Shakespeare's Insults by Vienne-Guerrin Nathalie

Author:Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie. [Vienne-Guerrin, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474252683
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames? […] ’Sblood, the rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies, fifteen i’the litter; and you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking: if the bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. […]

(3.5.4–13)

This passage tells the story of how Falstaff becomes an unwholesome humidity, showing how Mistress Ford’s insulting words are turned into an insult in action. Falstaff goes on harping on the abuse he has suffered when he then narrates his comic though traumatic experience to Ford/Master Brook. He tells him how they ‘Rammed [him] in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins, that, […], there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril’ (3.5.82–6) and then seems to gloss the expression ‘unwholesome humidity’ when he explains how he, ‘a man of continual dissolution and thaw’ was ‘crammed in the basket’, and carried ‘in the name of foul clothes to Datchet-lane’, ‘like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease’. ‘More than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish’, Falstaff is ‘thrown into the Thames’ (3.5.88–113), thus literally becoming ‘unwholesome humidity’.

(C) On pumpkin as a particularly ‘humid’, watery fruit, see Fitzpatrick (2011), 346–7.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.