The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350328617
• eBook ISBN: 9781350055506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare's World explores Shakespeare's complex art of insults and shows how the playwright set abusive words at the heart of many of his plays. It provides valuable insights on a key aspect of Shakespeare's work that has been little explored to date. Focusing on the most memorable scenes of insult, abusive characters and insulting effects in the plays, the volume shifts how readers understand and read Shakespeare's insults. Chapters analyze the spectacular rhetoric of insult in Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens; the 'skirmishes of wit' in Much Ado about Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream; insult and duelling codes in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, the complex relationships between slander and insult in Much Ado about Nothing and Measure for Measure; the taming of the tongue in Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, the trauma of insults in Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline and insult beyond words in Henry V and King lear. Grasping insult as a specific speech act, the volume explores the issues of verbal violence and verbal shields and the importance of reception and interpretation in matters of insult. It offers a panorama of the Elizabethan politics of insult and redefines Shakespeare's drama as a theatre of insults.

1

The spectacular rhetoric of insult

Shakespeare’s plays convey the banality of certain raw insulting words yet also cultivate artistic forms of abuse that rest on a spectacular rhetoric, reminiscent of the tradition of flyting.¹ They combine excess and creativity. Key insulting terms emerge from the whole corpus, the three most recurrent of which are ‘villain’, ‘rogue’ and ‘knave’. These constitute the ‘triple pillar’ of Shakespeare’s world of insults, illustrating what C. S. Lewis called the ‘moralisation of status words’.² When combined with other words to form strings of abuse and being shaped into theatrical material, these common terms become a source of originality. The three plays on which this chapter will focus, Henry IV Part 1, Troilus and Cressida, and Timon of Athens, are emblematic of the ways in which insults articulate profusion and invention to make insults a spectacular speech act.

1 Henry IV or ‘gormandizing’ abuse

One of the plays that most memorably illustrate the art of excess is Henry IV Part 1 in which the flyting scenes between Falstaff and Hal are most spectacularly festive. In this play, anger is fake and insults are a sign of friendship rather than a symptom of enmity. It is probably in this play that the title of this book, ‘the anatomy of insults’, takes on its most extensive meaning, as appears when the spectators hear the strings of abuse that are at the heart of the central scene:

HAL

[…] Why, thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch.

(2.4.219–21)

HAL

[…] This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh –

(2.4.235–7)

FALSTAFF

’Sblood, you starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish! O, for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor’s yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck –

(2.4.238–41)

HAL

Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years?

(2.4.436–42)

The battle between Carnival and Lent, in which our contemporaries could now hear a form of ‘sizeism’, has clearly been identified in 1 Henry IV.³ It takes the form of sequences of flyting that Keir Elam defined as ‘[a] ritual dispute between two opponents, consisting in an exchange of invective and abuse’.⁴ The dialogues between Hal and Falstaff in the tavern scenes, contrary to Hotspur’s mostly solitary angry expostulations, epitomize insult as a ritualized festive spectacular speech act. The tavern where these scenes take place represents both abundance of drink and food and abundance of words.

In Shakespeare’s period, the tavern was considered as a world of excess, a place of disorder where unruly tongues and foul mouths reigned supreme. The Homyly against gluttonie and dronkennes warns that ‘Wyne dronken with excesse, maketh bytternesse of mynde, and causeth brawlyng and stryfe’ but also that ‘many fonde, foolyshe, and fylthy wordes are spoken when men are at theyr bankettes’.⁵ To tame one’s tongue, one needs to tame one’s life and avoid drunkenness. It is precisely what the newly crowned King Henry V means in 2 Henry IV when he rejects Falstaff and asks him to ‘leave gormandizing’ (2H4, 5.5.52), meaning he must say adieu to all sins of the tongue. The exchanges of abuse that Hal and Falstaff indulge in are an expression of a life of ‘gormandizing’ that rests on pleasure and seems to be a perpetual ‘feast of words’.⁶ They constitute a spectacle within the spectacle, a ‘play extempore’ (1H4, 2.4.271), an expression that theorizes the exchanges between Hal and Falstaff, to better display their metatheatrical nature. In the world of the tavern, words of insult are spectacular objects of collective delight, eatables to share and relish that feed some key metastylistic comments.

