Bawdy in Romeo and Juliet: The Verdict in Brief
Bawdy double meanings are the second language of Romeo and Juliet, a complete system of words that mean twice running beneath the famous language of idealized love. The verdict of this article is stated at the outset because everything that follows defends it: the bawdy is not decoration, not comic relief pasted onto a tragedy, and not an embarrassment that polite editing should remove. The bawdy is the play’s body talking. Where the love poetry speaks of souls, shrines, saints, and pilgrims, the double meanings speak of flesh, appetite, ripeness, and use, and the play needs both registers because its whole argument is that the soul’s language and the body’s language describe the same event. Cut the bawdy, as expurgated editions have cut it for two centuries, and the love poetry floats free of the ground it stands on. Restore the bawdy, gloss it plainly, and the tragedy sharpens: a city that can only speak of desire as conquest, jest, or merchandise has left its two most honest speakers no clean words to love with.
A word about method, since the subject attracts two kinds of bad treatment in roughly equal measure. The treatment here is clinical in the strict sense: second senses are named in plain anatomical and historical language, neither euphemized into coyness nor dwelt on for sensation, and every instance admitted to the argument is required to show its evidence, a period attestation and a cue in the scene. The clinical standard is not prudishness in a lab coat. It is the recognition that the material is evidence about how a culture spoke of the body, and evidence is handled best at room temperature. Readers who have met the subject mainly through the snigger or the scissors, the edition that leers in its notes or the edition that deletes in its text, are asked to notice how much more interesting the material becomes when it is handled as what it is: the working vocabulary of a great play’s second language, as susceptible of exact description as its sonnets and as deserving of it.
The system has rules, and the rules are the subject here. A bawdy double meaning is a construction with an innocent surface that any hearer may accept and a second sense that a knowing hearer cannot miss. The device is distributed by licence: servants speak it as class dialect, the Nurse speaks it as the privilege of age and office, Mercutio speaks it as a philosophy, and the lovers, who are forbidden the low register entirely, smuggle double meanings into the highest style the play possesses, where “satisfaction,” “maidenhead,” and “die” carry charges that the pilgrims and saints cannot discharge. Each kind of speaker bends the device to a different use, and the differences are the meaning. What follows defines the device, walks the opening scene where the play tunes it, maps the licences that govern it, examines its two virtuosi and its secret sharers among the lovers, catalogues its principal instances in the InsightCrunch bawdy gloss, and then faces the two hard questions the material raises: how any of it can be glossed responsibly when the second senses have gone archaic, and what was lost when the expurgators cut it. The critics who matter here disagreed about what the bawdy is for, and the disagreement is adjudicated, not merely reported, before the verdict closes.
The stakes are not antiquarian. The popular image of this play, the chaste monument of young love that schoolrooms inherit and wedding readings excerpt, was formed on texts from which the second language had been removed, and the image survives partly because the removal is invisible: a cut line leaves no scar on the page for a reader who never saw the line. Restoring the bawdy changes the temperature of everything restored alongside it. The pilgrim sonnet at the feast is a prettier thing in a play whose street talks of maidenheads as trophies, because the sonnet’s liturgy is then legible as a refusal, two speakers declining the available vocabulary in favour of one they must invent courtesies to sustain. The balcony vows gain their voltage from the same contrast. A reader who cannot hear the low register cannot measure what the high register costs, and cost is the play’s whole subject: what these two spend, of safety, obedience, and life, to say love in a city that prices it as merchandise and jokes of it as meat. The bawdy is the price list. An account of the play that omits it has omitted the economy in which the famous speeches are currency.
One boundary is observed throughout. The companion subjects of sexual discourse as a whole theme, of the pun as a formal device, and of the collision between sacred and profane registers each belong to their own studies in this series, and each is compressed here to the single point where it touches the double meaning itself. The territory held is narrow and deep: the word that means twice, the speaker licensed to fire it, and the editor who must decide whether to explain it.
The Device Itself: Innuendo, Double Entendre, and the Second Sense
A double entendre is a phrase built to be taken two ways at once, one way innocent and one way sexual, with the construction so arranged that the innocent way remains available to any hearer who needs it. The term is French in form and later than the play, but the device is exactly the one the play’s first scene demonstrates within thirty lines. Innuendo is the wider category: any utterance whose real meaning travels underneath its stated meaning, relying on tone, context, and shared knowledge to deliver the cargo. Every double entendre is an innuendo, but not every innuendo is a double entendre, because innuendo can work by implication alone, with no single word carrying two dictionary senses. The bawdy of this play works by both routes, and the distinction matters for glossing: a double entendre can be pinned to a word and proved against period usage, while a pure innuendo lives in the situation and can only be argued from the scene.
A neighbouring device must be distinguished before the evidence is weighed, because the play uses both and the difference is diagnostic. Equivocation constructs a statement that is true under one interpretation and false, or misleading, under another, and its doubleness lives in the proposition rather than in any single word’s senses: the speaker has said nothing that cannot be defended, while the hearer has understood something the speaker did not commit to. The double entendre, by contrast, loads the doubleness into vocabulary, into words that carry two dictionary lives at once. The servants and Mercutio work almost entirely by double entendre, the Nurse by a mixture, and Juliet, when the play traps her, by equivocation raised to an art. The distinction matters for proof. A double entendre can be verified against the period’s glossaries; an equivocation can only be verified against the scene, by showing that both hearings were available and that the speaker needed both. The catalogue that follows confines itself to the lexical device, where the evidence is hardest, and treats the heroine’s equivocations in the prose where their context can be laid out.
The mechanics repay precision. A successful double meaning requires three components. First, a surface that parses cleanly: the sentence must make complete sense read innocently, or the device becomes mere obscenity and loses its protection. Second, a second sense that is genuinely present in the language of the period, attested in other texts and not invented by an ingenious editor. Third, a cue: something in the speaker, the situation, or the verbal pattern that tells the knowing hearer to listen twice. The cue may be a wink built into the dialogue itself, as when Gregory answers a boast about maidenheads with a line about the sense in which the maids must take it, and the exchange teaches the audience the listening method the whole play will require. When all three components are present, the double meaning is not a suspicion but a fact of the text, as checkable as a rhyme.
Why must a bawdy line be able to pass as innocent?
A bawdy line must be able to pass as innocent because deniability is the device’s working condition, not its decoration: the innocent surface lets the line survive in mixed company, lets the speaker retreat if challenged, and lets the audience divide into those who heard one meaning and those who heard two, which division is part of the play’s map.
The division of the audience is the deepest part of the mechanism. A soliloquy informs everyone equally; a double meaning sorts its hearers. Onstage, the same sorting happens among the characters: the Nurse’s husband jokes over the toddler Juliet in front of Lady Capulet, who hears a servant’s garrulity where the audience hears a prophecy of the wedding night. In the theatre, the hearer who catches the second sense is made complicit, recruited into the knowing party, and the play exploits that recruitment relentlessly. Mercutio’s speeches make the audience his confederates against Romeo’s idealism before the argument has even been stated. The device is therefore never merely verbal. It distributes knowledge unevenly through the theatre, and uneven knowledge is the play’s tragic engine everywhere else as well: letters unread, identities unknown, a wife reported dead who sleeps. The bawdy trains the audience in the play’s central experience, hearing more than the characters hear.
Eric Partridge, whose glossary Shakespeare’s Bawdy of 1947 first mapped this territory systematically, treated the second senses as facts of the language recoverable by evidence, and his work established the premise on which all later glossing stands: that the bawdy is extensive, deliberate, and central enough that an edition which hides it has misrepresented the author. Partridge’s lists can be quarrelled with item by item, and later lexicographers have pruned them, but the premise has held. The question for responsible glossing is never whether the play contains a system of sexual double meaning. The question is which proposed instances pass the three tests of surface, attestation, and cue, and that question is taken up in full after the catalogue.
The play’s official voice, by contrast, is single-sensed from its first syllable, and the contrast is a control experiment built into the structure. The Chorus speaks the Prologues in sonnets of perfect regularity, households and dignity and star-crossed lovers, and not one word in either sonnet opens downward into the body. The state’s herald and the law’s spokesman share the exemption: the Prince’s edicts and sentences are the most sonorous single-sensed verse in the play, because a command that could be taken two ways has already failed as a command. Doubleness, in Verona’s verbal constitution, is the property of the unofficial city, the street, the kitchen, the orchard wall at midnight, and the play’s framing voices stand outside it like a border. The border is what makes the lovers’ achievement measurable. They begin inside the official forms, the sonnet and the vow, and smuggle the unofficial city’s doubleness across the border into them, and the smuggling is the sound of two private people inventing, inside a public language that offers them only the market and the liturgy, a third thing that is theirs.
The device has two physical varieties, and the difference between them governs how each behaves in a theatre. The first variety works through the sense range of a word: “stand,” “tool,” “cover,” and “flesh” each hold a respectable meaning and a bodily one in stable suspension, and the double effect dawns as the hearer registers the second dictionary entry standing behind the first. The second variety works through sound: words that converge in pronunciation while diverging in spelling and sense, hare and hoar and whore, fire instantly in the ear and vanish, leaving nothing on the page for a silent reader to inspect. Performance treats the varieties differently. The sense jokes reward the reflective hearer and survive translation into a footnote; the sound jokes are events, gone in the instant of their firing, which is why Mercutio, the play’s fastest mind, specialises in them and why editions, which are built for the eye, systematically underreport his register. A complete account of the bawdy has to keep both channels open, the lexicon and the ear, because the play’s speakers divide between them by temperament: the Nurse trades in senses her whole life has taught her, while Mercutio trades in sounds his wit can strike like sparks.
