Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
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Quotations… as an English Literature teacher and English Literature graduate, there are so many quotations bouncing about in my head! And we are also in the midst of GCSE Exam season so I hope – please god I hope – that there are plenty in my students’ heads too!
And for me, you say quotation, I go to Shakespeare!
With a nod to those students, remember to use very very short quotations such as…
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
ripe
Lord Capulet exhorting Paris to wait for Juliet to become “ripe” before wedding and bedding her… the most appalling and uncomfortable metaphor for a father to use about his daughter, indicative of the patriarchal control of women in their most intimate experiences and the reality of what marriage meant in 1596.
That is one quotation that didn’t chime with me until I became a father to a daughter…
However, these one word quotations don’t really do to explore a theme or idea in themselves. They are super useful in essays, but this is not an essay!
Just for fun though, let’s have a look at some ripe Shakespearean insults!
Henry IV Part I
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 pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years
Thou leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, knot-pated, agatering, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue, Spanish pouch!
Falstaff was the butt of a great number of jokes and insults in Henry IV – one of my favourite plays! The physicality of these insults is extraordinary!
King Lear
Thou whoreson zed , thou unnecessary letter!
Another absolute favourite play… and who doesn’t love the nerdiness of this insult?
It is, however, pale in comparison to the following, which is from the same scene in which Kent berates Oswald, the servant of the Duke of Cornwall as
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable 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…
Much Ado About Nothing
You have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm, and cloudiness.
This is a wonderful quotation! It is Don Pedro and Claudio mocking Benedick on the day of his wedding to Beatrice.
There is a wealth of insults in the play – my favourite comedy – (almost) all of them with the same lightness and humour. So many jokes at the expense of women and their infidelities, the cuckold imagery of men hiding their horns which is somehow never offensive, perhaps because Benedick owns that it is all a mask: “Do you question me,” he asks Claudio, “as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgment; or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?” His “tyranny” against women is no more than an act and not a “true judgement”.
As You Like It
I must tell you friendly in your ear, sell when you can, you are not for all markets.
There is something Wildean about this exhortation from Rosalind, disguised as the male Ganymede, to Phoebe to accept Silvius’ affections… Many of Shakespeare’s Sonnets give the same advice, to seize the chance for love and affection – and reproducion – whilst you are still young enough to attract it!
The fact that Rosalind has just made a rather sensual summary of all Phoebe’s many rustic charms – “Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair, Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream That can entame my spirits to your worship” – does seem to give the lie to the insult! I have seen a production of As You Like It that treats Phoebe very tenderly and gave her a moment of longing regret, staring after the retreating figure of Rosalind
in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.
This is also from As You Like It, but this time courtesy of the melancholy Jacques.
Richard III
Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes.
Shakespeare was rather fond of the image of infection, contagion, of the stain that spreads to others… and no good writer should be afraid of reusing familiar material!
Timon of Athens
I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands.
I recall Leonates saying to Hero in Much Ado About Nothing that she has “fall’n / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again”, soiling both herself and those who come into contact with her. For a man living under constant threat of the plague – and a man making his living by writing, presumably by hand with quill and ink, personally – these ideas seem very apt and pertinent. I love to imagine that as he was writing Much Ado…, Shakespeare did spill ink on himself and left ink stains all about his home!
Hamlet
We love to believe that Shakespeare was a man of our times, don’t we, seeking out evidence of liberal attitudes, of feminist leanings, of inclusivity… but he was also a man of his times. When Hamlet says to Ophelia
If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them
it is so tempting to pass it off as Hamlet’s madness – or his act of madness – or as a desperate and vicious ploy to remove Ophelia from the toxicity of Elsinore. But there is something bitter and grief-struck – and ,yes, vicious – in these words. Unlike Benedick’s playful banter in Much Ado… – which echoes a lot of the same imagery of cuckoldry, and its inherent suspicion of women and female sexual mores – Hamlet seems much more intense.
The Tempest
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”
Okay… this one is a bit of a stretch… It’s not really an insult, more a statement of shock and horror at the violence of the storm Ariel has conjured up for Prospero. But it does drip with irony: the true devils are not the phantoms created by Ariel but actually Alonso and Antonio and Sebastian who usurped Prospero’s Dukedom from him and attempt fratricide… albeit these are facts that the innocent Ferdinand does not yet know.
Upcoming Themes
May 21: Authors I’d Love a New Book From (These could be authors that have passed away, who have retired from writing, who have inexplicably gone quiet, or who might jut not be able to keep up with how quickly you read their books!)
May 28: Books I Was Super Excited to Get My Hands on but Still Haven’t Read
June 4: Books I Had VERY Strong Emotions About (Any emotion! Did a book make you super happy or sad? Angry? Terrified? Surprised?)
June 11: Bookish Wishes (List the top 10 books you’d love to own and include a link to your wishlist so that people can grant your wishes. Make sure you link your wishlist to your mailing address or include the email address associated with your e-reader in the list description so people know how to get the book to you. After you post, jump around the Linky and grant a wish or two if you’d like. Please don’t feel obligated to send anything to anyone!)
June 18: Books on My Summer 2024 To-Read List
June 25: Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2024
