My favourite Shakespearean insults explained.
Lists of Shakespearean insults seem to have become popular on the web. Searches for keywords like “Shakespeare/Shakespearean” and “insults” yield hundreds of thousands of results; there are Shakespearean insults info-graphics ready for use, a Shakespearean insults kit and a Shakespearean insults mug which can be bought online. Maybe this is because the web is increasingly full of haters, and there is a need to respond to insults in a sublime way.
Whatever the reason of the popularity, some of the insults, invectives and verbal abuses in Shakespeare’s works are among the most fascinating, funny, moving, thought-provoking lines written by the playwright.
Like so many other things, Shakespearean insults change in tone and language from the early creations to the later works. In the early plays, language is often flashy and decorative, written for actors to declaim rather than speak; like in the set-piece exchange between Falstaff and Prince Henry in
Henry IV part 1 (II,iv).
Falstaff calls Prince Henry
“You starvelling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish –O for breath to utter what is like thee!- you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck! “
referring to his thinness.
While Prince Henry calls Falstaff
“an old fat man”, “ trunk of humors”, “ bolting-hutch of beastliness,”, “swollen parcel of dropsies”, “huge bombard of sack”, “stuffed cloakbag of guts”, “roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly”
referring to his abundant body shape.
The theme of body shapes comes back in this description of a not-very-thin lady in the dialogue between Dromio and Antipholus from
Comedy of Errors (III,ii)
“No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip, she is spherical, like a globe, I could find out countries in her.”
After which, they go on locating countries on her body with not-quite-so-sensual descriptions.
In spite of how emotionally involved a character may be, the utterance of the insult is always argumentative and controlled, and the language is always written for declamation, like in these lines spoken by Prince Escalus in
Romeo and Juliet (1,i):
“Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace,
Profaners of this neighbor-stainèd steel! —
Will they not hear? — What, ho! You men, you beasts,
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins”
Or in these, by Philip the Bastard to Hubert de Burgh in King John (IV,iii):
“There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell
As thou shalt be, if thou didst kill this child.” [………]
If thou didst but consent
To this most cruel act, do but despair;
And if thou want’st a cord, the smallest thread
That ever spider twisted from her womb
Will serve to strangle thee, a rush will be a beam
To hang thee on; or wouldst thou drown thyself,
Put but a little water in a spoon,
And it shall be as all the ocean,
Enough to stifle such a villain up.”
With time, so many things change in Shakespeare’s works, and so does his language. This type of music will never be heard again.
In his later masterpieces, the language springs more naturally from the needs of the characters; it is closer to real speech, more varied and dramatic, less regular in construction, sometimes twisted, like in these sarcastic lines to Polonius in Hamlet, (II,ii)
Hamlet: “ […….] old men have gray beards, […] their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and […] they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams — all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.”
Or more concentrated and rapid, like in these short, dry abuses to Apemantus in Timon of Athens (IV,iii)
“Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon! “. ” I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands”. “Away thou issue of a mangy dog. Choler does kill me that you are alive.” . “Were I like thee, I would throw away myself”
Or allusive and elliptical with the reader challenged to complete the sense, as in Macbeth (II,ii)
“Who then shall blame
His pestered senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?”
Or emotionally charged, like Kent’s copious catalogue of blunt invectives towards Oswald in King Lear (II,ii); an uninterrupted, single-sentence rant working fast towards a climax. The mother of all insults.
“Thou art a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.”
And, finally, my favourite Shakespearean insult: still in King Lear -on top of all the other names- Kent also calls Oswald a “cullionly barber-monger” (a vain rogue who spends a disproportionate amount of time in front of a mirror).
Concise, original and robust.