Act 1 Scene 1: The Servants Set the Play’s Double Key
The play opens with two servants of the Capulet house trading boasts in prose, and within the first forty lines the double meaning has been defined, demonstrated, and aimed. Sampson and Gregory are not principals, and their scene is sometimes treated as a warm-up, a street brawl’s comic porch. Read for its language, the porch is a manifesto. Before any lover speaks, before the Prologue’s sonnet has finished echoing, the play establishes that in Verona every word about women is also a word about weapons, and every word about weapons is also a word about the body. The fusion is the feud’s native grammar: desire and violence share a vocabulary because the city has never developed separate ones. The full anatomy of the pair and their brawl belongs to the study of Sampson and Gregory, the servants who start the play and its quarrel; the concern here is the narrower one of how their lines teach the audience to hear everything twice.
Sampson begins with the wall. Gregory warns that the quarrel is between the masters and the men, and Sampson answers with the street code: “‘Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant. When I have fought with the men, I will be civil with the maids. I will cut off their heads” (1.1.15-17). Gregory’s reply springs the trap the whole scene is built around: “The heads of the maids?” Sampson: “Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt” (1.1.24-26). The word “maidenhead” carries its plain anatomical sense and its sense as the condition of virginity, and Sampson’s gloss on his own joke is the play’s first lesson in method: the sense is the hearer’s to take. Gregory caps it with the mechanism’s own description: “They must take it in that sense that feel it” (1.1.27). Feeling is the test of the second sense. Those who feel the blow take the meaning that wounds. In four lines the servants have stated the theory of the double entendre more economically than any critic has managed since: the meaning is double, the choice is the hearer’s, and the proof is in the body.
The boasts that follow keep both barrels loaded. Sampson promises that Montague’s men shall feel him “while I am able to stand,” and adds “‘tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh” (1.1.28-29). “Stand” carries its period sense of erection as plainly as its sense of holding ground, and the sentence is nonsense as military boasting without the second sense: an ability to stand in a fight is proved by fighting, not announced as a known reputation. “Piece of flesh” demotes the boaster to meat even as it promotes him to lover, and Gregory’s answer completes the circuit by pricing the meat: “‘Tis well thou art not fish. If thou hadst, thou hadst been Poor John” (1.1.30-31). Poor John is dried hake, the cheapest protein of Lent, and the joke demotes Sampson’s flesh from the butcher’s stall to the fishmonger’s barrel in one move. Then, as the Montague servants enter, Gregory orders “Draw thy tool” (1.1.31), and Sampson answers “My naked weapon is out” (1.1.33), and the sword that is also a body is unsheathed on stage in earnest. The scene’s choreography is its semantics: weapons come out exactly where the talk has been of maidenheads, and the brawl that follows is the boast cashed.
The wall deserves its own attention, because the scene’s governing image is architectural before it is verbal. Gregory opens the code by warning that the weakest goes to the wall, the gutter side of the street where the pressed and the filthy belong, and Sampson builds the whole sexual politics of Verona on the concession: “therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall. Therefore I will push his men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall” (1.1.13-17). The repetition is the analysis. Men are pushed from the wall as a defeat in the street’s ranking; maids are thrust to it as a use, and the same preposition carries both because in the servants’ grammar a woman against a wall is a thing positioned, not a person met. Every later wall in the play inherits the charge. Romeo scales a wall to reach a garden where a woman speaks from a window as an equal and a author of her own terms, and the contrast between the two walls, the street’s and the orchard’s, is the distance the play travels between its first theory of women and its heroine’s refutation of it. That the refutation is necessary at all is the opening scene’s doing. Before Juliet can be heard, the audience has been taught the language she will have to answer, and taught it in the form she will have to answer it in: double meanings, traded by men, about women who are not present to reply.
M. M. Mahood’s Shakespeare’s Wordplay remains the essential account of what this fusion accomplishes. Mahood argued that the punning of this play is not ornament but cognition, the means by which the play thinks, and the opening scene is her thesis in miniature: a language in which cutting off heads and cutting off maidenheads are one phrase is a language belonging to a city where love and killing have already merged. The point deserves its full weight. The feud does not interrupt the love story from outside. The feud and the desire share a tongue from the first minute, spoken by the lowest characters in the cast, which is precisely where a culture keeps its least examined truths. When Romeo later reaches for oxymorons about brawling love and loving hate, the high style is only catching up with what the servants’ prose established before he entered.
The scene’s ending stages the two languages in confrontation, and the confrontation is a mishearing. The brawl the boasts built draws the citizens, the old men, and finally the Prince, whose edict arrives in the play’s most formal verse, rhymed, balanced, and single-sensed throughout: rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, profaners of neighbour-stained steel. The law hears a breach of the peace where the street has been conducting a seminar on desire, and it answers the seminar with a tariff of death for the next offence. Nothing in the edict is wrong, and everything in it is beside the point, because the force that fills Verona’s streets is not disobedience but the fused grammar the Prince’s own vocabulary cannot parse. The tragedy that follows is often described as a failure of communication. Its first scene proposes a more precise diagnosis: a city whose official language and whose bodily language have no translation between them, so that the law legislates against the noise while the meaning escapes, armed, into the next scene and the next, until it reaches a tomb where a message taken in its single sense does what all the edicts could not prevent.
Gregory’s function in the exchange deserves separate notice, because the scene contains its own first editor. Sampson boasts; Gregory interrogates. It is Gregory who asks whether the heads are the maids’ heads, Gregory who supplies the fish that prices the flesh, Gregory who states the rule about the sense that is felt. The scene thus builds its glossary into its dialogue, modelling for the audience the exact operation the audience will perform for five acts: hear the surface, suspect the drop beneath it, demand the second sense, and test it against the body. When editors of later centuries supplied in footnotes what Gregory supplies in dialogue, they were continuing the scene’s own procedure, and when expurgators cut the exchange they removed not only the bawdy but the play’s instructions for hearing it. A first scene that teaches its own listening method is a rare piece of dramatic engineering, and the teaching is done by the two lowest characters in the cast list, which is the play’s first announcement that in Verona the truth about language lives at the bottom of the house.
Notice, too, what the scene does not contain. No woman speaks. The maids who are to be thrust to the wall and relieved of their heads and maidenheads are grammatical objects, prizes in a contest between households conducted through servants’ mouths. The double meaning here is an instrument of male bonding: Sampson and Gregory cement their fellowship by exchanging senses over absent women’s bodies, and the audience, laughing, is bonded with them. That is the device at its most sinister, and the play knows it, because the play will spend five acts moving the same vocabulary into mouths that answer back. Juliet will take the word “maidenhead” out of this scene’s register entirely and speak it as a bride. The arc of the word is the arc of the play’s sexual politics, and it begins in this gutter of a street exchange, with two men who will never appear again.
The Licence to Speak: Rank, Age, Office, and Wit
The double meaning is not distributed evenly through the cast, and its distribution is a social document. Who may speak bawdy in Verona, in whose hearing, and at what risk, turns out to be governed by four licences, each revocable and each revealing. The first is the licence of service. Sampson, Gregory, Peter, and the unnamed servingmen speak the body’s language because the body’s labour is their assigned element: they carry, clear, fetch, and bury, and their speech is priced accordingly. A servant’s bawdy costs nothing because a servant’s words are not expected to signify beyond the room. The second is the licence of age and office, held by the Nurse alone among the women: the woman who has nursed the heroine, buried a husband and a child, and served the house for decades may say in the mistress’s presence what the daughter may not hear herself think. The third is the licence of wit, held by Mercutio as a gentleman whose rank would normally forbid the register: wit converts obscenity into art, and the conversion is accepted by his company and his audience as long as the artistry holds. The fourth licence is negative and belongs to the lovers. Romeo and Juliet hold no licence for the low register at all, and their double meanings must therefore travel in disguise, inside sonnets, liturgy, and equivocation, which is why theirs are the most interesting instances in the play.
Between the licensed speakers and the forbidden ones stands a figure the system needs in order to be visible: the perfect hearer who never fires. Benvolio understands every double meaning addressed to him, answers Mercutio’s flights with prompts that feed them, and produces none of his own across five acts of trying to keep the peace. His immunity is temperamental rather than social, the peacemaker’s refusal to load his words, and it demonstrates that the licence is finally a matter of disposition ratified by station: the city contains men of Mercutio’s own circle and rank for whom the device simply does not ignite. The point will matter at the catastrophe, where Benvolio survives to give the Prince the official narrative of the tomb, a single-sensed report of events whose doubleness he never commanded in life. Verona’s history gets written by its most innocent hearer.
Rank alone does not predict the register, and the exceptions prove the system. Friar Laurence possesses the play’s most intimate knowledge of the body’s properties, the herbs that heal and kill, the marriage bed he blesses, the potion that mimics death, yet his diction stays clean of the double sense from first to last. His licence runs the other way: celibate office purchases plain speech about matters no one else may name plainly, and the play keeps his vocabulary clinical to mark the difference between knowledge and appetite. Capulet, at the opposite pole of authority, produces in his rage of Act 3 Scene 5 a stream of insults aimed at his daughter’s body, “young baggage,” “green-sickness carrion,” “tallow-face,” and none of it is bawdy, because bawdy requires the double structure, the innocent surface behind which the speaker can retreat. Rage has no surface. The distinction will matter again at the tomb, where the absence of the second sense measures how far the city has fallen from even its corrupt fluency.
What makes the Nurse’s bawdy different in kind from Mercutio’s?
