these familiar obscenities but is nonetheless blunt enough:

A Gentleman that was a very able Reveller, had ill fortune in his Capering at a Masque; upon which, says an old Court Lady that satt by, These are not right Genoa, they'le ne're doe well in a Sallett; yes by my troth Madame says he, I'le warrant you, The Capers are good enough for any Crone Mutton.

(p. 56)

Crone is used here in its rare sense of “old ewe” (OED, [Oxford English Dictionary] Crone, sb.²) but of course it also means “old hag.” Mutton has its familiar Elizabethan sexual significance—a loose woman.¹⁰Sallett is, as usual, something improperly tasty, as in Hamlet, II.ii.441.¹¹ And this leads to capers: the word has two obvious meanings in the Jeast: (i) leaps, dance steps; and (ii) herbal relish. These are insufficient, however, to explain the indignation of the Gentleman in the Jeast or the humor of his riposte to the scornful old Court Lady. We need a third sense—sexual gymnastics.

Dictionary makers have sidestepped this meaning,¹² but Colman comes close when he concedes that “capers can suggest kidlike (even goatish?) leapings.”¹³ It is a courageous concession, and one cannot blame him for circumspectly protecting his scholarly objectivity with a pair of parentheses and an interrogation point. I think we can remove these cautious qualifying marks when we consider the Jeast just quoted. Certainly the word does mean goatish leapings, coital plungings.

Oddly enough, Colman himself has called attention to a passage by one of Shakespeare's most eminent contemporaries in which these very words appear in the same cluster and with the same humorously obscene intent. Ben Jonson's invitation of a friend to supper includes a mouth-watering menu that can be read with a pure blush—and with pleasure—in a perfectly straightforward way. We still use food to represent sexual objects: tomato, dish, jelly roll. If all these occurred together in the lyrics of a popular song we would have no trouble identifying the double meanings.

So too with Jonson's invitation. Within a few lines he offers capers, sallade (i.e., salletts), and mutton—along with other food-animal-sex terms such as a short-legged hen (full of eggs), a coney, and larks.¹⁴ In dealing with Jonson's verses, Colman points to the “coincidence of half-a-dozen salacious nether-meanings available within almost as many lines” (p. 10); in so doing, he identifies the principle of clusters and guilt-by-association. However, he does not give caper a second thought in the text of his study or in his otherwise comprehensive glossary (pp. 182-223).

It is clear that when caper and mutton occur together, as in Jonson's verses and in Jeast No. 61, their individual suggestiveness is heightened by mutual influence. When these two companion viands occur together again in a Shakespearean scene already rich in double meanings, we should enjoy both the feast and the alternate senses. Early in Twelfth Night occurs this exchange:

SIR Andrew:
Faith, I can cut a caper.
SIR Toby:
And I can cut the mutton to't.
SIR Andrew:
And I think I have the back-trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria.

(I.iii.121-24)

Like Jonson in his poem, the characters in these scene are talking about food. The same thing happens frequently elsewhere in the play, with its many literal and figurative gastronomic references—when the Duke asks for more music, the food of love, or Toby mentions cakes and ale. In the scene from which the lines were just quoted, the two knights are also talking about dancing, of course, as Jonson is not.

The evidence from Jonson and the jestbook makes it more than probable that there is a third set of meanings: to cut a caper is to perform the act of love; the juxtaposition of mutton (“a loose woman”) supports this idea. Of course Sir Andrew is blissfully unaware of anything indecent in his remarks, here or elsewhere. With a knowing look at the audience perhaps, Sir Toby interjects his line, unnoticed by the foolish knight, and turns both of Sir Andrew's dance references into sexual double-meanings. For back-trick has its sexual sense too, especially when influenced by this cluster of wicked words. To have a strong back was to be potent in copulation.¹⁵

The reins (kidneys) are in the back, and they were thought to be a seat of the emotions. John Marston equates weak reins and a weak back in The Fawn (1604-06). Herod curses his impotent brother Sir Amoroso Debile-Dosso (i.e., Weak-Back): “As for my weak-rein'd brother, hang him! / He has sore shins” (II.i.173).¹⁶ We know why he is weak backed and weak kidneyed, but why should Sir Amoroso also have sore shins? The speech provides a convenient link between Sir Andrew's back-trick (and its associations with caper and mutton) and the second word I have chosen to treat, shin.

