Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare's Plays

Frances A Shirley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136565243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1979. How do the elements of swearing and perjury work in Shakespeare's plays? What effect did Shakespeare intend when he wrote them? How did they contribute to the delineation of character? These questions are investigated by combining a history of ideas approach with close textual analysis. The book begins by bringing together material from a wide range of contemporary sources in order to create a sense of popular awareness of oaths in Queen Elizabeth's time. Out of this emerges a scale of the relative strength of various oaths, an awareness of the ways in which people regarded perjury, and an appreciation of the attempts to prohibit profanity. Shakespeare's work is then examined against this background.

Chapter 1

The Mouth-Filling Oath

Early in the third act of Henry IV, Part One, Hotspur launches into one of the tirades so typical of him. Moments before, he has taken exception to the rebel partitioning of England and gone farther than necessary in ridiculing the testy Glendower’s belief in prodigies. In answer, Glendower has produced unearthly music to accompany Lady Mortimer’s Welsh air. Now Hotspur insists on a matching song from his wife, who demurs: ‘not mine, in good sooth’. Apparently more annoyed by her choice of words than her refusal, he bursts out, gradually subsiding into the control of verse and finally returning to the real issue. His words not only tell us about him, but also lead into the two areas we must explore: class and strength.

Not yours, in good sooth? Heart! you swear like a comfit-maker’s wife. ‘Not you, in good sooth!’ and ‘as true as I live!’ and ‘as God shall mend me!’ and ‘as sure as day!’

And givest such sarcenet surety for thy oaths

As if thou never walk’st further than Finsbury.

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,

A good mouth-filling oath, and leave ‘in sooth’

And such protest of pepper gingerbread

To velvet guards and Sunday citizens.

Come, sing.¹

Hotspur, at this point in the play as frequent a swearer as Falstaff, should know what he is talking about. But why choose a comfit-maker’s wife for contrast to a lady? It is not merely that her husband’s trade has sweetened her words. The reference to Finsbury and ‘Sunday citizens’ in their velvet trimmings would have called to the Elizabethan minds a merchant middle class with stricter rules of behaviour than the gentry. They would have understood the use of oaths to define social distinctions, especially with Hotspur’s own ‘Heart!’ (‘By God’s heart’) thrown in for contrast. We may be amused that Hotspur’s rigidity extends to Kate’s vocabulary, but Shakespeare is telling us more. Hotspur wants in all ways to be at the top of the ladder, and cannot brook a wife who falls short of conventional standards of profanity although, ironically, his own language will become milder later in the play.

I am not, I think, reading too much into the lines. Similar understanding is expected of the audience when Falstaff characterises Master Dombledon, a tailor who has refused him credit, as ‘A rascally yea-forsooth knave’, adding with a rather mild oath of his own, ‘I looked ‘a should have sent me two-and-twenty yards of satin, as I am a true knight, and he sends me security’ (Henry IV, Part Two, I, ii, 34–5, 41–3). Malvolio, dubbed a Puritan by Sir Toby’s faction in Twelfth Night, may call his hand to witness, but he also uses ‘I protest’, a phrase synonymous with T swear’ but as mild as ‘yea-forsooth’ (I, v, 82; II, iii, 113–14). Finally, characters in The Comedy of Errors could have been given pagan oaths – no concern of the censor when it was printed and not subject to cutting. But Shakespeare makes these merchants and a merchant’s sons shy away from the ‘by Jove’ we might expect. Frantic with puzzlement, characters may beat their servants, draw their swords or call officers, but only in the last-act recapitulation, when Antipholus of Ephesus says Angelo had sworn, does the Second Merchant go so far as to declare, unprofanely, ‘I will be sworn these ears of mine/ Heard you confess you had the chain of him/After you first forswore it on the mart’ (V, i, 260–2).