The Nurse’s bawdy differs in kind from Mercutio’s because hers is retrospective and prophetic where his is performative: the Nurse speaks from a body that has lived its history and aims every jest at the wedding night ahead, while Mercutio speaks to display a mind in the present instant, and his jests aim at the performance itself.
The Lady Capulet problem exposes the licence system at its most delicate. The mother who must sell her daughter a bridegroom in Act 1 Scene 3 conducts the sale in the elevated conceit of Paris as a book: “This precious book of love, this unbound lover, / To beautify him only lacks a cover” (1.3.88-89). The surface is bibliophile compliment. Underneath it, “cover” carries its stable-yard sense, the stallion covering the mare, attested across the period’s husbandry and carried into the sexual glossaries, and the line quietly admits the act the whole speech exists to arrange. Lady Capulet does not intend the second sense; nothing in her character permits the intention. The double meaning here belongs to the audience and to the language itself, which cannot describe a marriage market in the period’s vocabulary without the body leaking through. The case is the strongest evidence that the bawdy is a property of the play’s verbal world and not merely of its clowns: even the most guarded speaker in Verona, a mother performing respectability, fires the device by accident.
Below the principal servants, the licence persists in diluted form as professional patter. The servingmen clearing the Capulet feast in Act 1 Scene 5, arguing over plate and marchpane while the lovers exchange a sonnet in the same room, and Peter with the musicians in Act 4 Scene 5, trading tune titles over a corpse’s household, speak a wit of trades and tools rather than of bodies. The dilution is itself evidence for the system: the second sense thins as the speakers’ contact with the body’s great occasions thins, until at the bottom of the household it survives as little more than the rhythm of double talk, the shape of the jest without its cargo. The licences are also all revocable, and the play revokes them one by one. Mercutio’s expires with his life at the midpoint, withdrawn by the same street code that issued it. The Nurse’s is withdrawn by its beneficiary: after the counsel of Act 3 Scene 5, Juliet dismisses her from the last confidence with a sentence of formal separation, “Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain” (3.5.240), and the register that had carried the heroine’s whole sexual education is never heard in her presence again. Romeo, who never held a licence, is the control case: surrounded by the device from the first scene, addressed in it by his dearest friend, he answers in sonnets to the end, and his immunity is the play’s way of marking the distance between the lover it is building and the city that built the language.
Mercutio: Bawdy as a Theory of Love
Mercutio is the device’s virtuoso, and his bawdy is the most consequential in the play because it argues. Where the servants exchange senses as fellowship ritual, Mercutio deploys the double meaning as a counter-philosophy, a sustained attempt to drag Romeo’s Petrarchan heaven down into the body it came from. The full portrait of that campaign, its wit and its wordplay, is given in the study of Mercutio’s bawdy of sex, wit, and wordplay, and the formal machinery of his punning belongs to the companion study of the puns and quibbles that carry the play’s verbal duelling. The claim staked here is confined to the double meaning as doctrine: every one of Mercutio’s great bawdy flights is a lecture, and the lecture has a thesis, that love is appetite wearing fancy dress.
The doctrine is announced early and in miniature. Romeo, lovesick for Rosaline, asks “Is love a tender thing?” and Mercutio answers with the whole philosophy compressed into a fencing figure: “If love be rough with you, be rough with love. / Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down” (1.4.27-28). “Prick” is the period’s word for the mark or target, for the point of a weapon, and for the male organ, and the line instructs Romeo to answer the pricking of desire with a prick of his own, to treat the wound of love with the organ that caused it. The advice is a double meaning functioning as a prescription: stop writing sonnets to the wound and use the body. Romeo does not take the prescription at the feast. He takes a sonnet instead, and the play’s central argument about language is joined in that refusal.
The conjuration of Act 2 Scene 1 is the doctrine’s set piece. Romeo has scaled the Capulet wall, and Mercutio, calling into the dark for a friend who will not answer, performs a mock liturgy of raising by the beloved’s body: “I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes, / By her high forehead and her scarlet lip, / By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, / And the demesnes that there adjacent lie” (2.1.17-20). The catalogue descends the body in the Petrarchan order, eyes, forehead, lip, foot, leg, thigh, and then stops at the border it has been travelling toward, naming the destination only as adjacent lands, “demesnes,” a legal term for estates held in possession. The stop is the art. A catalogue that named its object outright would be a list; the catalogue that halts at the property line makes the audience supply the object, and the supplying is the complicity the device exists to manufacture. Joseph A. Porter’s Shakespeare’s Mercutio, the mandatory study of this figure, reads the conjuration as the centre of Mercutio’s being in the play: a rival liturgy, the body’s mass said against the sonnet’s, with Mercutio as its priest. Porter’s Mercutio is no random jester but the play’s unofficial theorist, and the conjuration is his creed recited over a wall.
The medlar passage that follows is the doctrine’s scripture in a single fruit. Mercutio imagines Romeo sighing under a medlar tree, wishing “his mistress were that kind of fruit / As maids call medlars when they laugh alone,” and wishes in turn that Rosaline were “an open-arse, and thou a poperin pear” (2.1.33-38). The medlar is a fruit eaten only when rotten-ripe, bletted to softness, and its shape gave it a dialect name, open-arse, that the glossaries record without blushing; in the slang of the period the fruit named the female genitals, and the maids’ solitary laughter registers that the word was common female property too, a joke women told where men could not hear. The poperin pear, a variety from Poperinghe in Flanders, carries its pun in its name for any ear attending in English. Every element of the passage passes the three tests: surfaces that parse (a lover sighing under a fruit tree), senses attested in period usage, and cues in triplicate, the maids’ laughter, the tree’s species, the pear’s provenance. This is the double meaning at concert pitch, and it is aimed, be it noted, at an absent woman and an absent friend. Mercutio’s bawdy is theatre performed for Benvolio and the audience; its objects are never in the room. The limitation defines him as sharply as the brilliance does.
The street scenes add the clock and the song. At noon in Act 2 Scene 4, Mercutio greets the returning Romeo with the hour told bawdily: the “bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” (2.4.112-113), the clock’s hand standing on the mark, “prick” again doing its triple duty as point, mark, and organ, so that the time of day itself is conscripted into the doctrine. The hare song he sings at the Nurse’s approach turns on sound alone, “an old hare hoar” being “very good meat in Lent,” where hare, hoar, and whore collapse into one syllable and the joke exists only in the ear. These are not decorations on Mercutio’s function. They are the function: a mind for whom every word opens downward into the body, keeping the play’s other language honest by refusing to let any abstraction stand unexamined. When Mercutio dies at the midpoint, the device loses its licensed virtuoso, and the consequences for the play’s language are structural, as the closing sections argue.
The Queen Mab speech shows the doctrine invading even Mercutio’s fantasy material. The fairy catalogue descends through lovers’ dreams and courtiers’ knees until it reaches the maids: “This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, / That presses them and learns them first to bear, / Making them women of good carriage” (1.4.91-93). The hag is the nightmare of folk belief, the weight on the sleeper’s chest, and Mercutio converts her into a schoolmistress of the marriage bed, teaching maids to bear, a verb carrying the load, the child, and the posture at once. Even his dream lore cannot stay in the air. Every road in Mercutio’s imagination runs downhill into the body, and the speech that begins as an improvisation on a fairy ends as instruction in the act the fairy presides over in dreams. Romeo’s interruption, “Thou talk’st of nothing,” is the idealist’s correct diagnosis and complete misunderstanding in four words: the nothing is precisely the something his friend keeps naming.
The doctrine has a literary enemy as well as a human patient, and Mercutio names it in Act 2 Scene 4 when he measures the cured Romeo against the sonnet tradition itself: now Romeo is fit for “the numbers that Petrarch flowed in,” beside whose fluency Laura shrinks to a kitchen wench and the famous mistresses of the tradition to scolds who could not match Rosaline’s or Juliet’s rhyme. The mockery is a critic’s, delivered in the doctrine’s own prose: the entire apparatus of Petrarchan praise, the blazons and the comparisons and the celestial machinery, is repriced as a market in which the women are goods and the verses are advertising. It matters that the play’s most famous love poetry is written in the very forms Mercutio is repricing. The sonnet the lovers share at the feast is Petrarch’s instrument, and Mercutio’s prose has already told the audience what the instrument costs and what it hides, so that the feast scene plays thereafter under a double audit: the liturgy on its surface, and underneath it the friend’s voice asking what the liturgy is for. No other Shakespearean clown is given a critical theory of the play’s own lyric mode. Mercutio’s bawdy is that theory’s delivery system, which is why its silencing at the midpoint leaves the love poetry unaudited for the rest of the action, free to ascend and free to be believed, at exactly the moment belief becomes fatal.
The recovery scene of Act 2 Scene 4 completes the portrait by showing what the doctrine is for socially. Romeo returns from the Friar’s cell cured of Rosaline, and Mercutio’s joy at the cure is expressed as joy at the wordplay’s return: the friend who trades jests again, who can be “sociable,” is pronounced Romeo once more. Porter reads this homosocial circuit as the bawdy’s deepest function in Mercutio’s hands: the double meaning is the currency of male fellowship, the medium in which the friends’ bond is denominated, and Romeo’s sonnet register reads to Mercutio as a kind of emigration from that fellowship into a country where men speak to women in liturgy. The reading explains the conjuration’s violence of tone, which is not contempt for Rosaline but alarm at defection. It also explains the tragedy of the instrument: a fellowship currency cannot be spent in the orchard, and the friend who minted it is left outside the wall, conjuring a Romeo who has already stopped answering in the old coin.
