Two New Sources for Shakespeare's Bawdy French in Henry V

202 NOTES AND QUERIES covering the two reigns which Shakespeare adapted or possibly even ‘mined’. Certainly the dramatic division between prose and verse is most pronounced in Henry V. The coincident division of authors along the fault lines of verse and prose in that play was the finding of another analysis which used the technique of line-by-line authorship discrimination by cumulative sums and principal component analysis.5 This result was confirmed by employing the independent technique of intertextual distances used in French.6 There remains the caveat: is Marlowe the man? Trained on works by Shakespeare and Marlowe, the neural network can distinguish reliably only between given texts by Shakespeare and Marlowe, not Shakespeare and Peele, or Shakespeare and Greene. Of the two Peele plays, The Arraignment of Paris and David and Bethsabe, the SCMs are 0.51 and – 0.04 respectively. Of the three Greene plays, Alphonsus King of Aragon, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and James the Fourth, the SCMs are 0.84, 0.30 and 0.83 respectively. Clearly, for comparisons with authors who are neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare, the results of the particular neural network may be considered to be unstable. This caveat, however, is qualified by three considerations: first, the argument presented above indicates a non-Shakespearian element, irrespective of authorial identity, in contrast to an overwhelmingly evidenced Shakespeare canon; second, the evidence for Marlowe as the most likely candidate for the collaborate or incorporated non-Shakespeare textual material in question is made elsewhere;7 third, the configurations in Figures 1 and 2 are not arbitrary – Titus Andronicus and 2 and 3 Henry VI have been authoritatively 5 Thomas Merriam, Marlowe in Henry V: a Crisis in Shakespearian Identity? (Oxquarry, Oxford, 2002). 6 Thomas Merriam, ‘Intertextual Distances Between Shakespeare Plays, With Special Reference to Henry V (Verse)’, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, ix (2002), 261–73. 7 Merriam, Marlowe in Henry V. Possibly the most interesting feature of Henry V is Shakespeare’s parody in prose (and/or verse) of Tamburlaine and his author in the words of Pistol. June 2005 identified as candidates for Shakespearian part authorship.8 THOMAS MERRIAM Basingstoke doi:10.1093/notesj/gji223 ß The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] 8 William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford, 1987), 112–13, 113–15. TWO NEW SOURCES FOR SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY FRENCH IN HENRY V IN Act III scene iv of Henry V (1599), Princess Katherine receives a memorable language lesson almost entirely in French from an ‘old Gentlewoman’ called Alice on the English names for parts of the body, including la main (hand), les doigts (fingers), les ongles (nails), le bras (arm), le coude (elbow), le col (neck), and le menton (chin). The purpose of this catalogue is apparently to create a series of bawdy bilingual puns which notoriously ends with the double punchline of ‘Le Foot, & le Count’ (as it appears in F1, TLN 1368, III.iv.47) – i.e., ‘a vigorous vulgarism’ for copulation, as Eric Partridge puts it, and an equally popular vulgarism for the female genitalia.1 These puns are now frankly glossed in modern editions; but no editor has ever noted that this scene may have been suggested by an equally frank vocabulary list of ‘The Members Of A Mans Bodie’ in a contemporary French language-learning manual by Claudius Holyband called The French Littelton (1597). In a catalogue of over a hundred body parts listed in columns of English and French, we find the following items named in the space of two pages: the chinne ......... a mans yard le menton la verge 1 For a modern text, I use Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (Routledge: London and New York, 1995); Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy. (New York: Routledge, 1990 (1st printed 1947)), 87. NOTES AND QUERIES June 2005 the armes an arme the hand hands a finger fingers the knockles a naile nailes ......... the necke a necke of mutton the loines the buttocks the arse the arsehole ......... the foote les bras le bras la main les mains un doigt les doigts les nœuds des doigts un ungle les ungles le cou un collet de mouton les reins les fesses le cul le trou de cul le pied2 Of course, it is impossible to attribute direct influence, but it is remarkable that this list seems to suggests all of the bawdy humour of Katherine’s English lesson (it lacks an elbow), where a recitation of the higher parts quickly descends to the nether regions, much of it in the very order of that scene. Moreover, The French Littelton appeared in multiple editions between 1576 and 1597, and was printed by none other than Shakespeare’s fellow Stratfordian, Richard Field, who had preceded him to London, who had risen from apprentice to owner of Thomas Vautrollier’s printshop (acquiring in the process the largest list of French language manuals in the stationer’s register), and who had only a few years earlier printed Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). If there is any French language manual that Shakespeare would be likely to lay his hands on, The French Littelton is it. As early as the 1950s, J. W. Lever established that another popular French language manual that was also published by Richard Field, John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), 2 Clavdivs Holyband (pseudonym for Claude de Sainliens), The French Littelton: a most easy, perfect, and absolvte way to learne the French tongue . . . (Imprinted at London by Richard Field, dwelling in the Blacke-Friers, 1597), 87–8. 3 J. W. Lever, ‘Shakespeare’s French Fruits’, Shakespeare Survey, no. 6 (1953), 79–90. John Eliot, Ortho-epia Gallica. Eliots fruits for the French . . . (London: Printed by [Richard Field for] Iohn VVolfe, 1593). 