Although presumably not so delicate as ‘fine Mistris Simula’, a hypocritical Puritan who would ‘faint if she an oath but hear’,² they tend to be careful of their language, and certainly do not underline minor statements in the manner of Falstaff or Hotspur. Even at the end, where the Duke might call upon them to swear to their statements as he conducts his inquiry, there are not the oaths that gentry employ in the denouements of some of the later works, including Cymbeline. Of course, Shakespeare is not totally consistent in this sort of characterisation by omission; and, if we look beyond his works, we will find numerous exceptions. But there is copious support for a generalisation that more swearing was done at the ends of the social scale than in the middle. Randle Cotgrave, while mixing his languages, sticks mainly to the upper ranks of society in making a comparison: ‘Il iure comme un Gentilhomme. He swears after a thousand pound a yeare. Il jure comme un Abbé, chartier; gentilhomme; prelate. Like a Tinker, say we.’³ There seems to be a surprising concentration on religious figures, although there is not the bias that one finds in a Martin Mar-Prelate tract of the late 1580s. Mar-Prelate is, however, attacking what is perceived to be a habit of some churchmen in the ‘Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House’. One should not trouble the Bishop of London, lest that august person be interrupted at bowls and ‘sweare too bad’. And Bishop John is asked ‘will you not sweare as commonly you do, like a lewd swag, and say, by my faith my masters, this geare goeth hard with us’.⁴ The more writing of the time that we sample, though, the more we will find swearing coming from Cotgrave’s gentlemen and tinkers, as well as from soldiers, rather than from priests and bishops.

Almost a century ago, Julian Sharman stated that ‘Swearing mostly owed its favour and its audacity to the presence of really cultivated men.’⁵ If we recall Ben Jonson’s gull Stephen, who wants badly to be thought a gentleman and strains to sound at ease as he mouths great oaths, or the Clown in The Winter’s Tale adopting his mark of class along with his new clothes, we see how even the social climbers would have agreed with Sharman. But there is an overgeneralisation here, for neither Bobadil, who is coaching Stephen, nor Cob the Water-Carrier is ‘really cultivated’, and yet there is apparent inventiveness being shown as well as satirised.⁶ They have picked up and embroidered phrases, as did the ‘Smithfield Ruffian’ attacked by Roger Ascham when he deplored the many bad influences young people were subject to.⁷ And they are at one with the people of Samuel Rid’s City of Vanity, who are all engaged in inventing fashions, words and oaths.⁸

Much of the inventiveness or ‘audacity’ is part of oral tradition and has been lost, while evanescent secondary meanings or connotations in use by a particular social group are also often preserved only by chance. Renaissance Englishmen were more apt to spend their time compiling dictionaries of hard words or recording the sayings of their queen than setting down the language of the streets with definitions to aid succeeding generations. Thomas Harman, fortunately, kept a list of cant terms, including a few oaths, when he made his observations of the underworld in the 1560s. Rid enlarged Harman’s work, and included one particularly interesting example: ‘Salomon’, which meant ‘mass’. He advises the bystander:

Now when many doe presse the poore rogues so earnestly to sweare by the Salomon, doe not blame them though they refuse it; for although you know not what it means, yet they very well know: Many men I have heard take this word Soloman to be the chiefe commander among the beggars; but to put them out of doubt, this is not he.⁹

Given the scarcity of such information, we are lucky that Shakespeare is not so prone as some of his contemporary dramatists to invent strange oaths or to indulge in those with obscure second meanings. He uses, instead, the phrases that appear time and again in the lists of others, and his swearers range through the social groups most commonly accused of offending. There are even many comments that could have come from the tract- or character-writers of the day, including Henry IV’s reference to the ‘ruffian that would swear, drink, dance’, or Jaques’ characterisation of the soldier as ‘full of strange oaths’ when he catalogues the seven ages of man.¹⁰