The Nurse: Bawdy of Memory and Prophecy
The Nurse’s bawdy works in the opposite direction from Mercutio’s. His jests display a mind; hers report a life. Nearly every double meaning in her speech is a memory wearing a joke’s clothes, and the great speech of Act 1 Scene 3, anatomized in the study of the Nurse’s speech of bawdy memory and the lost Susan, establishes the pattern within the play’s first extended female utterance. She recalls weaning Juliet by laying wormwood on her dug, the toddler’s fall that raised a bump “as big as a young cock’rel’s stone,” and her dead husband’s jest on the fallen child: “dost thou fall upon thy face? / Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit, / Wilt thou not, Jule?” (1.3.41-43). The husband’s line is a double meaning of the purest construction. Its surface is a father’s tease about a toddler’s tumble. Its second sense, the posture of a woman in love, projects the child’s whole sexual future into a nursery joke, and the toddler’s grave “Ay” seals it like a contract. The Nurse has repeated the jest for eleven years, three times in the scene itself, and each repetition is an act of memory: the husband is dead, the daughter Susan is dead, and the joke is the surviving furniture of a marriage.
That the jest is told over the child, in the mother’s presence, on the very occasion of proposing the child’s marriage, is the licence of age operating at full stretch. Lady Capulet’s repeated attempts to end the reminiscence register the strain. The Nurse may say it because she is old, because she is a servant, because she nursed the girl at her own breast, and because the saying is framed as quotation, a dead man’s words, which is deniability built into the transmission. No other woman in the play could carry the line across. Juliet herself, at the scene’s end, can only beg for the talk to stop. The distance between the Nurse’s freedom and the heroine’s silence is the distance the play’s sexual politics has to travel, and the Nurse’s register is the measure of it.
Her very first lines in the play set her seal on the word the servants opened with. Summoned to produce her charge, she swears the play’s most quietly astonishing oath: “By my maidenhead at twelve year old, / I bade her come” (1.3.2-3). The oath is a fossil and a joke at once. A woman of her years and history swearing by her maidenhead invokes a thing surrendered decades before the audience’s grandmothers were born, and the humour depends on the hearer registering both the oath’s conventional form, by which maidens swore by the treasure they guarded, and its cheerful inapplicability to the swearer. What matters for the catalogue is the placement. The word “maidenhead” has now sounded three times in the play’s economy: as the servants’ trophy, and as the Nurse’s spent credential, and it will sound once more in the epithalamium as the bride’s own possession. Between the trophy and the possession stands the oath, the word passing through the hands of the woman who will carry the heroine to her marriage, its value changing at every transfer. No critic invented that itinerary. The text walks the word down the cast list like a coin changing owners, and the gloss exists to make the transfers visible.
Her second mode is prophecy disguised as errand-running. Reporting the arrangement for the wedding in Act 2 Scene 5, after an agony of delay, she signs off with the body’s plain arithmetic: “I am the drudge, and toil in your delights, / But you shall bear the burden soon at night” (2.5.73-74). “Bear the burden” is the idiom of the labourer, and its second sense, the weight a bride bears in the marriage bed and the burden of pregnancy that follows, is delivered with a servant’s plausible innocence. The line is the wedding night announced in advance by the only person in the household who has borne such a burden and can price it. Where Mercutio’s bawdy reduces the wedding night to appetite, the Nurse’s frames it as work and consequence, women’s knowledge passed hand to hand. Her register is also, crucially, the register in which Juliet first hears desire discussed at all: the heroine’s vocabulary of the body is inherited from this woman, and when Juliet comes to speak her own desire in the epithalamium, the Nurse’s earth is under the verse.
Her last extended utterance in the play confirms the register’s death from inside her own mouth. At the discovery of Juliet’s body in Act 4 Scene 5, the Nurse’s lament is a chain of pure repetition, woeful day upon woeful day, lamentable day, a grief with one sense iterated until it empties. The woman who once turned a toddler’s fall into a marriage prophecy in a single line now has no second sense available for the greatest occasion of her service, and the verse gives her iteration where her prose once had doubleness. It would be too much to call the lament a punishment. It is better described as the register’s biography completing itself in its most gifted speaker: the double meaning belonged to a world in which the body’s news was funny, survivable, and transmissible, and that world ended in the street in Act 3. What speaks in Act 4 is its survivor, fluent in nothing but the single note.
The Nurse’s bawdy therefore has a temporal signature no other speaker shares. It looks backward to a marriage ended by death and forward to a marriage beginning that night, and it binds the two across the heroine’s childhood. Mercutio’s jests have no past and intend no future; they are fireworks. The Nurse’s are heirlooms, and like heirlooms they carry the dead with them. When she withdraws her licence in Act 3 Scene 5 and counsels the bigamous marriage to Paris, the catastrophe is partly linguistic: the one voice that could speak of the body with warmth, experience, and loyalty falls silent on the subject, and Juliet is left with equivocation as her only remaining instrument.
The darkening of her register after the duel is the surest index of what the register had been. She enters Act 3 Scene 2 carrying the rope ladder, the tackle of the wedding night, into a room where the news she bears has already poisoned the errand, and her speech collapses from jest into proverb: there is no trust, no faith, no honesty in men, all perjured, all forsworn, all naught. The woman whose bawdy had been the play’s warmest bodily knowledge now speaks of men in the flattened plurals of a proverb, single senses every one, because the double sense requires a world in which bodies promise pleasure and the news from the street has cancelled the promise. Her tragedy inside the tragedy is linguistic before it is moral. The counsel to marry Paris that follows is usually read as betrayal, and in effect it is, but its verbal texture is that of a speaker whose instrument has broken: she can no longer say two things at once, so she says the safe thing only, and the heroine who was educated by the double register is abandoned to the single one at the moment of greatest need.
Her handling of Mercutio in Act 2 Scene 4 shows the licence under attack and holding. He receives her with mock heraldry, a sail, a sail, and turns his sound-jokes loose in her direction, and the Nurse, who has come on the play’s most delicate errand, returns the fire in kind: she takes Peter aside to protest that if Mercutio should lead Juliet into a fool’s paradise, “as they say, it were a very gross kind of behaviour, as they say, for the gentlewoman is young” (2.4.165-168), and she names him afterward as a saucy merchant full of his ropery. The doubled “as they say” is the mark of a connoisseur sheltering inside quotation, exactly the device her dead husband’s jest used, and the protest’s content gives the game away: she understands every word that has been fired at her, prices it accurately, and answers as a licensed practitioner defending her charge’s value in the same market language. Mercutio has met the one hearer in Verona who cannot be shocked because nothing in the register is news to her. The scene is the licence system auditing itself, wit’s licence and age’s licence exchanging credentials in the street, and it is played as comedy because for once the exchange is between equals.
The Lovers’ Share: Double Meanings Inside the High Style
The standard account holds that the lovers speak a language purified of the play’s bawdy, and the account is half right in a way that conceals the interesting half. The lovers never touch the low register: no catalogues, no fruit, no clock-hands, no meat. What they do instead is more daring. They run the double meaning inside the highest forms available to them, the sonnet, the liturgy of pilgrimage, the vow, so that the body’s claim is asserted in the very vocabulary designed to deny it. The collision of sacred and profane registers as a system belongs to its own study in this series; the instances gathered here are those where a single word or phrase demonstrably means twice, with the second sense doing dramatic work.
The first meeting sets the method. Romeo opens the shared sonnet with a confession framed as worship: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: / My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss” (1.5.92-95). The hand has already touched; the poem is a negotiation for the lips, conducted entirely in the language of shrines and pilgrims, and both speakers know it. Juliet’s correction, “Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this. / For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss” (1.5.96-99), accepts the touch by reclassifying it, and her questioner’s reply, “Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?” answered by “Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer,” drives the exchange to its engineered conclusion: “Then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do” (1.5.100-104). Every term keeps its innocent surface; the whole sonnet is a double meaning in formal dress, two strangers negotiating a kiss through a theology that licenses each escalation it pretends to refuse. The bawdy here is not in any word’s slang sense. It is in the structure: sacred vocabulary used, with full mutual awareness, as the body’s advocate.
The sonnet’s closing exchange refines the method to the point of wit about the method itself. Juliet, having licensed lips by prayer’s analogy, caps the doctrine with a theologian’s calm: saints do not move, though they grant for prayers’ sake. Romeo’s reply accepts the premise and springs it: “Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take” (1.5.105-106), and the kiss occurs under a rubric that requires the saint’s stillness as its condition. The stage business is the double meaning made visible, a kiss that is also, contractually, the granting of a prayer, performed by two speakers each fully aware of both descriptions and bound by the fiction they have jointly drafted. Nothing in the street scenes is more knowing than this stillness. The pilgrims’ vocabulary was supposed to be the antidote to the servants’ register, and within fourteen lines it has been bent into an instrument more precise than anything Sampson commands, because it can negotiate in real time, concession by concession, toward an act both parties intend and neither names.
The orchard scene drops the liturgy and keeps the doubleness in a single commercial word. Romeo, refused the right to swear, pleads “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” and Juliet returns the question that an innocent reading cannot survive: “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” (2.2.125-126). “Satisfaction” in the period names a debt discharged, a wrong atoned, and sexual fulfilment, and Juliet’s use of it is a test administered in the open: the answer she accepts, “Th’ exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” passes because it names the vow and not the body, while the word she chose has already admitted the body into the negotiation. This is the heroine at fourteen conducting a double meaning with more control than any servant in the play, deploying the second sense as an instrument of inquiry and then sealing it with the marriage condition. The licence system has been quietly inverted: the one speaker with no licence at all has learned to make the high style do the low style’s work.
Why does Juliet’s wedding-night speech borrow the servants’ vocabulary?
