1. hempen–homespun

What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here…

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.67

Clothes, they say, make the man—or unmake him, as the case may be.

In this scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck has just happened upon an impromptu play. He isn’t just calling the band of actors he’s run into rustic—hempen means “made of hemp,” and hemp was traditionally used to weave coarse cloth (like burlap) and ropes. These actors aren’t just unsophisticated, but painfully so.

In Shakespeare’s day, cloth wasn’t just a commercial product. It’s true that there were guilds of weavers who turned out different kinds of cloth for those who could afford to buy it, but cloth was also commonly made at home (and particularly by those without the means to buy cloth from the weaving guilds). The cloth made at home was usually simpler than the cloth made for the marketplace—a loom that was able to weave complicated patterns, for instance, was often larger and much more expensive than a simple frame loom used to make plain weave. But it didn’t stop and start just at the weaving. The raw materials used for the cloth were also produced in a parallel fashion to how the cloth was woven: those with money could buy nicer thread made with exotic and expensive materials (like silk) in the market, and those without could spin wool or flax at home.

Homespun referred to a type of plain weave cloth that was woven using thread spun at home, and because plain weave cloth is plain, the word homespun also came to refer to anything rustic, simple, or unsophisticated.

2. “By the Book“

You kiss by the book.

—Romeo and Juliet, 1.5.109

Ah, young love, when everything’s new and fresh. Except, that is, for Romeo’s kisses.

By the book is a phrase that has come to mean “conventionally” or “in accordance with tradition or rules,” but when Shakespeare used it here, it also had a much more literal meaning: “by rote.” Education, and particularly formal education, in the 16th and early 17th centuries involved a lot of memorization and recitation of key texts—books belonged to teachers, not to students. Because of this, the phrase by the book came to refer to things that were done as if memorized.

The later meaning was around when Shakespeare was writing. This makes Juliet’s comment even shadier: is she saying that Romeo has studied the arts of l’amour, or is she saying that his kisses aren’t anything special? It’s Shakespeare: it could well be both.

3. Branbury cheese

You Banbury cheese!

—The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.1.126

What is it about Banbury cheese that makes it so objectionable? It’s not what Banbury cheese is, so much as what it isn’t, which is plentiful.

Banbury cheese is a strong, yellow cheese that was made (appropriately) in the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. Banbury cheese was very thin—so much so that when eager eaters pared away the rind, there wasn’t much cheese to eat. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a minor character calls Abraham Slender a Banbury cheese in mockery of his name (and, one assumes, his slenderness).

4. “I Find the Ass in Compound with the Major Part of Your Syllables”

I can’t say your worships have delivered the matter well, when I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables.

—Coriolanus, 2.1.58-60

Education, as we mentioned before, was fairly structured in Shakespeare’s day. Students who progressed to university were taught more than the rudiments of reading and writing: they were given a classical liberal arts education, spending time reading Latin authors and studying math, rhetoric, and grammar.

Grammar in Elizabethan England wasn’t about when to use lay and when to use lie: it was a study of Latin, not English, grammar. As such, grammars focused on Latin words and constructions, including the Latin prefixes and suffixes.

And here’s where Shakespeare’s insult gets literary: a few grammars of the time focused on the suffixal -as, and there were a number of puns in Shakespeare’s plays and in other plays and satires of the time that punned on the similarity between the suffix -as and the ahem suffix-like ass. The collocation in compound was lifted straight from grammar books of the day, where an enterprising student would learn the rules that restricted when -as could be used in compound with another word, or as a suffix to a root word.

What about the syllables? At this point in time, words weren’t taught letter by letter, but syllable by syllable. This literary joke boils down to this: in nearly everything that the tribunes (“worships”) have said, this character finds proof that they are, through and through, ah… fools.

5. Lily-livered

Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lily-livere’d boy.

—Macbeth, 5.3.17-18

The thing about Shakespearean insults is that sometimes the insult isn’t clear to modern audiences. We might think there’s a double-entendre in prick your face (there isn’t) and completely miss the actual insult: lily-livered.

Lily-livered means “cowardly,” and it has its origins in medieval physiology. When Shakespeare was writing, the prevailing belief was that there were four bodily fluids, or humors, whose balance not only affected your health, but your character. For instance, a person who had too much blood was sanguine, or cheerful or courageous. A person with an overabundance of black bile was melancholy (or sad); a person with too much phlegm was phlegmatic (or unexcitable); a person with too much yellow bile was choleric (or aggressive and hot-tempered). As you can see, these humorous dispositions gave us English words to describe each of these temperaments.

It was also possible to have too little of one of these humors, and we have English words for that condition as well. Lily-livered is one of those. Medieval physicians believed yellow bile was produced in the liver, and the liver of a person whose body produced too little yellow bile would be pale (because it wasn’t full of bile). Since yellow bile is associated with a warlike, aggressive disposition, a person with a deficiency of it would be weak and cowardly. The whiteness of the lily pairs well with the supposed paleness of a bile-less liver, giving us lily-livered.

