Mini Episode: The Art of the Shakespearean Insult

Patreon Bonus: The Art of the Shakespearean Insult

The following episode contains adult language and themes. Listener discretion is advised.

Thanks to my brilliant Patreons, we hit our first goal! As promised, here is a mini episode on how to insult people Shakespeare style.

The bard was a wizard at the art of the insult.  As a general rule, his insults fell into some basic categories.  

The first is probably the most wide-spread throughout his works, and that is the act of simple name-calling.  Some were pretty basic, such as when Luciana in The Comedy of Errors snaps at Dromio with “thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot!” Calling someone an animal, such as a snail or slug, is particularly insulting, for the Elizabethans, as a general rule, believed in the Great Chain of Being, where all of creation held a certain rank, such as plants being lowlier than the creatures that slid on the ground, and humans being superior to four-legged mammals. This ranking system permeated the literature of the day, and held a certain weight to it, which is one of many reasons being compared to some animal was particularly insulting.  

Pistol, for instance, does this when he addresses Nym in Henry V calling him an “Iceland dog! thou prick-ear’d cur of Iceland!” These animal insults could be combined with other terms that also refer to rank, such as calling someone higher up in the social pecking order a rank that was lower.  Additionally, name-calling could involve insulting another’s family. We see this when Petrucio calls Grumio “You peasant swain! you whoreson malt-horse drudge!” in the Taming of the Shrew.

Name-calling in Shakespeare’s works hit it’s apex in King Lear, when Kent blasts Oswalt with this breath-taking stream of names. Oswalt asks Kent simply, “What doest thou know me for?” to which Kent answers:

“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, 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, pander, 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.”

There are so many examples of name-calling in Shakespeare’s work that I could honestly do a whole podcast on just that, but rather, I’m going to move on to the back-handed compliment.  I confess that my favorite play of Shakespeare’s is probably Much Ado About Nothing simply because of the snappy quips between Benedick and Beatrice. At one point in the play, Benedick pays Beatrice a kind of back-handed compliment when talking about her with Claudio. The two guys are watching Hero and Beatrice chat together, and Claudio asks Benedick if he thought Hero was pretty, to which Benedick responds, “I can see yet without spectacles and I see no such matter: there’s her cousin and she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December.” She is “possessed with a fury” and yet she is the most beautiful girl in the room.  Likewise, Parolles is another figure in Shakespeare who is quick-witted with the backhanded compliment, for he tells Helena “If I can remember thee, I will think of thee at court” in All’s Well That End’s Well. Nice.

Of course, Shakespeare perfects the backhanded compliment in Sonnet 130, in which he tells us how his beloved is not a conventional beauty.  This particular sonnet is making fun of the Italian sonnet tradition that painted women as caucasian angelic beauties, such as how Petrarch talks about Laura’s perfect golden hair and fair skin.  Shakespeare, however, purposefully throws this tradition on its head, but even after such a string of insults, he ends it with a couplet that makes this sonnet quite the compliment. He tells us this about his love:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,

Coral is far more red, than her lips red,

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight,

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

However, despite all of these less than perfect qualities, he tells us:

 And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,

 As any she belied with false compare.

She is still his beloved, and he elevates her as being one of a kind, to the point that even trying to compare her to the classically beautiful Laura in Petrarch’s Canzoniere is a fool’s errand; he loves her in spite of having “reeking breath” and “treading on the ground” rather than angelically gliding along. In a way, this demonstrates a stronger love than Petrarch, for Shakespeare’s love is grounded in reality whereas Petrarch’s love seems to be grounded in an impossible ideal.

Back-handed compliments aside, Shakespeare isn’t above the “kill yo’self” insult.  In Henry IV Part I, Falstaff tells Prince Hal to “Go, hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters!”  Gratiano, in The Merchant of Venice, tells the wicked Shylock, “Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself.”  Another example can be found in Part III of Henry VI when Margaret basically tells King Henry to “make thy sepulchre And creep into it far before thy time.”

The crowning glory of the Shakespeare put-down is, of course, the bawdy insult.  He wasn’t above the “your mama” joke, such as when Chiron tells Aaron in Titus Andronicus, “Thou hast undone our mother” to which Aaron quips back, “Villain, I have done thy mother.”  Of course, everyone loves a good whore insult, such as when Timon of Athens tells Timandra “Be a whore still; they love thee not that use thee. Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust.” Iago also insults Desdemona along these lines in Othello when he tells her, “You rise to play, and go to bed to work.”  In as you like it, Touchstone the fool has an exchange with Audrey that plays upon this theme:

  AUDREY. Well, I am not fair; and therefore I pray the gods make me

   honest.

