Insulting by nature
Seona Anderson, 4th November 2023
Insults, jokes, witticisms and put downs are all integral to Shakespeare’s approach to drama. We are treated to a wide and diverse range of insulting language which includes many nature-based images.
Falstaff is one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s givers and takers of insulting language. In the Merry Wives of Windsor he is described as a ‘gross-wat’ry pumpion’, a ‘hodge-pudding’, a ‘bag of flax’ and a ‘whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor’. He describes himself as a rough, unfashionable man and not ‘like a many of these lisping hawthorn buds that come like women in men’s apparel and smell like Bucklersbury in simple time’. Bucklersbury was the area in London where many apothecaries had their shops and simples were the plants they used in their mixtures and medicines. In Henry IV Part 2 Falstaff turns his tongue on Justice Shallow describing him as “like a forked radish with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife”, “lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him “mandrake”, “you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him”. Falstaff insults Poins ability as a wit, “he a good wit? Hang him, baboon. His wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard”.
Insults can be related to size, age, colour, beauty or courage. Primrose can be used as a skin colour in a positive and negative sense. In Cymbeline Arviragus places primroses on Fidele’s grave saying “thou shalt not lack the flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose” but in Henry VI Part 2 Queen Margaret says “I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs”. Lilies are most often used as a complement, a symbol of purity and beauty but they are also used to insult. Shakespeare uses the term ‘lily-livered’ as an insult in both King Lear and Macbeth to mean lacking in courage.
Women in Shakespeare’s works come in for a wide range of insults to their beauty, their age, their virtue and in certain cases for appearing to behave like men. Women who were believed to be sexually available were described in Measure for Measure as a ‘rotten medlar’ or a ‘rotten orange’. There is always a tension between being perceived as pure and virtuous, a lily or bud or blossom, and being ‘green’ or naïve about the dangers of the world. Polonius warns Ophelia that “you speak like a green girl” in believing Hamlet’s promises of love, and that his words are “springes to catch woodcocks”.
Suffolk insults Warwick in Henry VI Part 2 by suggesting that his mother deceived his father, “thy mother took into her blameful bed some stern untutored churl, and noble stock was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art and never of the Neville’s noble race.”
Queen Margaret, wife of Henry VI, attracts insults based on the perception that she is acting like a man and being merciless, described as a she-wolf, an adder and a tiger (more on this in a later blog). Wolves, adders, tigers, lions, bears are often used to insult the savage behaviour of a particular character but they can also be used to praise decisiveness and courage in other situations.
Some animals are always presented in a negative and insulting way. Toads, bats, and snakes are almost always used to characterise negative qualities. Dogs are a more complicated case. Mongrel and cur and dog are often used as insults in Shakespeare but dogs are also valued and loyal in other cases.
Richard III is insulted by Anne, his future wife, Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth and his own mother. They all describe him as a toad, “never hung poison on a fouler toad”, “curse this poisonous bunch-backed toad”, “that bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad”. Toad is used as an insult in Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida.
Some of Shakespeare insults are a product of his time and sit uneasily in a time of diversity and respect for equality. The same can be said for the casual use of animals to define negative characteristics. Why should we simply accept that toads are bad? Humour can tell us lots about the culture and stereotypes of a community in any particular time and we can read them in context without continuing to use them unquestioningly in a different time and place.
