Virtual Grub Street: Tudor Trivia Tuesday: All-Shakespeare Edition.

It's time for a special Tudor Tuesday Trivia!!!
Every item is from or about Shakespeare!!!

In this series:

All-Shakespeare Edition #1.
All-Shakespeare Edition #2.

1) Shakespeare’s character Romeo describes an apothecary shop in Romeo and Juliet, V.i.:

And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,

An alligator stuff'd, and other skins

Of ill-shap'd fishes ; and about his shelves

A beggarly account of empty boxes,

Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,

Remnants of pack-thread and old cakes of roses,

Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.

The scene could serve for a modern film set of a magician’s workshop. As well, it would seem, for a typical apothecary shop.

2) When Bottom asks the name of a fairy, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i.185-90, and is answered “Cobweb” he replies:

I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb; if I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you.

This refers to the 16^th century (and earlier) practice of using cobwebs to cover small cuts much as we use bandaids.

3) At great dinners or feasts the company was usually arranged into fours, which were called messes, and were served together, the word came to mean a set of four in a general way. [Nares] Thus, in Love’s Labours Lost IV.iii.220, Shakespeare writes:

Berowne. That you three fooles, lackt mee foole, to make up the messe.

4) The godparent of a child in the 16^th century often gave the child its Christian name. Thus, Shakspere of Stratford-Upon-Avon’s son Hamnet was named after his godfather Hamnet Sadler. Sadler’s wife Judith was godmother to Shakspere’s daughter Judith.

5) In The Winter’s Tale, IV.iv.278, the shepherdess, Mopsa, says, by way of straight-line for the shepherd-Clown:

Come you promis'd me a tawdry-lace, and a paire of sweet Gloues.

Tawdry was the common pronunciation of “Saint Audrey”. Tawdry-lace referred to lace bought at the annual fair of Saint Audrey, on October 17^th. The fair was especially known as a place to buy gaudy knick-knacks and gewgaws in which unsophisticated country folk delighted. “Sweet gloves” was the common term for perfumed gloves.

“At the Fair of St Audry, at Ely, in former times, toys of all sorts were sold, and a description of cheap necklaces, which under the denomination of tawdry laces, long enjoyed great celebrity.” Chambers's Book of Days (October 17).

6) In Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.105-7, Shakespeare wrote of the dead Antony:

For his Bounty,

There was no winter in't. An Anthony it was,

That grew the more by reaping

The strange, seemingly inexplicable use of Antony’s name is actually a stunning metaphor on the Classical Greek ΄Ανθóνομος [Anthonomos], a flowering, that which nourishes flowers.

7) ‘[A] tailor’s goose was a jocular name for his pressing-iron, probably from its being often roasting before the fire, an allusion to which occurs in "Macbeth" (ii. 3): "come in, tailor; here you may roast your goose."’ [Dyer]

8) In Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.345-6, Bottom offers that his amateur acting company will dance for the entertainment of the Duke:

Will it please you to see the Epilogue, or to heare a Bergomask dance, betweene two of our company?

Bergamasque is the common designation of a citizen of Bergamo, under subjection to the city state of Venice during the second half of the 16^th century. According to Thomas Hanmer “All the buffoons in Italy affect to imitate the ridiculous jargon of that people; and from thence it became a custom to mimic also their manner of dancing.” This, together with the company’s acting from a synopsis rather than a script, and set “epilogue” immediately available as occasion presents itself, suggests that Bottom’s company is meant to depict an Italian comedy troop much as the Gelosi that performed in England in 1576. (See my “The Fascinating Itinerary of the Gelosi Troupe, 1576.” for more.)

9) When Hamlet says

methought I lay

Worse than the mutine[er]s in the bilboes. (Hamlet, V.ii.5-6)

he is referring to leg shackles with an intervening iron bar. These shackles were made in the metal works of Bilboa, in Spain. Falstaff again refers to a “Bilbo,” in the Merry Wives of Windsor, III.v.98-9:

compassed, like a good bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head.

This again refers to the Spanish city of Bilboa but not to the shackles. This refers to the sword that became popular in England around 1600 (about the year the play was written). The common use of the word to indicate the shackles would seem to have fallen out of use some 10 years earlier.

10) Shakespeare’s character name “Ophelia” was taken from the name of a shepherdess in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Italian pastoral poem Arcadia (c. 1480). The Arcadia was wildly popular in mid-16^th century English literary circles and influenced a number of Shakespeare’s early plays and the works of Sidney, Spenser and others.