WS ABC Shakespearean insults

After a month's break, I'm back. Please continue to read, enjoy and comment thereon. David.

Warning! You are advised that this page should not be read by anyone under the age of 40 - the age that the Kabbalah deemed a person to be fully and mentally mature!

First of all, we'll start off with a surprising fact. Our William never used the f-word in any way at all, (noun, verb, adjective or gerund) in any of his plays even though this very useful piece of vocabulary was in use during his own lifetime. However, when he did want to insult anyone in his plays, the unfortunate victim of his invective was certainly sure to know that he had incurred the speaker's displeasure. (Oh, how mealy-mouthed!)

I mean, how would you feel if someone said the following to you in the way that Lear screams at his daughter, Goneril?

Thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle,
In my congealed blood.

Or would you be insulted if someone used the following at you like when Prince Hal calls Falstaff:

A huge hill of flesh, a trunk of humours, that boiling-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly.

And once you have got over the picture of the Bard sitting in his Shoreditch (London) garret enjoying himself hugely as he puts quill to paper and chuckling quite happily to himself, you will notice that in the above, there are no 'rude' or insulting words. It's just that the whole is fantastically greater than the sums of its own individual parts. 

Other examples include such gems as:

Slave, soulless villain, dog!

Let's meet as little as we can.

More of your conversation would infect my brain.

Away! Thou art poison to my blood. 

And the above are mere one-liner insults.
 How about four-liner like the following one from The Comedy of Errors?

He is deformed, crooked, old and sere,
Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere;
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind;
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.

Now throw THAT at someone and they'll really know that you are not pleased with them!

In his book, William Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Bill Bryson says our William didn't use profanities [blasphemous] language to curse and that in comparison with his rival, Ben Jonson, the Bard was quite "prudish." I'm not sure I would agree that the man from Stratford was a prude [extremely proper, correct and easily shocked] but he never used Jonson's turn of phrase and refer to farts etc.

Next time: More about insulting and sexual language.

If you can guess where the above quotes come from, please write to me at: wsdavidyoung@gmail.com