To understand why Marston's Sir Amoroso and Shakespeare's Costard (Love's Labor's Lost) both have sore shins, we must prepare—turn a little earth with the spade. In As You Like It Rosalind speaks of orators who “when they are out, they will spit” (IV.i.75-76), a crude remark in any event. Actually, there is another stratum, a sexual level, beneath the surface on which oratory is the subject. There are probable allusions to coitus interruptus and ejaculation. Rosalind continues: “for lovers lacking (God warn us!) matter, the cleanliest shift is to kiss” (ll. 76-77). Colman is less cautious in his comment on this passage: “spermal fluid and digital stimulation may well be implied” (p. 108). But Rosalind is not talking about fingers. One need hardly be told that a kiss—without the presence of fingers on, or in, the partner's body—may itself result in an emission of spermal fluid. The identification of matter and semen is correct.¹⁷ Colman is wrong, however, not only about those fingers but about the general meaning of the passage. Rosalind's lovers lack matter. They are deficient in love-balm. When the male lacks fluid and the female also comes up dry, intercourse is difficult. It is best to kiss and part, for the moment anyway. The phrase “God warn us!” seems to signal an impropriety.¹⁸ Lovers-plus-kissing-plus-matter are clustered, each influencing and heightening the other. The result is innuendo of a hearty bawdiness, just right for Ganymede (playing at “Rosalind” with Orlando) who in his (her) worldly and experienced fashion moralizes upon lovers' practices.¹⁹

I shall cite another preparatory passage before returning to matter and Costard's sore shin. In the Merry Wives Slender reports to Anne:

I bruis'd my shin th' other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence (three veneys [bouts] for a dish of stew'd prunes) and by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.

(I.i.282-86)

The smell of hot meat is suspicious, but I cannot prove its bad character. The dish of stewed prunes is, on the other hand, one of the commonest indecent camouflages in Elizabethan poetry, alluding as it does to whores. Everybody now recognizes this one, though Partridge missed it. Whether Slender's sword-and-dagger fights are real duels or merely sexual bouts is not important: the bruised shin is. Recall the passage from Marston's Fawn quoted above (weak back, weak kidneys, impotence, sore shins). Later on in the same play Marston has his Dulcimel complain to Philocalia:

… tell me if it be not a scandal to the soul of all being, proportion, that I, a female of fifteen, of a lightsome and civil discretion, healthy, lusty, vigorous, full, and idle, should forever be shackled to the crampy shins of a wayward, dull, sour, austere, rough, rheumy, threescore and four.

(III.i.177-82)

Compare Sir Nicholas Le Strange's Jeast No. 197: “One usd to say that Lawyers wifes had the sweetest lives of any woemen, because their Husbands returne allwayes Crura Thymo plena” (p. 66). The Latin phrase means “shins full of thyme.”²⁰ Healthy shins were tireless in love-making; furthermore, such a shin could represent the male member, with a firm “bone” in it. The matter in a bone is of course its marrow, and marrow was a cant term for semen.²¹ Love was said to “burn” or “melt the marrow,” and, as Hulme tells us,

marrow-bone … as one of the many euphemisms for “penis” is still used in spoken English of the present time and may well have been current in earlier speech. No instances are found in Shakespeare of this usage, but “marrow” itself has the expected sexual connotation.²²

Shin thus has two sexual senses: first, in a non-figurative sense, a lover's shins could grow weary from the exertion of love-making and develop shin-splints; second, without matter or marrow, a shin is a penis without semen. In either case the lover with a less-than-healthy shin could not ply his trade. Empty, hollow, or diseased shins are useless for love-making, as the bitter protagonist of Timon of Athens makes clear:

                                                                                                              Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man, strike their sharp shins,
And mar men's spurring.

(IV.iii.151-53)

The Riverside editors gloss consumptions thus: “Used of all wasting diseases, including syphilis.” They provide no gloss for spurring, but it has been a familiar quibble for fornicating since the time of the Wife of Bath and even before.²³ Employing once again the principle of mutual influence in clusters, we see that consumptions-plus-shins-plus-spurring equals a clear double meaning. Diseased phalluses are empty of matter and are of no use in love-making.