‘Unsavoury similes’

‘Thou hast the most unsavoury similes and art indeed the most comparative, rascalliest, sweet young prince’ (1H4, 1.2.76–8): this is how Falstaff reacts when Hal compares him to ‘the melancholy of Moorditch’, a comparison that suggests Falstaff should be evacuated as some kind of filth, and anticipates what happens to him in The Merry Wives.⁷ It is not surprising that the greasy old man should stylistically define that speech act by using food imagery (‘unsavoury’), thus signifying that offensive words can be considered as food that is hard to swallow and digest. This idea is memorably dramatized in Henry V when the Welsh Fluellen forces Pistol to eat a leek,⁸ thus countering the verbal abuse he has received through physical abuse (5.1.14–68), literally transforming a speakable into an eatable. What Michel Jeanneret⁹ calls ‘les mets et les mots’, eatables and speakables, words and food, have much in common. Falstaff’s metalinguistic comment stresses the analogical dimension of abusive language, which is again emphasized when, gasping for breath or for inspiration, he exclaims: ‘O, for breath to utter what is like thee!’ (2.4.239–40). The assaulting words he hurls at Hal are based on what Puttenham calls ‘resemblance’ or ‘similitude’,¹⁰ or what Hal calls ‘base comparisons’ (1H4, 2.4.243). When Henry IV blames his son for being like Richard, the ‘skipping king’ who became a sort of Carnival figure who ‘[stood] the push of every beardless vain comparative’ (1H4, 3.2.66–7), Henry too equates insult with comparison, as the term ‘comparative’ may be glossed as ‘dealer in insults’.¹¹ By insulting, you translate the target you have chosen, by means of ‘base comparisons’ and ‘unsavoury similes’. The art of insult is an art of translation and in 1 Henry IV, it is the body that is transformed or deformed by means of tropes such as metaphors or synecdoches.

Most of the insults in this play have to do with the physical aspect, notably with corpulence or thinness. The body contaminates the intellect when Hal verbally assaults Falstaff, as the old man wakes up, saying: ‘thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack […]’ (1.2.2) or when he calls him a little later ‘thou clay-brained guts’ (2.4.219–20). The body is the mirror of the mind and a deformed body cannot but be the sign of a sinful soul, as appears when Hal tells Falstaff that he is all body and no spirit: ‘there’s no room for faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine; it is all filled up with guts and midriff’ (3.3.150–4). There is no room for soul or virtue in Falstaff and his body is a book in which one can read all the vices that dominate his life: laziness, gluttony and lust. Shakespeare draws the portrait of Falstaff mainly through insults that show that he embodies all the Vices of the Medieval Morality plays. Behind adjectives such as ‘fat’, ‘round’, ‘greasy’, ‘oily’, one may hear ‘lazy’, ‘greedy’, ‘drunkard’ or ‘vicious’, as is confirmed in Georges Vigarello’s study of obesity which argues that this negative vision of fatness emerged during the Renaissance.¹² The whole world of vice lies in Falstaff’s corpulence which leads the Prince to call him: ‘that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian,¹³ that Vanity in years’ (2.4.441–2), words that refer to abstractions that Medieval plays transformed into characters and to which Falstaff is compared. He becomes a sort of Satan, ‘That villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan’ (2.4.450–1).¹⁴

Falstaff’s huge body undergoes metamorphoses and is dislocated by means of synecdoche. He is reduced to guts and becomes a paunch: ‘ye fat guts’ (2.2.31), ‘Sir John Paunch’ (2.2.64), ‘ye fat paunch’ (2.4.138). Through exaggeration, insults build up a deformed, disproportioned and thus grotesque ‘bodyscape’ that is also shaped by oaths,¹⁵ verbal excesses par excellence, by which the speaker tears God’s body limb by limb. Those who swear by God’s body, blood or wounds, tear Him to pieces, crucifying him again.¹⁶ It is in this play that one finds the most numerous occurrences of ‘’Sblood’.¹⁷ What Hotspur would term ‘good mouth-filling oaths’ (3.1.250) are part of the ‘soundscape’¹⁸ of the tavern.