As for the first part? Macbeth is telling the frightened servant to pinch his cheeks to cover up his fear. A double–entendre in Shakespeare? Never!

6. Whoreson Zed

Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!

—King Lear, 2.2.65

Plenty of people assume that the alphabet as we know it today is the alphabet as it always has been: A to Z, 26 letters in all. But that isn’t the case. Letters have been added to and dropped from the Latin alphabet since before English was English.

Z, or zed as it is called in British English, is one such letter. The grandfather of our modern z was the Greek alphabet’s zeta, which is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. The Etruscans took and adapted the Greek alphabet, and in turn, the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet for their own use, but the alphabets weren’t a one-to-one match. The sound /k/ in Latin, for instance, was covered by three Etruscan consonants: kappa (which gave us k), koppa (which eventually gave us q), and gamma (which eventually gave us g). Phonetic changes in Latin also meant that some Etruscan letters were left out in the cold because there was no real use for them. That’s what happened to z: it was dropped from the Latin alphabet in the 4th century BC.

It goes without saying that we did eventually add it back into the Latin alphabet, but it’s one of the rarest letters in use, and in Shakespeare’s day, long before the American preference for -ize and -ization over -ise and -isation was common, z was even rarer than it is today.

This jab comes in the middle of an argument between the Earl of Kent and the servant Oswald, and is well-aimed: Kent is reminding Oswald that, as a servant, he is as unnecessary as the letter z.

7. I’ll tickle your catastrophe

You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!

—Henry IV, Part 2, 2.1.60

Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, the two Henry IVs (parts 1 and 2) are the most insult-laden, which means we’ve saved the best for last. It’s not just that each play includes numerous lines that are intended to be insulting, but those lines are chock-full of individual insults, like the one here.

Let’s unpack this particular line. The word scullion dates back to the 1400s, and first was used to refer to the lowest-ranked servant of a household—usually the one who did the grunt work in the kitchens. It wasn’t too long before people began to use scullion to refer to any person of low rank, and by Shakespeare’s day, it was a common epithet of abuse.

Rampallian is an insult with a shrouded past. It first showed up in English in the late 1500s to refer to a scoundrel or villain. It seemingly came from nowhere: we have nothing that gives us a definitive etymology, though we’ve made a few conjectures that might be heading in the right direction. Some etymologists believe this is possibly a blend of the earlier verb ramp, which means “to move or act threateningly,” and the now rare rascallion, which refers to a scoundrel or rascal. (This makes sense, since rascallion is derived from rascal).

Fustilarian is an alteration of the earlier (and much more colorful) word fustilugs, and both words refer to a ponderous, clumsy person, and especially a fat and slovenly woman. The earlier word is fustilugs, which is a blend of the word fusty, which refers to something dusty, musty, or old-fashioned, and the plural of lug, a word that refers to a big and clumsy person and is the same lug used to refer to the heavy nut that holds a wheel onto a car. Fustilarian is Shakespeare’s comic take on fustilugs, and is so rare that it is only entered in the historical Oxford English Dictionary, where Shakespeare appears to be the only one to have used it.

And while you may know what a catastrophe is, you are likely not familiar with the sense that Shakespeare is using here. You likely know the “disaster” meaning of catastrophe; there was another meaning that referred to a disastrous end point of something. Shakespeare built on this “disastrous end” meaning here, where catastrophe is used to refer to the posterior of a person.

source: merriam-webster.com

Can you match the Shakespeare plays and their Hungarian titles?

Key

1. d. 2. a. 3. g. 4. b. 5. f. 6. e. 7. c.

Bond, who published his first book, A Bear Called Paddington, in 1958, went on to write more than 200 books for children.

More than 35 million Paddington books have been sold around the world to date.

Bond’s latest Paddington novel, Paddington’s Finest Hour, was published in April 2017, with a second Hollywood film based on the books due out later this year.

Ann-Janine Murtagh, executive publisher at HarperCollins children’s books said: “I feel privileged to have been Michael Bond’s publisher – he was a true gentleman, a bon viveur, the most entertaining company and the most enchanting of writers.

He will be forever remembered for his creation of the iconic Paddington, with his duffle coat and wellington boots, which touched my own heart as a child and will live on in the hearts of future generations. My thoughts and love are with his wife, Sue and his children Karen and Anthony.”

Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins CEO, said: ‘Michael Bond was one of the great children’s writers and at HarperCollins we are immensely fortunate to have published him and to have known him.

“He was a wonderful man and leaves behind one of the great literary legacies of our time.”

Obituary: Michael Bond

Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear has become one of the classic characters in children’s literature.

A chance encounter with a toy bear in a London shop spawned a long line of books, a BBC TV series, a feature film and a lot of merchandise.

A prolific writer, he also created The Herbs, featuring Parsley the Lion, which became a successful TV series and the tale-telling guinea pig, Olga da Polga.

And for adults there was Monsieur Pamplemousse, the retired detective turned restaurant critic and his bloodhound, Pommes Frites.