We are ready at last for Costard's shin and its matter. Love's Labor's Lost has more than its share of unsolved puzzles, gnarled witticisms, and irretrievable topical allusions. But we can now clear up a group of references that have baffled all commentators. In Act III, scene i, Costard enters crying for a plantain leaf to heal his broken shin.²⁴ Most editors explain this as a clumsy joke. Costard means an apple and is used for the head, like noggin. A head with a wounded shin is clownishly comical. Richard David, the Arden editor, has more information:

Hart wrote: “References to the breaking of shins are so abundant at this time that one is inclined to think they must have been even more susceptible than nowadays.” The probable explanation … is that a “broken shin” had for the Elizabethans a metaphorical as well as a literal sense, and was in fact slang for a sexual disappointment.

(III.i.67n)

To support this new and, as we now know, obviously correct recognition of the double sense, David cites A Merry New Song How a Bruer Meant to Make a Cooper Cuckold.²⁵ The evidence adduced in the present study suggests that Hart was perhaps owlishly naive and that David's “sexual disappointment” is a donnish euphemism.

In this scene Costard's shin is mentioned five times. He has been caught in the act with the country wench Jaquenetta, but we later learn that she is apparently made pregnant not by this clownish Apple-Head but by the fantastico, Don Armado. This Spaniard is full of fire-new words and, evidently, plenty of matter. Costard describes his own performance with the country wench thus: “I, Costard, running out that was safely within, / Fell over the threshold, and broke my shin” (ll. 116-17). His shin was, he adds, lacking in matter (l. 119). The word is glossed by editors (if they gloss it at all) as “pus,” but we now know better. Costard's running out, after having been safely within, and falling over the threshold take on almost explicit comic sexual meanings, when we see them in the context of this scene. Love's Labor's Lost is a play about words: shin and matter, along with their dubious lexical comrades in these passages, take on a new patina of humorous sexual significance. The influence of the cluster goes beyond shin and matter, though they are the targets here.

In Taming of the Shrew the word matter is utterly innocent. It occurs seven times, always with the neutral sense illustrated by Hortensio's “How now, what's the matter” of I.ii.20. But conceit in this play is something else. It occurs only twice, in succeeding lines:

PETRUCHIO:
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.155-63)

Conceit is certainly meant to conjure up conceive here, with the familiar equation of conceive as “become pregnant” implied.²⁶ Both Gloucester (in Lear) and Hamlet make this salacious pun—and as a matter of fact Colman cites a later passage from Shrew itself to illustrate this very meaning:

WIDOW:
Thus I conceive by him.
PETRUCHIO:
Conceives by me! how likes Hortensio that?
HORTENSIO:
My widow says, thus she conceives her tale.
PETRUCHIO:
Very well mended. Kiss him for that, good widow.

(V.ii.22-25)

But to return to the earlier exchange between Petruchio and Grumio: the conceive/conception quibble may be present here as well as in the exchange involving the widow. But in the dialogue with Grumio, it is accompanied by yet another bawdy meaning: cunt, a sense that is brought to the fore by the presence of taken up … gown … deeper. Both Partridge and Colman assert that the blunt four-letter word for the female pudendum is present in Hamlet's country matters (III.ii.116) and perhaps also in country mistresses (Cym, [Cymbeline] I.iv.57-58) and country copulatives (AYL, V.iv.55-56). The spelling of conceit has perhaps hidden from modern readers the same taboo monosyllable.

A passage from a minor prose work attributed to Nashe illustrates what appears to be a transitional sense for conceit, moving from concept to conception to cunt. The lines allude to the “myncing Dame of Rochester with the golden locks, whose conceipt was so quick, that shee caught a childe whilst her husbande was from her.”²⁷ Here there are three levels of meaning possible: (1) wit, intelligence; (2) conception (becoming pregnant); and (3) cunt-seat.