Juliet’s wedding-night speech borrows the servants’ vocabulary because the epithalamium must name what the night is for, and the play has kept every direct word for the body’s acts in the low register: when she takes up “maidenhead” and the wager of “stainless maidenhoods,” the borrowing is the speech’s honesty, the bride refusing the euphemisms her rank prescribes.
The epithalamium of Act 3 Scene 2 is where the borrowing becomes unmistakable. Juliet summons the night as a falconer handles a hawk: “Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks, / With thy black mantle” (3.2.14-15), and frames the consummation as a wager, “Learn me how to lose a winning match, / Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods” (3.2.12-13). Then, at the speech’s crisis of impatience, she reaches for the word the play opened with: “And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead” (3.2.137). In Sampson’s mouth the word was a severed thing, a trophy of conquest over absent maids. In Juliet’s it is a possession she disposes of, offered to a husband and withheld from death, and the transfer of the word from the street boast to the bride’s soliloquy is the play’s sexual argument in one migration. The vocabulary has not been cleaned. It has been claimed. Around it the speech runs its other charged terms in high style, the mansion of love “bought” but “not possess’d,” the night asked to perform love’s rites, each phrase keeping an innocent surface of property law and falconry while the second sense governs the speech’s pulse.
The dawn parting of Act 3 Scene 5 adds the aubade’s willed falsehood to the lovers’ repertoire, a species of double speech adjacent to the double meaning and worth distinguishing from it. Juliet insists the bird outside the window was the nightingale and not the lark, a statement she knows to be false and Romeo briefly agrees to believe at the price of his life: the words mean their opposite, and both speakers hear both the statement and its negation together. Where the double entendre hides a second sense under a first, the aubade’s lie displays the false sense on top and keeps the true one underneath as shared knowledge, an inversion of the servants’ device built for two hearers only. It is the lovers’ private version of the public mechanism, and its appearance at the marriage’s first dawn, hours before the equivocations begin, marks the turn in their story after which double speech is never again a game.
Paris, in the Friar’s cell, gives her the occasion to perfect the technique. Claiming her face as his property by the marriage contract, “Thy face is mine, and thou hast slander’d it,” he receives the answer that has become a byword for her method: “It may be so, for it is not mine own” (4.1.35-36). The sentence concedes everything in his hearing and nothing in hers, since the face is indeed not her own to give, having been given already to a husband he does not know exists. Every word is true; the total is a deception; and the instrument is the same grammatical doubleness the servants used for boasting in the play’s first minute, refined by necessity into a precision instrument. The arc from Sampson’s delegation of sense to Juliet’s weaponisation of it is the device’s biography inside the play.
Juliet’s last double meanings are defensive weapons, and they close the arc. To her mother in Act 3 Scene 5, speaking of Romeo in enforced hatred, she constructs the sentence that can be punctuated into opposite confessions: “Indeed, I never shall be satisfied / With Romeo, till I behold him, dead, / Is my poor heart so for a kinsman vex’d” (3.5.94-96). Read with the pause in one place, she longs to see Romeo; read with it in another, she longs to see him dead, and the grieving heart belongs to whichever reading the hearer chooses. To her father in Act 4 Scene 2 she performs repentance in the same double syntax: she has “learn’d me to repent the sin / Of disobedient opposition” (4.2.17-18), a sentence true of a rebellion she defines and her father cannot inspect. Equivocation is the double meaning turned bodyguard, the device of the play’s clowns rebuilt as a trapped girl’s armour. The bawdy began as fellowship and doctrine. It ends, in the mouth of the speaker least licensed to use it, as the last technology of survival Verona leaves her.
The Device in Decline: The Musicians and the Drained Jest
The extinction the verdict describes can be watched happening in a single scene usually treated as disposable. Act 4 Scene 5 opens on the household discovering Juliet’s apparently dead body and closes, after the laments, with Peter and the musicians negotiating whether music is appropriate to a house of mourning. Peter requests a tune, “Heart’s ease,” trades names and riddles with Simon Catling, Hugh Rebeck, and James Soundpost, and dismisses them with the proverb that musicians live by silver sound because they will not give their music without payment. The exchange is wordplay to its bones, built of puns on instruments, strings, and sound. What it is not, at any point, is bawdy. The play’s last low-register scene, in the play’s last household interior, contains double meanings by the dozen and a second sense in none of them: the dropping-away of the body’s sense from the device’s machinery is complete, and the machinery rattles on as trade patter, names and fees, because the men who work it have no doctrine and no memories, only a gig that has been cancelled by a death.
The contrast with Act 1 Scene 1 is the point, and it is structural rather than accidental. The play’s first scene gave its lowest speakers the richest double senses in the text, because the world then still believed its own fusions, desire and violence in one grammar, fellowship cemented over women’s bodies. The musicians’ scene gives its lowest speakers puns with the cargo removed, because the world that made the fusions meaningful has spent them: Mercutio dead, the Nurse dismissed, the bride on her bier, the wedding feast being cleared for a funeral in the adjoining rooms. Even Capulet’s great lament in the same scene, for all its rhetorical splendour, speaks of his daughter in the single register of loss, death his son-in-law and heir, a metaphor with no drop beneath it. The device in decline measures the household’s fall more precisely than any speech about the fall could. Verona’s language began by meaning twice about everything that mattered. By the morning of the funeral it can barely mean twice about anything, and the tomb, where the last messages are taken in their single senses and kill on schedule, is only the decline’s completion.
The InsightCrunch Bawdy Gloss: The Catalogue by Speaker
Analysis of instances scatters them across scenes, and the device is easier to judge whole. The InsightCrunch bawdy gloss gathers the play’s principal double meanings into a single catalogue, sorted by speaker, each entry giving the line’s location in Weis’s Arden Third Series text, the innocent surface, the second sense as attested in period usage, and the work the doubleness does in its moment. Entries are confined to instances that pass the three tests set out in the discussion of the device: a surface that parses innocently, a second sense documented in the period’s language, and a cue in speaker or situation. Speculative extensions beloved of the more adventurous glossaries are excluded, and the exclusions are part of the catalogue’s argument. Within each speaker’s group the entries run in the order of the action, so the catalogue can also be read vertically, as a chronology of the device’s career from the street of the first morning to the chamber of the wedding night. Readers assembling the gloss for teaching can lay the entries out in sequence with the ReportMedic PPT Viewer, one slide per speaker, and watch the catalogue’s pattern emerge as a map of the licence system itself.
| Speaker | Line and location | Innocent surface | Second sense | Work performed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sampson | “I will cut off their heads” / “or their maidenheads” (1.1) | Beheading the enemy house’s maids | Defloration as conquest | Fuses feud violence with sexual seizure in the play’s first minutes |
| Gregory | “They must take it in that sense that feel it” (1.1) | The maids must interpret the threat | The maids must physically undergo it | States the device’s rule: the hearer who feels it takes the sense |
| Sampson | “Me they shall feel while I am able to stand” (1.1) | Holding ground in a fight | Erection as reputation | Converts a military boast into a bodily one |
| Sampson | “I am a pretty piece of flesh” (1.1) | A fine figure of a man | Meat; sexual availability | Prices the boaster’s own body in the market he serves |
| Gregory | “Draw thy tool” (1.1) | Draw a sword | The organ as instrument | Equips the brawl with the body’s weapon as swords come out |
| Sampson | “My naked weapon is out” (1.1) | A blade unsheathed | The body exposed | Completes the sword and body equation on stage |
| Mercutio | “Prick love for pricking” (1.4) | Answer love’s wounding in kind | Treat desire with the organ | Compresses his whole doctrine of appetite into a fencing figure |
| Mercutio | “The demesnes that there adjacent lie” (2.1) | Lands bordering the thigh | The genitals as held estate | Makes the audience supply the catalogue’s destination |
| Mercutio | “An open-arse, and thou a poperin pear” (2.1) | A medlar fruit and a Flemish pear | The fruit’s dialect name for the body; the pear’s punning name | Turns the Petrarchan blazon into orchard slang |
| Mercutio | “As maids call medlars when they laugh alone” (2.1) | A fruit ripe only when rotten | The slang sense women used among themselves | Admits the second sense is female common property too |
| Mercutio | “The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon” (2.4) | The clock hand stands on the noon mark | The hand and mark as body | Conscripts the time of day into the doctrine of appetite |
| Mercutio | “An old hare hoar is very good meat in Lent” (2.4) | Grey hare as Lenten fare | Hare, hoar, and whore in one sound | A joke that exists only in the ear, aimed at the Nurse’s approach |
| The Nurse | “Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit” (1.3) | A toddler’s tumble recalled | The posture of a woman in love | Prophecies the wedding night inside a nursery memory |
| The Nurse | “You shall bear the burden soon at night” (2.5) | A labourer’s load to carry | The bride’s burden in bed and in pregnancy | Announces the wedding night as work and consequence |
| Lady Capulet | “This unbound lover only lacks a cover” (1.3) | A book awaiting its binding | The stallion covering the mare | Lets the marriage market’s act leak through its own compliment |
| Romeo and Juliet | “Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss” (1.5) | A pilgrim’s gesture of prayer | Sanctioned touch escalating toward lips | Negotiates a kiss inside a liturgy both speakers understand |
| Juliet | “What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” (2.2) | Contentment; a debt discharged | Sexual fulfilment | Tests Romeo’s answer while admitting the body to the negotiation |
| Juliet | “Death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead” (3.2) | Death as rival bridegroom | The servants’ word claimed as a bride’s possession | Transfers the opening scene’s trophy word into the heroine’s vow |
| The Nurse | “By my maidenhead at twelve year old, I bade her come” (1.3) | A maiden’s oath of summons | The same word as a credential spent decades before | Walks the trophy word through its middle owner on the way to the bride |
Read down the final column, the catalogue tells the play’s story in shorthand. The servants’ entries perform fusion, the feud and desire sharing one grammar. Mercutio’s perform argument, a doctrine pressed on a friend. The Nurse’s perform transmission, knowledge and prophecy passed down. Lady Capulet’s single entry performs leakage, the market confessing itself through a speaker who intends nothing of the kind. The lovers’ entries perform negotiation, test, and claim. One device, five functions, and the functions sort exactly by the licences mapped earlier. That is the pattern the gloss exists to expose: the double meaning in this play is not a stain spread evenly over the text but an instrument assigned, speaker by speaker, with a precision that editing ignores at the cost of the play’s design.