Ironically, it is the Puritans, with their moral grounds for disapproving of all but the oath taken before an official, who tell us most about casual swearing and explain the meanings of some of the abbreviated phrases that Shakespeare does use. It is further irony that, just as censorship of the Rock musical Hair in Boston and delay of its opening in London made many people more aware of sex and nudity on stage, so the puritanical fulminations must have made the audience of Shakespeare, Jonson or Greene much more conscious of the theatre’s use of oaths. The plays rarely give such illuminating glances into the thinking about profanity as do the tracts and sermons, and it is with them that we will begin. Although attitudes toward a specific phrase might change over the years, certain principles remain, and provide guidelines for determining what might be considered profane, what innocent, even what offended seemingly capricious censors and courts.

The moralists probably felt a bit on the defensive. Hosking notes, as he surveys the theatrical background of the time, that those who did not join in riotous amusement in 1600 were decried as ‘puritans’;¹¹ Bernard is speaking from experience in his allegorical guide to behaviour, The Isle of Man, when he comments that sin is too often glossed over and ‘Filthy Ribaldry’ called ‘Merriment’.¹² Despite tendencies of people to minimise their own sins and laugh at their critics, the complaints continued. There are frequent attacks on the mental attitudes that lead to casual swearing, warnings of the damnation that awaits offenders, and calls for the enactment of civil penalties for a spiritual crime in an effort to save the souls that are being lost daily. Although occasionally pagan precedent is recalled, such as Hesiod’s statement that swearing would lead to long-lasting punishment by the gods,¹³ predominant references are to the Bible. Alexander Nowell cites Exodus, 20, and Leviticus, 19, reminds his readers of the Lord’s Prayer’s specific ‘Hallowed be Thy name’, and points finally to a verse in Jacob, 5: ‘Swear not neither by heaven, neither by the earth, nor any other kind of oath.’¹⁴ Nowell’s target is ‘this great and horrible vice of vaine swearing’, and he asks strength to fight ‘so great a sinne. ... So common an evil’.¹⁵ Like many of his fellows he uses a wide range of illustrative rumours and facts, including tales of grim punishments in the far reaches of Scotland and a sweeping reminder that heathens do not swear lightly.

This last point is important to him, for he is particularly upset by the light and frequent utterances of those whose habitual oaths have lost all believability.¹⁶ His specific references are not to kings but to common men, counterparts of the sinners he hopes to reform, and his tales have sorry ends: ‘Arthur Miller a filthy talker of ribaldries, a common swearer and blasphemer of GODS name . . . in his sicknesse in the yeare of our Lord, 1573, refused all comfortable doctrine of faith in Christ.’¹⁷ One need not ask what happened to his soul! Despite the volume of Nowell’s work and an attitude that suggests opposition to everything from ‘by God’ to ‘by the mousefoot’, like many of his contemporaries he fails to list specific examples. These men could assume, of course, that their readers knew the offensive words and needed only to be told of underlying principles.

Some critics, like Thomas Adams, felt there were regional differences, and that innocent ‘rural wretches’ were happier than corrupt London dwellers because ‘they skill not what the studying of oaths means’.¹⁸ Far more are like Gervaise Babington, who in the midsixteenth century was bewailing the apparently general carelessness of English parents heard to ‘sweare fearfully without regarde, speake prophanely, not respecting the frailtie of the youth that heareth them’.¹⁹ Weaned on such language, succeeding generations developed a taste for it, and even the translator of the anonymous Spanish-French rodomontade, Al-man-sir, seems to have felt a need to cater for this appetite. Original phrases such as ‘I swore by Pluto’s Horns, by the beard of Mars, by Samsons Whiskers, and by Mahomets Alcoran’ are not enough, and he inserts bits like ‘By the stately gravity of my fore-fathers’.²⁰ Although the trans...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Mouth-Filling Oath
• 2 Oaths as Structure
• 3 Fashionable Swearing
• 4 Oaths of Air and of Honour
• 5 Oaths and Tragic Tension
• 6 In Response to Censorship
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index