Could concei(p)t be pronounced in early modern English in such a way as to suggest these three senses—particularly the latter? Kökeritz treats fully the phenomenon of the excrescent [t] in Shakespeare's English; it occurs at ends of words, “as in assistants (assistance),” in LLL, [Love's Labour's Lost] V.i.128.²⁸ It is perhaps over-fastidious to insist that the [t] in conceit is intrusive not excrescent, since it occurs in the middle of the word. The same phonetic phenomena are involved in both assistance and conceit: [ns] invites the intrusion or excrescence of [t]. I have not searched all the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays for spellings of conceit that might throw light upon these phonetic facts, as does the spelling of assistants cited by Kökeritz. In the First Folio the compositors invariably spell the word conceit or conceite, neither of which provides a clue.²⁹

Other occurrences of conceit (conceit's, conceits) in Shakespeare's works apparently provide no passage parallel with that in Shrew. However, when one at first reads the following, one's ears prick up: “With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats” (MND, [A Midsummer Night's Dream] I.i.33). If only the donor of these gifts were a woman! But Egeus, the speaker, is referring to Demetrius. We are familiar of course with the sexual imagery of Donne's bracelet of bright hair about the bone, and Shakespeare's wordplay upon ring is a commonplace. Both are obvious references to the elusive monosyllable, the cunt. Therefore conceits in the foregoing passage at first seems to glow with a naughty aura because of its context. If only Hermia were the bestower of the gifts! But perhaps that is just the point: the presents, at least some of them, are ludicrously inappropriate for a man to give a woman—if one recognizes the bawdy second meanings. Stubborn old Egeus is wrong about Demetrius anyway, and the inappropriate bracelets of hair, rings, and conceits may constitute a joke of which Egeus is unaware.

One cannot insist upon a sexual meaning for Egeus' lines. The Shrew passage thus appears to be the only one in Shakespeare's works in which conceit probably has a sexual double meaning. It could be pronounced [klunt sit] or [klant sit],³⁰ and if that pronunciation occurred in the right situation in a play—with the appropriate speaker and amidst appropriate lexical surroundings—an indecent meaning might well be conveyed. Jonson again provides some support. Early in Bartholmew Fayre Little-wit says, “I doe feele conceits comming upon mee, more then I am able to turne tongue too” (I.i.32-33).³¹ As Little-wit's humour-character name suggests, he is a naif who utters imbecilities and double-entendres without knowing whereof he speaks. I do not think I need to point out the dubious companions with which conceit finds itself in this Jonson passage.

When we now return to conceit in IV.iii.155-63 of Shrew, we are persuaded that there is a probable allusion to Kate's private part, hidden beneath her skirts and “deeper than you think for.” The last phrase is the clincher: a conceit (concept) may be deep and so may a vulva. A conception (an impregnation) cannot. The conceit with which Petruchio and Grumio play—as Kate stands by, fuming and mute—appears to combine the monosyllable and seat. If it were not for the presence of deeper and the lifted skirts, we would perhaps exonerate conceit. The cluster makes a triple meaning likely: concept, conception, pudendum. Shin and caper also suffer from bad company, as I have shown above. These words can hide behind the safe pudicity of a pure blush, retaining their innocent meanings, but if we take into account the clustered references in which they sometimes occur, parallel indecorous senses emerge.

No doubt many other bawdy clusters exist in Shakespeare's works. The foregoing analysis, employing three different kinds of evidence, will, I hope, make us more responsive to the subtle but hardly corruptive wit in these kinds of word groups.

Notes

1. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960); E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974) mentions a couple of groups of words that I would include in my concept of clusters: foul and fault, and lovers, meeting, son (pp. 7, 15). However, he does not examine fully the function of the cluster principle. Hilda Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare's Language (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962) deals from time to time with mutual influence but, again, without examining the principle; she quotes J. R. Firth with approval: “A word is known by the company it keeps” (p. 100). In my Chaucer's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1972), pp. 20-21, I have described the heightening effect produced by clusters of indecent innuendos.

2. Hulme, p. 114, describes the problem: “To ‘prove’ the existence of an indecent joke which the dramatic context seems strongly to suggest is not always easy. Evidence which is available in the minor sources of Elizabethan and Jacobean English may not be noted in dictionary collections; readers who come upon such evidence may not be concerned with its relevance to Shakespeare's text”; and she adds (p. 124), “both innocent and less innocent senses are of equal importance.”

3. As Colman points out (pp. 112-42), Shakespeare uses his bawdy language both for comic purposes and to reveal a character's sexual revulsion—an idea proposed by previous critics, though none has treated it as thoroughly as Colman.

4. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); all quotations are from this ed.

5. Colman, p. 205, equates this nest with the female genitalia; however, he says that the sexual allusions of this play are instruments of policy and “none of them are strictly bawdy” (p. 60).