The exclusions from the catalogue are as deliberate as the inclusions, and two deserve note. The word “die,” whose period sense of sexual climax hovers over the play’s love language, is treated in the glossing discussion rather than tabled, because no single line owns it: its charge is distributed across scenes and speakers, and a table entry would falsify a climate into an instance. The more speculative reaches of the maximalist glossaries are likewise excluded wholesale, not because the period’s ears were innocent but because an instrument that admits everything measures nothing. An eighteenth entry problems no one; an eighteenth entry that cannot be proved teaches the reader to discount the seventeen that can. The catalogue’s restraint is its credential.
Glossing the Second Sense Responsibly
Every instance in the catalogue had to survive a problem the first audiences did not face: the second senses have been dying for four centuries while the innocent surfaces lived on. A word’s sexual sense is typically its most perishable sense, slang being the fastest-moving layer of any language, tied to the spoken street and the unrecorded joke. The plain sense gets written down in documents and dictionaries; the bawdy sense travels mouth to mouth and dies with its generation’s laughter. The result is an asymmetry built into the evidence. A modern reader meets “medlar,” “tool,” “stand,” “prick,” and “cover” as innocent words and must be told, on authority, that each once opened downward. Glossing is therefore not an optional spice added by dirty-minded editors. It is the recovery of lost information, as factual a task as identifying a dead metaphor or a defunct coin, and an edition that withholds the recovery on grounds of taste has made an editorial decision with interpretive consequences as real as any emendation.
Which everyday words in the play have lost their second sense?
The everyday words that have lost their second sense include “stand,” “tool,” “prick,” “cover,” “die,” “medlar,” and “flesh”: each survives in plain use while its sexual sense, common property in the period’s speech, has vanished so completely that the lines now parse as innocent until a glossary restores the drop beneath them.
The archives from which the recovery is built deserve a word, because they explain both its reliability and its gaps. The spoken senses of the period survive in the genres that had commercial reasons to record speech as spoken: the jestbooks that sold a famous clown’s repertory, the coney-catching pamphlets that exposed the cant of thieves and tricksters for a penny readership, the ballads, the rogue biographies, and the court records in which insults were entered as evidence and glossed by the clerks who took them down. These are not respectable sources, and that is their evidentiary value: a sense recorded in a jestbook was recorded because an audience paid to hear it, which is as close to a performance test as the archive affords. Where a proposed second sense can be found in such company, in the right decades, the attestation limb of the three tests is satisfied by the strongest kind of witness, a paying one. Where the trail runs only through later dictionaries copying earlier ones, the honest gloss says so and lowers its voice.
The recovery has a history, and its heroes are lexicographers. Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy of 1947 assembled the evidence word by word from across the canon and the period’s jestbooks, rogue pamphlets, and dictionaries, and established the working list on which the field still builds. Gordon Williams’s Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language of 1994 refined the method, distinguishing senses by period attestation and marking the confidence of each claim, the scholarly equivalent of the three tests used in this article. Between and around these stand the editions themselves, whose footnotes are where most readers meet the second senses or fail to: Brian Gibbons’s Arden Second Series text of the play glossed with celebrated economy, while René Weis’s Arden Third Series text, the edition cited throughout this article, annotates the bawdy more fully and treats its presence as part of the play’s meaning rather than as a series of local embarrassments. The footnote is the real battleground of the subject. A gloss admits the reader to the knowing party; a silent page leaves the reader with the groundlings’ laughter unexplained and the line’s energy mysteriously flat.
How can a reader tell a genuine double meaning from an editor’s invention?
A genuine double meaning can be told from an invention by three checks: the second sense must be attested in the period’s own usage rather than asserted from resemblance, the speaker and scene must cue it, and the line must play in performance with the sense active, deepening the moment instead of merely decorating the margin.
The cautionary tale on the far side of those checks is Frankie Rubinstein’s Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance of 1984, a work of formidable learning whose method finds sexual puns by phonetic resemblance at a density many reviewers found incredible, whole speeches dissolving into continuous innuendo. Rubinstein’s excess is instructive precisely because the impulse behind it is sound: the period’s ears were quicker than modern ears, and real instances have been missed by timid editing. But a method that can find a pun anywhere can prove a pun nowhere, and the discipline imposed by attestation, cue, and playability is what separates the catalogue printed in this article from a parlour game. The verdict on the glossing wars is therefore double. Against the prudes: the system is real, extensive, and load-bearing, and silence about it falsifies the play. Against the maximalists: the system is finite, testable, and strongest exactly where it can be proved, and invention in its name discredits the recovery. Mahood’s functional test supplies the tiebreak in doubtful cases. A proposed second sense earns its place when it does work in the scene, when the drama is richer with it active than without it, as the medlar and the demesnes are richer, and poorer when the proposal merely titillates the footnote.
Translation supplies the experiment that proves the device’s load. A translator of this play into another language faces, line by line, the choice the glossaries theorize: the medlar does not pun in French, the hare does not hoar in German, and “cover” keeps only one of its senses in Italian. Competent translators do not omit the second sense; they rebuild it, finding the target language’s own double words and planting them where the original planted its instruments, because a version that renders only the surfaces has demonstrably lost information the original carried, as surely as a version that dropped a rhyme scheme or a stage direction. The rebuilding is the strongest external evidence that the bawdy belongs to the play’s substance rather than to its accidents. Nobody rebuilds an ornament at that cost across four centuries of translation. What translators rebuild, at whatever labour, is what the work cannot be itself without.
Performance has always been the glossing tradition’s silent partner, and it deserves record before the expurgators take the stage. An actor can gloss with a pause, a stress, or a held glance, restoring in the theatre a second sense that the edition in the audience’s lap leaves bare, and the great Mercutios and Nurses of the stage tradition have always done so, because the lines refuse to land at their written temperature without it. The period’s own lexicography was less timid than its successors: John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes of 1598, enlarged in 1611, renders the vocabulary of the body with a lexicographer’s completeness, because a dictionary’s business was the language as spoken and not as wished. The prudery that later hid the second senses was therefore not fidelity to the period’s standards. It was a later age’s standard, projected backward onto a text that had never shared it, and the projection succeeded so completely that it came to be mistaken for the text itself.
Bowdler’s Knife and the School Text
The recovery was necessary because the loss was deliberate. In 1807 there appeared the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated text prepared within the Bowdler family, much of the labour later scholarship assigns to Henrietta Maria Bowdler, and issued under her brother Thomas’s name in the expanded edition of 1818. Its stated principle was the removal of everything that could not with propriety be read aloud in a family, and its editor’s surname entered the language as a verb for the practice. This play stood high on the list of texts requiring the treatment. The opening servants, the Nurse’s reminiscence, the conjuration, and the street wit of Act 2 were precisely the passages a family reading could not survive aloud, and they were cut, softened, or silently reworded across two centuries of drawing-room and school editions that followed the Bowdler precedent whether or not they used the Bowdler name.
The damage is structural, and it can be specified. Cut the servants’ exchange and the play opens with a brawl whose language no longer announces the feud’s fusion with desire; the Prologue’s talk of civil blood loses its vernacular echo. Cut the Nurse’s fall-backward jest and her character loses its foundation in lived bodily history, becoming mere comic garrulity, and her counsel in Act 3 loses the weight of the experience that made her counsel worth taking. Cut the conjuration and Mercutio becomes a wit without a doctrine, his death a plot event instead of the silencing of a philosophy. Cut the dial and the hare song and the noon of Act 2 Scene 4 loses its function as the doctrine’s high mass, the last full performance of the body’s language before the swords come out in earnest. An expurgated Romeo and Juliet is not the same play with the jokes removed. It is a play whose argument has been removed and whose famous love poetry is left performing sincerity in a vacuum, which is one reason the popular image of the work as a chaste romance proved so durable: the text that formed the image had been laundered before the image formed.
The expurgators received the immortality reserved for warnings. “Bowdlerize” stands in the dictionaries as a common verb, defined by the practice it names, and the surname of a family that wished to be remembered for piety survives in the language chiefly as the term for a mutilation of other men’s work. There is a justice in the survival that the play itself would appreciate: the double meaning outlasted its censors, and the censors’ name became a single, unflattering sense in the vocabulary they tried to police. The cuts themselves have largely been forgotten, which is the more dangerous legacy, since a forgotten cut cannot be argued with. A reader who knows the text was bowdlerized can go and find the whole; a reader who has never heard the verb assumes the laundered version is the original, and the assumption, repeated across generations of schoolrooms, did more for the chaste image of the play than any argument ever mounted in its defence.