203 was a probable source for some of the French dialogue in Act IV scene iv, where Pistol captures a French soldier during the battle of Agincourt.3 Three decades later, Joseph Porter observed a number of other probable sources in Eliot that Lever had overlooked.4 Both Lever and Porter, however, seem to have read through the English half of the facing-page, bilingual manual when searching for related material since a reading of the French side of the manual turns up other probable sources for Shakespeare’s French. The most notable of these is a dialogue called L’Hostelerie (The Inne), between a lodger and the daughter of the inn-keeper, which anticipates the comic climax of the dialogue between King Henry and Princess Katherine in Act V scene ii. In both dialogues, a male suitor asks for a kiss from a woman who explains that she is not permitted to kiss him. The key to the humour in Eliot’s dialogue is that the word that they use for ‘kiss’ – baiser – had already acquired in the sixteenth century the (vigorously) vulgar meaning that it still carries today.5 The dialogue reads: . . . en vous plaist il autre chose? Nenny pour le present. Dormez bien. Escoutez Gaudinette, baisez moy vne fois mamı́e, deuant que vous en allez. Plustost mourir, que baiser vn homme en son lict. Baisez moy, & ie vous rendray voz braceletz, que ie vous ostay l’autre iour en iouant auec vous. Ne me parlez plus, ie vous en prı́e de baiser n’y d’amour . . . ......... Ne me voulez pas baiser auant que partir? C’est pour vne autre fois: lon m’appelle asteure: [sic] Ie seray tancée. Ie ne peux baiser les hommes. . . . would you nothing else? Not now. Seep well. [sic] Harke Gaudinetta, kisse me once my sweet heart, before thou depart. I had rather die, then kisse a man in his bed. Kisse me, and I will giue you your bracelets againe, that I tooke from you the other day playing with you. Speake no more to me, I pray you of kissing nor of loue, but giue me my bracelets againe . . . ......... Will you not kisse me before you depart. 4 Joseph Porter, ‘More Echoes from Eliot’s OrthoGallica, In King Lear and Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, xxxvii, 4 (Winter 1986), 486–8. 5 See ‘baiser’ in Le nouveau Petit Robert (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993), 207. 204 NOTES AND QUERIES Another time. I am cald now. I shall be chidden. I cannot kisse men.6 Unless beginning students of French are warned against the casual use of baiser for ‘to kiss’ (and they quickly are, one way or another), the mistake is an easy one for someone learning the language to make. The point of the lesson here, which must be supplied by a teacher or inferred from elsewhere in the manual, is that both speakers ought to be using embrasser instead. Thus, with a mischievousness that is perfectly consistent with the rest of Eliot’s famously entertaining book (which includes dialogues on how to run from a cobbler once he has fixed your shoe, rob someone with a pistol and threaten couper la gorge, and boast like a braggart soldier), the fun of this dialogue clearly arises from the conspicuous repetition of the commonly understood vulgarism despite the chaste rendering on the facing English page. Shakespeare’s dialogue between Henry and Katherine functions in precisely the same way, where the sexual connotation of the word is humorously emphasized by repetition, but then deflected with an innocent translation. Shakespeare out-Eliots Eliot, however, by beginning the exchange with the proper idiom baiser la main (to kiss the hand) – almost as if to show that he knows how to use the word correctly – and then switches to a usage that suggests the colloquial undertone. Henry first says, ‘Upon that I kiss your hand’; to which Katherine replies in French that he must not lower his grandeur ‘en baisant la main’ (by kissing the hand) of such an unworthy servant (lines 248–54). Henry counters with, ‘Then I will kiss your lips, Kate’; to which she replies that it is not the custom for the ladies in France ‘etre baisées devant leur noces’ (‘to be ‘‘kissed’’ before their nuptuals’) (lines 255–7). The dialogue continues: KING Madame my interpreter, what says she? ALICE Dat it is not be de fashion pour les ladies of France – I cannot tell vat is baiser en Anglish. 6 Eliot, 120–3 (facing pages). June 2005 KING To kiss. ALICE Your majesty entend bettre que moi. (lines 258–62) Henry thus renders this baiser innocently, but Alice, as both bawd and interpreter, seems to admit that she understands the word in a different, less appropriate sense. In his 1995 Arden edition, which surpasses all previous editions (including Oxford) for the editing and annotation of Shakespeare’s French, T. W. Craik is the first editor in history to note that the bawdy sense of baiser pre-dates this play and may have been operative in this scene. I furthermore propose that the dialogue of ‘The Inne’ – which is sandwiched between the very dialogues in Eliot’s lively manual that have been identified by Lever and Porter to be Shakespeare’s sources – may have suggested the idea for the final witticism of baiser, even if it should have to be admitted (contrary to my belief) that Eliot himself may not have intended the bawdy pun in his own manual. TIMOTHY BILLINGS Middlebury College, Vermont doi:10.1093/notesj/gji224 ß The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] BANQUO: A FALSE FAUX AMI? BECAUSE the character behind Banquo in Hollinshed (Banquho) partakes in the battle against Duncan which places Macbeth on the throne, he is frequently thought of, by scholars, directors, and actors, as either a silent co-conspirator with Macbeth, and so a false friend to Duncan or perhaps even a false friend to Macbeth: the one noble who stays around after the king’s sons, MacDuff and others have fled does so in order to find his own moment and help the witches to the accomplishment of their second set of prophecies – that he should be ‘the root and father of many kings’ (III.i.5).1 1 The first position, which considers Banquo a silent co-conspirator, is taken by Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1919), 383–5, and seconded by Richard Jaarsma in ‘The Tragedy of Banquo’, Language and Psychology, xvii (1967), 87–94. The second position is also offered by Bradley (360, 386).