6. Doll gives the impression that occupy bore a naughty sense for only a brief time, but it persisted through the seventeenth century and probably longer. See OED, [Oxford English Dictionary] 8, which also points out that the verb fell into desuetude until the end of the eighteenth century because of its “vulgar employment”; I am indebted to Professor R. W. Dent for guiding me to this information. Hulme (p. 124) adds: “It is noteworthy that the verb occupy, ‘to cohabit with’ was, in Shakespeare's day, in process of being dropped from decent usage, so that the meaning of ‘Occupation’ which Othello himself ignores would be more vividly present to the Shakespearean audience.”

7. Most commentators dismiss this line by explaining what it means in archery. The Riverside editors affirm that the pin holds the clout or cloth in the center of the target; Richard David, the Arden editor of the play (London: Methuen, 1968), provides fuller evidence of the same thing. Partridge, p. 87, gives a hint of the “greasiness” of the phrase (“To cause emission in a male”), but only Colman is explicit enough to make us understand Maria's indignation. He explains that it means “masturbation of male by female” (p. 188).

8. Colman, p. 14. Amusingly, Hulme (pp. 108-09) counsels the opposite: “What might be regarded as an adolescent alertness to sex innuendo is more valuable than a high academic seriousness.”

9. Merry Passages and Jeasts: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange (1603-1655), ed. H. F. Lippincott; Salzburg Studies in English Literature, No. 29 (Salzburg: Institut f. englische Sprache u. Literatur, 1974), cited below as Jeasts. See also Lippincott's “‘Merry Passages and Jeasts’ and Sir Nicholas L'Estrange,” Library Chronicle, 41 (1977), 149-62.

10. Colman, p. 204, finds this meaning in Shakespeare's works but claims that the poet never used it in its slang sense of “prostitute.”

11. Ibid., pp. 10, 212.

12. See n. 2 above.

13. P. 10. Partridge does nothing with caper; nor does the OED, together with its new Supplement, ed. R. W. Burchfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); nor do old standards like J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, eds., Slang and Its Analogues, rev. ed. (New Hyde Park, N. Y.: University Books, 1966). These sources have been routinely checked, when appropriate, for material treated later in this paper.

14. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 64-65. The hen is a probable double-entendre; the eggs are a familiar aphrodisiac, scorned by Falstaff as unnecessary in Wiv., [The Merry Wives of Windsor] III.v.30-31; and larks are loose women. The limon might be equated with lemman (sweetheart), but I can find no suggestive meaning for olives. The coney stands for a light woman or for her pudendum (OED, sb., 5 and 5b). For an earlier use of hare and coney in indecent senses, see my Chaucer's Bawdy, pp. 101-02. Jonson offers “an oliue, capers, or some better sallade / Vshring the mutton” (ll. 10-11). I can find no bawdy meaning for usher; however, in Epicoene, IV.i.125-27, True-Wit explains how one should woo a woman: “Nor will it be out of your gaine to make love to her too, so shee follow, not usher, her ladies pleasure.” Usher keeps suspicious company in both these Jonson passages. The OED, Usher, sb., 2b, gives as an obsolete sense “a male attendant on a lady.” The earliest citation, from Fletcher (1621), does not have an obscene meaning; but in 1649 Davenant wrote, “Consumptive ushers that are decay'd In their Ladies service.” For consumptive, see Colman, p. 189, where he states that consumption alludes glancingly to gonorrhea; and compare the reference to Timon in this paper. Most modern commentators agree that service can mean sexual attention. The quotation from Davenant may be a little late to provide a dependable gloss for Jonson's usher, but it deepens one's suspicions. Usher occurs in Shakespeare only a few times; of these, perhaps Berowne's hushering (LLL, V.ii.328) may have a double meaning. He is speaking of Boyet, whose relationship with the Princess and her ladies is too familiar.

15. Colman, p. 183, equates the back-trick and copulation. The Riverside editors identify the gustatory and terpsichorean senses of caper in this passage from TN [Twelfth Night] and they state that the back-trick was “steps taken backward in the galliard.” J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, the Arden editors (London: Methuen, 1975), explicitly deny any quibble on mutton here; they also claim that the back-trick is not known as a technical term in the dance. However, they continue, “if it is coined by Sir Andrew, there may be unconscious indecency,” and they quote a number of contemporaneous works that equate strong backs with sexual prowess. See OED, Reins, 3: “The seat of the feelings and affections,” with several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century citations. This sense is present in Falstaff's remarks to Bardolph when the latter tells him that Mistress Quickly is approaching (Wiv., III.v.21-22): “Come, let me pour some sack to the Thames water; for my belly's as cold as if I had swallow'd snowballs for pills to cool the reins.”