School editions inherited the arrangement and gave it a curriculum. The set text met in adolescence, glossed for examinations, has historically been the most heavily mediated version of all, its notes explaining the feud, the sonnet, and the stars while stepping around the medlar. The pedagogical problem is genuine and this article does not mock it: a classroom contains every level of readiness, and the clinical treatment the brief of any honest teaching demands, plain words, period evidence, no sniggering and no leering, is a skill. But the alternative to clinical treatment is not innocence. It is ignorance of what the lines say, preserved into adulthood and mistaken for the play. Generations of readers have believed the work a monument of pure love because the impure evidence was deleted before they were allowed to see it, and criticism conducted on expurgated texts inherits the deletion invisibly.
An expurgated text can be detected without collation, and the detection is worth teaching alongside the play. The signs are consistent: an opening scene that reaches the Prince’s entrance with suspicious speed, street talk that keeps stopping a line short of its point; a Nurse whose great speech has lost its husband; a Mercutio whose wit is praised in the introduction and absent from the pages; footnotes that explain the sonnet, the stars, and the feud while falling silent at the medlar. Any of these is evidence that an editor has decided which audience the reader belongs to, the innocent or the knowing, and has made the decision unilaterally. The scholarly editions print their policies in their introductions and their texts whole. A text that will not say what it has removed has answered the glossing question in the worst way available, by pretending there was never a question.
The scholarly restoration, when it came, came through the footnote rather than the manifesto. Twentieth-century editions of the play, the Arden line chief among them, progressively re-admitted the second senses to the margin, at first in Latinate paraphrase and then in plain English, until a student with a modern scholarly text could recover nearly everything Partridge had catalogued without leaving the page. The stage completed the restoration faster than the classroom, since a line that will not play at its written sense pressures every company that attempts it. What remains contested is exactly the territory where the expurgation began, the school text and the family reading, and the contest is instructive: nobody now defends the Bowdler text as scholarship, yet the habits it installed, the stepped-around gloss, the scene assigned without its first forty lines, persist by inertia long after their rationale has been abandoned. A falsification does not need believers to survive. It needs only the appearance of being the original, and two centuries of reprinting gave it that.
The Critics’ Quarrel and the Play’s Verdict
The two mandatory authorities on this material disagree about where its centre lies, and the disagreement is the most useful one in the subject. Porter’s Mercutio-centred account makes the bawdy a character’s philosophy: the double meaning is the instrument of one extraordinary speaker, the doctrine of appetite preached by the play’s wittiest man against his friend’s idealism, and its meaning is exhausted when he is silenced. Mahood’s wordplay-centred account makes the bawdy a property of the play’s language itself: the punning habit by which the whole verbal world thinks, in which love and death, sex and violence, are fused at the level of the word long before the plot fuses them at the level of event. On Porter’s reading the device dies in Act 3 Scene 1. On Mahood’s reading it cannot die, because it was never one man’s property; it migrates, and the migration is the meaning.
The text adjudicates. Porter is right about the first half and about Mercutio: no account that treats the conjuration and the dial as random ribaldry survives a reading of their construction, and the doctrine of appetite is genuinely his, preached with a convert’s energy at a named opponent. But the catalogue assembled in this article refutes the containment of the device within his character. The servants fire it before he appears. The Nurse fires it in a register his philosophy cannot explain, retrospective, maternal, prophetic. Lady Capulet fires it by accident. And in the epithalamium, an act after his death, the heroine takes the opening scene’s trophy word into her bridal soliloquy and disposes of it as her own possession. A device that precedes Mercutio, surrounds him, and outlives him cannot be his invention, only his virtuoso instrument. Mahood’s account wins at the level of the whole play, with Porter’s retained as the true description of the device’s most brilliant local deployment. The bawdy is the play thinking in double senses, and Mercutio is the loudest thought, not the thinker.
What the play finally does with the device is the verdict this article set out to reach, and it is sterner than either critic’s version. The double meaning is the sound of a world where the body can still be talked about, however corruptly, in fellowship, doctrine, memory, and vow. Its history across the five acts is a history of extinction by register. The servants’ fusion gives way to Mercutio’s doctrine; the doctrine is killed at noon in Act 3; the Nurse’s transmission fails in Act 3 Scene 5 when her voice turns counsellor of bigamy and her warmth withdraws; the lovers’ high-style doubleness narrows into equivocation, the same device with its joy removed, double meanings spoken not to delight or to argue but to survive an interview. At the tomb the extinction completes itself. Paris strews flowers in unbroken high style, Romeo speaks the play’s greatest poetry of death, and no second sense sounds anywhere, because the world that could hear two meanings at once has been replaced by a world of single, literal statements: a letter undelivered, a name misread, a wife reported dead. The tragedy can be told as the story of the double meaning’s death. Verona begins able to say two things with every word and ends able to say only one thing, too late, over the bodies. Restoring the bawdy to the text, glossed plainly and judged by evidence, restores the measure of that loss, and with it the play.
The apothecary’s shop in Mantua shows the completed extinction at the level of the single transaction. Romeo buys his poison in a scene of perfect commercial clarity: the goods are described, the price is named, the law’s prohibition is acknowledged and priced into the sale, and gold changes hands for a dram of the means of death: “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls” (5.1.79). It is the play’s market with the bawdy boiled off, and the comparison with the play’s first market is the measure of the fall. In Act 1 the servants priced flesh and fish in jest, and the pricing, however brutal, stayed inside a language that could still laugh at its own transactions. In Mantua the pricing is literal, the goods are lethal, and nobody laughs. The double meaning had been, among its other functions, the market’s conscience, the device by which Verona’s commerce in bodies was continually exposed to itself in the mirror of the second sense. When the mirror is gone, the commerce proceeds in plain terms, and the plain terms kill the customer. The tomb needs no further machinery than that.
One consequence of the verdict deserves stating separately, because it reverses the usual account of the love poetry’s purity. The pilgrims, saints, and shrines of the lovers’ register are often praised as though their elevation were achieved by distance from the play’s coarse world, a clean language kept clean. The catalogue shows the opposite mechanism at work. The high style’s terms hold their charge precisely because the low style exists beneath them as the thing being refused, transformed, or secretly admitted: the kiss negotiated as prayer is daring because the street’s version of the same negotiation is a boast about maidenheads; the vow of satisfaction is a test because the word’s bodily sense is in the room; the bride’s maidenhead is a claim of ownership because the audience first met the word as a severed trophy. Remove the second language and the first loses its resistance, becoming the decorative sighing of the popular image. The lovers’ purity, in short, is not the absence of the bawdy. It is the bawdy mastered, priced, and declined at full knowledge of its value, which is a far more interesting purity and the only one the unexpurgated text supports.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the InsightCrunch bawdy gloss, and how does it sort the play’s double meanings by speaker?
The InsightCrunch bawdy gloss is the catalogue of the play’s principal double meanings printed in this article, and it sorts its entries by speaker because the speaker is the meaning’s licence. Each entry gives the line and its place in Weis’s Arden Third Series text, the innocent surface, the second sense attested in period usage, and the work the doubleness performs. Sorted that way, the catalogue stops looking like a miscellany of smut and starts reading as a social map: servants fuse desire with violence, Mercutio argues a doctrine, the Nurse transmits knowledge, Lady Capulet leaks the market’s secret by accident, and the lovers negotiate, test, and claim. Only instances passing the tests of surface, attestation, and cue are admitted.
Q: What is a double entendre, and how does it differ from a merely coarse word?
A double entendre is a phrase engineered to carry two senses at once, one innocent and one sexual, while a merely coarse word carries its single sexual sense openly. The difference is structural, not a matter of degree. A coarse word confronts; a double entendre offers a choice, and the choice is the device’s protection and its art. The innocent surface must parse completely on its own, or the speaker has no retreat and the hearer no sorting to do. Because both senses remain live, the line can be heard innocently by one part of an audience and knowingly by another at the same moment, which is why the play uses the device to distribute knowledge unevenly through the theatre.
Q: What does Sampson mean by “take it in what sense thou wilt”?
Sampson means that the sense of his threat is the hearer’s to choose, and the line is the double entendre describing its own mechanism. Gregory has asked whether the heads to be cut off are the maids’ heads, and Sampson substitutes “maidenheads,” a word holding an anatomical sense and the sense of virginity itself, then explicitly delegates the interpretation: take it in what sense thou wilt. The boast works either way as violence and either way as sexual conquest, which is the point. Gregory’s answer, that the maids must take it in the sense they feel, confirms the rule from the receiving side: the meaning that lands is the meaning the body registers.
Q: What does “stand” mean in the servants’ boasting, and why does the joke collapse without its second sense?
“Stand” means both to hold ground in a fight and, in the period’s slang, to be erect, and the boast collapses without the second sense because its logic depends on reputation. Sampson declares that Montague’s men shall feel him while he is able to stand, and adds that his quality is known. As military talk this is empty: competence in a brawl is proved in the brawl, not announced as prior fame. As bodily boasting the sentence coheres perfectly, since the reputation claimed is exactly the kind a servant might plausibly be known by among his fellows. Gregory’s fish-market reply prices the claim, and the exchange’s comedy is the sound of one sense continually auditing the other.
Q: Why can the Nurse say in Lady Capulet’s hearing what Juliet cannot say at all?
The Nurse can say it because age, office, long service, and widowhood have jointly issued her a licence that Juliet’s marriageability forbids. She has nursed the heroine at her own breast, buried a husband and a daughter, and served the house for decades, and her bawdy arrives framed as quotation and reminiscence, a dead man’s jest retold, which gives everyone present a way to hear it as harmless memory. Juliet, whose value in the marriage market depends on performed innocence, cannot afford a single knowing sentence in her mother’s presence. The licence is therefore not about personality. It is a tariff, and the scene prices exactly what speech costs a girl whose silence is part of her dowry.
Q: What is a medlar, and why do maids laugh when they name it alone?