Food and its excesses nourish the language of insults in 1 Henry IV: Falstaff is ‘[a]s fat as butter’ (2.4.498); he is called ‘Ribs’ (2.4.108), ‘Tallow’ (2.4.108), ‘that damned brawn’ (2.4.107), names that are both metonymical and metaphorical as Falstaff both resembles and is assimilated to what he eats. He ironically reverses roles when he calls the travellers he is robbing ‘bacon-fed knaves’ (2.2.82), ‘gorbellied knaves’ (2.2.86) and ‘bacons’ (2.2.88) in a passage that sounds like a self-portrait and will inevitably make the audience laugh.

Reifying metaphors add to the food imagery as Falstaff is transformed into pots and pans, objects that Bakhtin identifies as carnivalesque.¹⁹ Such insults as ‘tallow-catch’ (2.4.221), ‘that huge bombard of sack’ (2.4.439), ‘that bolting-hutch of beastliness’ (2.4.437–8), ‘that trunk of humours’ (2.4.437), ‘a tun of man’ (2.4.436) or even ‘Jack’ (1.2.108) all refer to containers. Reversely, Falstaff transforms Hal into objects that convey the Prince’s thinness, which goes together with a primarily sexual form of impotence.²⁰ When Hal is associated with food, he is compared to fish, that is, the food that characterizes Lent, thus standing in sharp contrast to the meat with which Falstaff and Carnival are associated and foreshadowing the days when Falstaff will be required to ‘leave gormandizing’.

‘Breathe a while and then to it again’

When Hal interrupts Falstaff’s string of abuse, telling him to ‘breathe awhile’ (1H4, 2.4.242), this ironical advice shows that insulting is a tiring physical activity for the fat old man. Behind this ‘breathe awhile’, one can find all the excesses that are characteristic of insults in this play where words of abuse are so abundant that they lead to physical exhaustion. The copia verborum (abundance of words)²¹ that Falstaff indulges in leads to breathlessness, a symptom that is emblematic of his character and goes together with his corpulence. Sir John’s insulting language reflects his anatomy: it is bombastic, unbounded, overflowing. Such phrases as ‘my sweet creature of bombast’ (2.4.318) or ‘blown Jack’ (4.2.48) convey this correspondence between the old man’s language and his body. Falstaff’s language is as ‘blown’ and gigantic as his body. By adopting the language of insult and its rhetoric of excess, Prince Hal makes himself as big as Falstaff. From this perspective, the old man’s abusive sentence ‘The Prince is a jack’ (3.3.85) may take on a new meaning. In the play, Hal verbally becomes a Jack Falstaff, as one can hear ‘The Prince is a jack’, i.e. a knave, as well as ‘The Prince is a Jack’. Using the rhetoric of excess, Lent becomes as big as Carnival.

In 1 Henry IV, hyperbole goes together with lies, an idea that is present in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie where the rhetorician describes the figure as the ‘over reacher’ or the ‘loud lyer’.²² Hyperbolic insults are everywhere: ‘starveling’ (2.4.238) answers ‘huge hill of flesh’ (2.4.237) or ‘horse-back-breaker’ (2.4.236). They can sometimes be ironical, as when Hal calls Falstaff ‘bare-bone’ (2.4.318). The lexical proliferation that app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘No abuse?’
• 1 The spectacular rhetoric of insult
• 2 The ‘merry war’: Insult as a love game
• 3 ‘Quarrelling by the book’: Insult and duelling codes
• 4 Insults as actionable words
• 5 Insult and the taming of the tongue
• 6 The trauma of insult
• 7 Insult beyond words
• Epilogue: Shakespeare’s theatre of insult
• Notes
• Bibliography of work cited
• Detailed outline
• Index
• Imprint