16. John Marston, The Fawn, ed. Gerald A. Smith, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965). Shakespeare's Sir Andrew is funny not only because he is stupid but because he is also effeminate, like Sir Amoroso in Marston's play. Sir Andrew also has physiognomic characteristics that betray his effeminacy (like Chaucer's Pardoner and Absolon in the Miller's Tale); see my Chaucer's Bawdy, pp. 100-01.

17. OED, Matter, 3: “the fluids of the body, excrementitious products, etc.”

18. It serves a function, it would appear, like “(God) bless the mark,” which can indicate something off-color or can forestall an ill omen. See TGV, [The Two Gentlemen of Verona] IV.iv.19, and MV, [The Merchant of Venice] II.ii.24. It also resembles the exclamation “sir reverence!” as seen in Err., [The Comedy of Errors] III.ii.91, and Rom., [Romeo and Juliet] I.iv.42.

19. Some people are offended by this less than ladylike Rosalind. Her forthrightness startled readers like Coleridge. As Colman sees her, there are moments of “blunt physicality,” but there is “nothing brazen” in her character (p. 108).

20. The allusion is found in Virgil's Georgics, IV.181, where he speaks of bees returning with crura thymo plena [things laden with thyme-scented honey]. On some occasions, when this lovely phrase was not “contaminated” by proximity with sexually suggestive words, it probably referred to husbands' golden moneybags.

21. OED, Marrow, 1b; it cites Ven., 142, which, however, is a line spoken by Venus: “My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning.”

22. Hulme, p. 128. She illustrates her point by quoting AWW, [All's Well That Ends Well] II.iii.279-81: “He wears his honor in a box unseen, / That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, / Spending his manly marrow in her arms,” and Middleton's Mad World, B1^v (1608): “all her wanton Pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, oh two lushious mary-bone pies for a yong married wife.” The Riverside editors gloss Shakespeare's manly marrow as “manly essence.”

23. I neglected this meaning, together with other horse-rider double-entendres, in my Chaucer's Bawdy. See Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1973), on horses (pp. 103-12); and the same writer's Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1971), on the Wife of Bath (pp. 118, 136-37).

24. Plantain was evidently a real remedy for scrapes and scratches. The dictionaries and herbals do not include it among the aphrodisiacs. Some of the humor lies precisely here: no plantain leaf can heal Costard's malady! There is wry self-mockery in Romeo's reference to plantain and broken shins in Rom., I.ii.51-52. He can expect no more help from the homely remedy than can Costard.

25. STC 22919, dated around 1590 and attributed to H. Kirkham. There is a copy in the British Library. I am indebted to Professor Dent for directing me to this information.

26. Colman, pp. 20-21, discusses this passage, though for a different purpose. He says, rather confusingly, that Grumio makes these bawdy remarks, thus abusing “the already victimized tailor by making him the butt of a series of quite imaginary scurrilities.” It would perhaps be more accurate to say that Grumio deliberately misinterprets Petruchio's remarks, imputing them to the tailor, who is listening to this dialogue.

27. In Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow (rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), I, 100 (ll. 5ff.). Concerning the Dame of Rochester, McKerrow (IV, 64) says, “I know nothing of her.”

28. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), p. 301. Though Kökeritz has been taken to task for assuming that compositors' spellings represent Shakespeare's (or any Elizabethan's) pronunciation, his work is still useful.

29. E. J. Dobson, English Pronunciation 1500-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) treats excrescent [t] as does Kökeritz, but he also explains that “in late ME and ModE there is a tendency for ‘inorganic’ or ‘excrescent’ stops to develop after nasals” (II, 1001), a statement which would include the intrusive stop [t] in conceit.

30. Dobson cites an orthographic manual published in 1649: “the same sound is expressed by different letters in sea-ted, con-cei-ted” (I, 167), a passage that employs precisely the examples we need to illustrate the off-color pun in Shr.!

31. Ben Jonson, VI, 20.