A medlar is a fruit that must rot to ripeness before it can be eaten, and maids laugh at its name because the fruit was common slang for the female genitals. The medlar is eaten only when bletted, softened past the point that other fruits would be discarded, and its open blossom end earned it the dialect name open-arse, recorded plainly in the period’s glossaries. Mercutio’s line about the fruit “as maids call medlars when they laugh alone” is the play’s own testimony that the sense was women’s property, a joke circulating among women where men could not audit it. The laughter is in-group knowledge surfacing for one line, and the glossaries merely confirm what the maids already knew.
Q: What three words does Mercutio’s hare song collapse into a single sound?
The hare song collapses hare, hoar, and whore into a single sound, and the joke exists only in the ear. Mercutio sings that an old hare hoar is very good meat in Lent, but that a hare too hoar is too much for a score when it hoars before it is spent. Heard aloud, the animal, the greyness of age, and the prostitute are one syllable cycling through the senses, with Lenten fare supplying the innocent surface. On the page the pun can be footnoted; in the theatre it detonates in real time or not at all. The song is the play’s purest specimen of a double meaning carried by pronunciation, aimed at the approaching Nurse as a fanfare of everything her own register will answer.
Q: How does the Nurse’s bawdy change when it turns from her own past to Juliet’s future?
The Nurse’s bawdy changes from reminiscence to prophecy, and the temperature changes with it. Turned toward her own past, it is warm and commemorative: a dead husband’s jest, a toddler’s fall, a marriage and a child both lost, retold because repetition is how the dead stay in the room. Turned toward Juliet’s future, the same register becomes transactional, a forecast of burdens to be borne on the wedding night and errands run in another’s delights, knowledge handed over like equipment. The shift matters because it traces the heroine’s education: Juliet hears the body’s future first in the grammar of her nurse’s past, and the play’s most intimate knowledge transfer happens entirely inside the licensed register.
Q: What does Mercutio’s command to “prick love for pricking” prescribe, and in how many senses?
The command prescribes answering desire’s wound with the body itself, and it operates in three senses at once. “Prick” names the point of a weapon, the mark or target aimed at, and the male organ, all attested in the period’s usage, and Mercutio’s fencing figure instructs Romeo to meet love’s pricking with a prick of his own and so beat love down. It is his whole doctrine compressed into one line: the Petrarchan sufferer nurses the wound with sonnets, when the correct treatment is use. Romeo hears the prescription and chooses the sonnet at the feast instead, and the play’s argument about its two languages is contained in that refusal.
Q: What second sense hides in Lady Capulet’s claim that the unbound Paris “only lacks a cover”?
The second sense is the stallion covering the mare, and it hides inside a compliment about bookbinding. Lady Capulet sells Paris to her daughter as a precious book of love, an unbound lover who lacks only a cover to beautify him, the cover being the wife who completes the volume. “Cover” in the period’s husbandry named the stallion’s mounting of the mare, and the sexual glossaries carry the sense into human use. The speaker intends none of it: the line is the device fired by the language itself through its most respectable mouth, the marriage market confessing, in a mother’s drawing-room metaphor, the act the whole negotiation exists to arrange.
Q: Why does Juliet tell her father she has learned to repent a sin she never names plainly?
Juliet names the sin only as “disobedient opposition” because the vagueness is the equivocation that keeps her alive. Kneeling in Act 4 Scene 2, she performs repentance for resisting her father’s will, and the sentence is true in senses she controls: the opposition she repents can be read as her resistance to the Paris match, while her father hears submission to it. A plainer confession would expose the secret marriage and destroy the Friar’s plan; silence would leave the forced wedding on schedule. The double construction buys her the unsupervised night the potion requires. It is the servants’ device rebuilt as armour, a meaning doubled not for laughter or doctrine but for survival.
Q: What happens to Act 1 Scene 1 in a school edition that cuts the bawdy?
The scene loses its verbal cause and keeps only its violence. Stripped of the maidenhead exchange, the flesh and fish pricing, and the tool and weapon play, the opening becomes two servants inexplicably spoiling for a fight, and the Prince’s edict arrives as exposition rather than as the law’s answer to a language the audience has heard fusing desire and killing for forty lines. The structural loss compounds through the play: Mercutio’s wit reads as decoration, the Nurse as mere comedy, and the love poetry as self-sufficient purity. A student meeting the expurgated scene has been given the feud’s body without its grammar, and the famous romance of the later acts floats on the omission.
Q: Why did the bawdy sense of so many words die before their plain sense did?
The bawdy senses died first because slang lives in speech while plain senses live in documents. A word’s respectable meaning gets written into contracts, sermons, accounts, and dictionaries, the records that carry a language across centuries. Its sexual sense travels by voice between contemporaries, in jestbooks at best, and each generation’s laughter is the only archive most of it ever has. Lexicography then completed what time began: early dictionaries omitted the low senses or hid them in Latin, so the written record actively testifies against them. The asymmetry of the evidence is therefore an artifact of survival, not a measure of how often the senses were used or how plainly first audiences heard them.
Q: Why do some editors gloss a double meaning while others leave the same line bare?
Editors differ because a gloss is a theory of the reader disguised as a footnote. The restrained tradition, represented by Gibbons’s Arden Second Series text, glosses the minimum and trusts the line to work on the stage, fearing that an annotated second sense becomes the only sense and flattens the doubleness into a solution. The fuller tradition, represented by Weis’s Arden Third Series text cited throughout this article, holds that a sense the reader cannot hear unaided is a sense already lost, and that silence in the margin reads to most readers as absence from the text. The stakes are real on both sides, since the footnote is where the knowing audience is recruited or the innocent reading is left standing alone.
Q: Why does Mercutio’s conjuration catalogue stop at “the demesnes that there adjacent lie”?
The catalogue stops at the adjacent lands because the stop is the art that makes the audience complete the blazon. Mercutio descends Rosaline’s body in the Petrarchan order, eyes, forehead, lip, foot, leg, quivering thigh, and at the destination substitutes a lawyer’s term for an estate, demesnes, lands held in possession. Naming the object outright would collapse the double structure into a list and break the mock liturgy’s spell; withholding it keeps the innocent surface intact while every hearer supplies the missing term privately. The euphemism also sharpens the satire, since the legal metaphor prices the beloved as property at exactly the point where the sonnet tradition would dissolve into rapture.
Q: What separates Capulet’s insults in Act 3 Scene 5 from bawdy, when both are aimed at Juliet’s body?
Deniability and shared laughter separate them, and Capulet’s rage has neither. Bawdy requires a doubled structure: an innocent surface the speaker can retreat behind, and a hearer recruited into complicity rather than assaulted. Capulet’s stream of “young baggage,” “green-sickness carrion,” and “tallow-face” is single-sensed abuse with no surface to retreat to, aimed at his daughter’s body with the declared purpose of wounding it into obedience. The distinction matters because it marks the licence system’s collapse: the household’s master takes up body-language stripped of the device’s protections at the moment the household ceases to be governable by its old codes, and the coarseness that was fellowship in the street becomes tyranny in the chamber.
Q: How should the bawdy be taught without cutting it and without leering at it?
The bawdy should be taught as vocabulary history, in a clinical register, with the evidence on the table. The working method is the one used in this article: name the second sense plainly, cite its attestation in the period’s own glossaries and usage, identify the cue in speaker and scene, and ask what work the doubleness does in the drama. Treated that way, the medlar and the dial are no more titillating than any other dead metaphor exhumed in a language lesson, and considerably more instructive, since they open the play’s whole system of licence and knowledge. Cutting protects nobody from a meaning the culture outside the classroom already supplies; leering forfeits the analysis. Evidence is the middle road.
Q: How can an essay use the bawdy gloss to argue that the body grounds the love?
An essay can use the gloss by following one word across its speakers and letting the catalogue’s pattern carry the proof. The strongest line of argument tracks “maidenhead” from Sampson’s boast, where it is a trophy severed from absent maids, through the Nurse’s prophecies, to Juliet’s epithalamium, where the bride disposes of it as her own possession in her own syntax. Set beside the gloss’s other migrations, that single itinerary demonstrates the thesis rather than asserting it: the idealized love is spoken in a vocabulary the body supplied, and its meanings deepen as the words pass from conquest to knowledge to vow. The catalogue’s arrangement by speaker is the essay’s structure ready-made.
Q: Why does Friar Laurence, the play’s expert on the body’s properties, keep his own diction clean of bawdy?
The Friar keeps his diction clean because his licence runs in the opposite direction from every other speaker’s: celibate office buys him plain naming instead of double meaning. He handles the body’s whole economy, herbs that heal and kill, the marriage he solemnizes, the death-mimicking potion, grace and rude will warring in man as in plants, and he names each thing in a clinical and sacramental vocabulary that never once doubles. The play is making a distinction in his speech between knowledge and appetite. The servants and Mercutio know the body as users; the Friar knows it as a system under moral government, and his unbawdy diction is the sound of that government.
Q: Why is there no bawdy at the tomb, and what does the silence measure?
There is no bawdy at the tomb because every licensed speaker of the second sense is dead, silenced, or absent, and the silence measures the extinction of Verona’s double language. The servants’ fellowship bawdy died with the street world of Act 1; Mercutio’s doctrine died with him at noon; the Nurse’s transmission failed when her counsel turned; Juliet’s equivocation has no interview left to survive. What remains in Act 5 is single, literal statement: a letter described, a report believed, a name misread, poison bought with gold. The audience trained for four acts to hear two meanings at once now watches a catastrophe assembled entirely from messages taken in one sense only, and the flatness of the hearing is the tragedy’s final instrument.