Thomas Michael Bond was born on 13 January 1926 in Newbury and raised in nearby Reading. One of his earliest childhood memories was standing by the railway line to watch the Cornish Riviera Express thunder past on its way from Paddington to Penzance.

Bond’s father was the mild-mannered manager of the local post office and was the basis for the character of Paddington Bear, the unassuming ursine stowaway.

“My father was a very polite man and he always wore a hat,” Bond said. “We’d go on holiday to the Isle of Wight and he used to go in the sea with his trousers rolled up and keep his hat on in case he met someone he knew and would have something to raise. He would have been mortified if he hadn’t.”

His parents instilled in him a love of books and he later remembered never going to sleep without a bedtime story.

Bond’s happy childhood was interrupted when his parents sent him to a strict Catholic school where the Brothers kept discipline with heavy rubber straps.

Bond often suffered this brutal treatment, so much so that he left school at 14 and got a job as a clerk in a local solicitor’s office.

A year later he was working for the BBC which, impressed with his hobby of building amplifiers and other electrical gadgets, gave him a junior job at a transmitter facility in Reading.

His budding career nearly came to a premature end when four German bombs fell on the building where he was working. Despite the ground floor being blown out he escaped unharmed.

In 1943 he volunteered for the RAF, later transferring to the army. It was while he was stationed in Egypt that he submitted a short story to the magazine London Opinion, which paid him seven guineas for it.

At that point he decided he quite liked the idea of becoming a writer.

Bond returned to the BBC in 1947, working at Caversham Park which monitored foreign broadcasts. Three years later he became a BBC cameraman, working on programmes including Blue Peter, while continuing to write short stories.

On his way home from work on Christmas Eve in 1956, Bond spied a lonely teddy bear on the shelf in a shop window, and took it home as a stocking filler for his wife. He called it Paddington because they were living near Paddington Station at the time.

While musing over a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper, he wondered idly what it would be like if an unaccompanied bear turned up at a railway station looking for a home.

The seeds of the idea had taken root during the war when Bond saw newsreels of children being sent out from British cities to avoid German bombing. “I had memories of children being evacuated from London with a label around their necks and all their possessions in a suitcase, and this became part of Paddington as well,” he said.

“Paddington Bear was a refugee with a label – ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you’, and he had a little suitcase.”

A Bear Called Paddington appeared in 1958 with illustrations by Peggy Fortnum. Ivor Wood would later take over the drawings and he went on to develop the successful BBC TV series that first aired in 1976.

Wood came up with the idea of a three-dimensional puppet which moved, using stop motion techniques, against a two-dimensional drawn background. Bond wrote the scripts and the actor, Michael Hordern, narrated the stories.

During the 1960s, Bond turned out an average of one Paddington book a year but didn’t feel secure enough to become a full-time writer until 1965, when he quit his job with the BBC.

Later that decade came the first of the Parsley books, featuring a lion and his friends including Sage the Owl and Sir Basil and Lady Rosemary. These books too were successfully translated onto TV by Wood and his company, FilmFair, first as The Herbs in 1968 and then The Adventures of Parsley which aired in 1970.

While aimed at children, it became cult viewing for adults who appreciated the dry humour which probably escaped the target audience.

In 1971 Bond published the first of his Olga da Polga stories for children, featuring a guinea pig with a penchant for telling tall stories in the manner of Baron Munchausen.

Bond next turned to writing for adults with his Monsieur Pamplemousse books, the first of which appeared in 1983. The idea of a French detective who quit the police and became a restaurant critic came when Bond – a Francophile – was eating in a French restaurant.

Pamplemousse and his faithful bloodhound, Pommes Frites, travel the country, sampling menus and getting into a series of comic mystery adventures. The books are full of the wry humour that was Bond’s trademark.

But the popularity of his original creation never seemed to wane and Bond continued to write adventures for the little bear. As well as the books, a huge merchandising operation was built up and Paddington toys remained high on the wish list of new generations of children.

Designer Shirley Clarkson was one of the first licensees to produce the figure with his now famous hat, wellington boots and duffel coat. She made the very first Paddington Bear as a Christmas present for her young son, Jeremy (future presenter of the BBC’s Top Gear).

In 2014 StudioCanal released a feature film of Paddington, with the bear voiced by Ben Whishaw. Bond, who had a cameo role, called the film “absolutely delightful”.

Since 1958, more than 150 different Paddington titles have been published, and more than 35 million copies have been sold worldwide in more than 40 languages.

Bond was still writing in recent months, with Paddington’s Finest Hour published in April of this year. It is a volume of letters from the bear to his Aunt Lucy in Peru – the relative who originally despatched him to London more than half a century previously.

Michael Bond was once asked why the popularity of Paddington had endured for children in the age of computers and video games.

“Paddington is eternally optimistic and always comes back for more, no matter how many times his hopes are dashed,” he said.

“It’s simply the joy of a little bear who is an outsider getting into scrapes and mishaps – always with the best of intentions – and coming out on top every time.”

source: The Telegraph, BBC