 TOUCHSTONE. Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut were

   to put good meat into an unclean dish.

 AUDREY. I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul.

 TOUCHSTONE. Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness;

   sluttishness may come hereafter.

The best part about Shakespeare is how he is constantly pushing the boundaries of real and fantasy, for even death can’t stop a good insult!  For instance, the ghost of Hamlet’s dad can’t help but take a dig at his wife the queen and brother. In a diatribe about how terrible it was to be betrayed by the queen as she cheated on him with his brother, the ghost says simply, “So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.”  He just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take one last dig at the betraying couple.

And finally, it wouldn’t be Shakespeare without the “you so ugly” genre of insults.  Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing says my favorite ugly joke of all time when she tells Benedick, “Scratching could not make it worse, and ’twere such a face as yours were.”  Of course, we can’t forget how Domeo of Syracuse makes fun of the oily Nell, the kitchen maid, when he tells Antipholus of Syracuse in the Comedy of Errors,

 Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench,

 and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to but

 to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light.

 I warrant, her rags and the tallow in them will burn

 Poland winter. If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn

 week longer than the whole world.

Bardolph and Falstaff also lay down some great insults in Henry IV Part II. Bardolph tells Falstaff, “Why, you are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all compass, —out of all reasonable compass, Sir John.”  To which Falstaff quips back, “Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life” while additionally telling him, “I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.” And finally, Ajax tells Thersites in Troilus and Cressida that he is so ugly he “will beat thee into handsomeness.”  Now that’s ugly!

Want to tell me your favorite Shakespearean insult?  Send it to me on Twitter @literature_lady. This episode was only made possible by the generous members of the Court of Badassery.  Want to join us at court? Check out my Patreon page at www.patreon.com/literaturelady.  

Stay tuned for some more Shakespeare insults as I blast my generous patrons at court, for really, let’s face it, they are “a sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, a scum of Bretons and base lackey peasants, whom their o’er-cloyed country vomits forth.”

Alan, I bite my thumb at you, sir! [You] King Urinal.
Alice, Thou art a boil, a plague sore, or embossed carbuncle, in my corrupted blood!
Amber, You rogue!  I’ll make a sop o’ th’ moonshine of you. You woreson cullionly barber-monger!
Antonia, [you] pernicious blood-sucker of sleeping men!
Eleanor, your breath stinks with eating toasted cheese!
Erin, where wilt though find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage?
Heather, [you] unlettered small-knowing soul!
Hunter, thou disputes like an infant: go, whip thy gig!
Anonymous Patron, Thou art not noble; For all th’accommodations that thou bear’st are nurs’d by baseness!
Jacqueline, wilt thou show the whole wealth of thy wit in an instant?
Joanne, I think the devil will not have [you] damned, lest the oil that’s in [you] should set hell on fire.
Julie Beth, [you] are duller than a great thaw [...and…] merely a dumb-show.
Kimberly, [you are] an index and prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts!
Kristen, I would thou didst itch from head to food; and I had the scratching of thee, I would make thee the loathesomest scab in Greece!
Laurie, I had rather be a tick in a sheep than such a valiant ignorance [as you]!
Mary, [You are] a coward, a most devout coward, [for you are] religious in it!
Megan, A thousand knees Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, upon a barren mountain, and still winter in storm perpetual, could not move the gods to look that way thou wert.
Morgan, [you] shall stand in fire up to the navel and in ice up to th’ heart, and there th’ offending part burns and the deceiving part freezes!
Rebecca, you are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face!
Sandy, [you are] one that converses more with the buttock of the of the night than with the forehead of the morning.
Tamara, you are not worth another word, else I’d call you knave!
Tracy, [you] live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty!
Zara, [you have an] undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion!

Want more insults? Check out the book Shakespeare’s Insults: Educating Your Wit by Wayne F. Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen as well as the Shakespeare Insult Playing Cards found at www.prosperoart.com, both of which were used for this podcast. (A former student gave me this deck of cards and I use it all the time! Thank you, Brianna!)

This is the Literature Lady, Dr. Janet Bartholomew, signing off, reminding all listeners to “live loath’ed, and long, most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears, you fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies, cap-and-knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks!”  Fare thee well!

Oh, hey, I almost forgot to thank Kyster for their recording at the Bork viking fair of the medieval music.  This comes all the way from Denmark. Thank you, my friend, for “you are a rare parrot teacher;” however, “a bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours” so feel free to “eat my leek!”