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.

Born in Stratford-on-Avon

Acted in London

The Globe Theatre

Writing tragedies

And then some histories

Comedy

Poetry

Hamlet

Romeo and Juliet

The Tempest

Merchant of Venice

Othello

All’s Well that Ends Well

A Winter’s Tale

Hundreds of sonnets

Merry Wives of Windsor

King Lear, Julius Caesar

Comedy of Errors

Measure For Measure

Shakespeare

Had some “lost years”

What was he doing?

“Taming of the Shrew”-ing

Shakespeare

Died on his birthday

“To be or not to be”

Famous soliloquy.

Tragedy or comedy? Can you sort the plays mentioned in the song?

Key

All’s Well That Ends Well – Minden jó, ha vége jó

As You Like It – Ahogy tetszik

Comedy of Errors – Tévedések vígjátéka

Love’s Labour’s Lost – A lóvá tett lovagok

Measure for Measure – Szeget szeggel

Merchant of Venice – A velencei kalmár            

Merry Wives of Windsor – A windsori víg nők

Midsummer Night’s Dream – Szentivánéji álom

Much Ado about Nothing – Sok hűhó semmiért

Taming of the Shrew – A makrancos hölgy

Tempest – A vihar

Twelfth Night or What You Will– Vízkereszt, vagy amit akartok

Two Gentlemen of Verona – A két veronai nemes

Winter’s Tale – Téli rege

HISTORIES

Henry IV, Part I

Henry IV, Part II

Henry V

Henry VI, Part I

Henry VI, Part II

Henry VI, Part III

Henry VIII

King John – János király

Pericles – Periklész

Richard II

Richard III

TRAGEDIES

Antonyand Cleopatra – Antonius és Kleopátra

Coriolanus

Cymbeline

Hamlet

Julius Caesar

King Lear – Lear király

Macbeth

Othello

Romeo and Juliet – Rómeó és Júlia

Timon of Athens – Athéni Timon

Titus Andronicus

Troilus and Cressida

Interesting Facts

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.

His first published play was Henry VI, Part II.

He worked with a theatre group known as the Lord Chamberlains Men.

He wrote plays for the Globe Theatre 

The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s shortest play it is 1770 lines long.

Othello was one of the most popular of his plays throughout the 18th and 19th centuries

Famous poet John Keats kept a volume of Shakespeare near his desk in hopes that the playwright would spark his creativity.         

Shakespeare used the word dog or dogs over 200 times in his works.  

King Lear used to be banished from the English stage for making fun of the monarchy and King George III.

Love’s Labour’s Lost has the highest percentage of rhyming lines of all of his plays.   

There is no record of All’s Well that Ends Well ever being performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime.          

He never published any of his own plays, they were all published by his fellow actors.          

He has instances of suicide an unlucky thirteen times in his works.

He was rumoured to have created over 1,700 words for the English language.

He wrote his first play when he was 25 years old.

He performed in many of his own plays.

Many people didn’t like Macbeth in Shakespeare’s time, because they were afraid of witches. 

The motto of the Globe Theatre was Totus mundus agit histrionem. (All the world’s a stage).

Shakespeare’s first job was holding horses outside the theatres.          

Shakespeare’s original title for Romeo and Juliet is ” The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy  of Romeo and Juliet.”

Romeo and Juliet, alongside Hamlet, is probably Shakespeare’s most performed play and has also been adapted in many forms.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays are based on others’ earlier plays, histories, and poems. This was common practice at that time.

In Shakespeare’s time, theatres had no curtain and used little or no scenery. Playwrights described the setting within the text of the performance.

Shakespeare is the second most quoted writer in the English language – after the various writers of the Bible.

In Elizabethan Theatre:

Acting was not a highly paid or highly respected profession.  Actors were seen as troublemakers who promoted hard living and sin.

In the 16th century, actors travelled from town to town on a cart, looking for audiences to pay to watch them perform.  Playhouses were not constructed in London until 1576.                        

Because acting was not a respected profession, women were not allowed to act until after 1660.  Teenage boys who hadn’t gone through puberty would play the roles of women. 

Going to the theatre was not considered to be a fancy affair.  Plays were often crude (by modern standards). Theatres would compete with other entertainment such as bear baiting (which involved watching and betting on bears killing dogs). 

Poor people were famous for their love of plays.  They would pay one penny to stand in front of the stage in an area called the open yard.                                  

Going to a play was a lively event.  People would frequently talk, yell, and even throw things (rotten produce, etc.) during the play. If the audience liked or did not like the play or the actors, they would let everyone in the theatre know it. Rich people would even sit on stage and make comments to the audience during the play.

The most expensive seats in a theatre were the in the top row of the theatre, farthest from the audience.  The cheap seats were directly in front of the stage, although people in this area stood. Rich people would want to have the most segregated and exclusive seats in the theatre, away from the rowdy, poor people.

People expected to see a new play every day in theatres. This meant many actors and playwrights were employed to meet the demands of audiences.                                                           

Most plays were seen at two o’clock in the afternoon.  

Can you match the Hungarian and English titles of some of Shakespeare’s plays?

Key:

1. E.

2. N.

3. A.

4. H.

5. I.

6. B.

7. J.

8. K.

9. C.

10. D.

11. M.

12. F.

13. L.

14. G.