Shakespeare's Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture by Lafont Agnès;

Author:Lafont, Agnès;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

OPHELIA. (sings) By Gis, and by Saint Charity,

Alack, and fie for shame!

Young men will do’t if they come to’t,

By Cock, they are to blame. (Hamlet, 4.5.58–6)

‘Cock’ is here a perverted version of ‘God’, but since Ophelia explicitly talks about sexual intercourse, she sounds very rude. The association of ‘God’ and ‘penis’ led François-Victor Hugo to translate the line into French: ‘Par Priape! ils sont à blâmer!’18 The association between poultry and sex is made clear by the nurse in Romeo and Juliet: ‘[…] a bump as big as a young cock’rel’s stone’ (1.3.55). Malcolm Jones19 evokes one of Dürer’s woodcuts, ‘The Men’s Bath’20 (or ‘The Bath House’), which illustrates the three most common meanings of the word ‘cock’ (bird – penis – tap).21 Priapus was also sometimes represented with a crest on his head because of its erectile proprieties. A rooster’s crest is, along with the bauble, one of the Fool’s attributes, known as the ‘coxcomb’. The association between crest and penis is in fact used by Rabelais in the first chapter in Pantagruel, in which Priapus is also regularly summoned:

Some other puffs did swell in length by the member which they call the labourer of nature, in such sort that it grew marvellous long, fat, great, lusty, stirring, and crest-risen, in the antique fashion, so that they made use of it as of a girdle, winding it five or six times about their waist […]22

One of the problems, when it comes to analyzing Priapus, is to stabilize the myth. In this respect, it is very interesting to consider its use in Rabelais. Borrowing Bakhtin’s words, we could define Priapus as a bicorporal image which unites a positive and a negative pole. It is a grotesque body, monstrous and disproportionate, characterized by excrescences, outrageousness and incompleteness (opposed to what Bakhtin calls the body of ‘the new canon’ – whole, ready, not hyperbolic). Studying insults (like ‘vitz d’âne’,23 which reminds us of Bottom) he analyses the word ‘couillon’ which wavers between insult and praise – similarly, the obscene gesture can be both praise (the fairy glorifying Bottom’s manhood) and insult (the ‘fig’).

In the prologue of Book IV, Priapus is referred to as ‘the stiff god of the gardens’. But in chapter 38, Rabelais goes even further: this is not any garden, but Eden. Priapus is associated with the ‘andouille’ – a kind of sausage, translated ‘chitterling’ by Peter Antony Motteux in the sixteenth century – and, by association of ideas, with the serpent of Genesis:

The serpent that tempted Eve, too, was of the Chitterling kind, and yet it is recorded of him that he was more subtle than any beast of the field. Even so are Chitterlings. Nay, to this very hour they hold in some universities that this same tempter was the Chitterling called Ithyphallus, into which was transformed bawdy Priapus, arch-seducer of females in paradise, that is, a garden, in Greek.24

Priapus thus becomes a complex and provocative figure: Rabelais creates a network of images that are at once contradictory and complementary, evoking both ‘andouillette’ and Paradise Lost.

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