The word “quondam”, as any latinist will tell you, means “formerly”. It, like “i.e.” (‘id est’, or ‘that is’), “vice versa” and other Latin terms, was current in the English of Shakespeare’s time. It occurs twice, for example, in Henry VI part III: first, the keeper spots the “quondam King” (deposed Henry VI) and an opportunity to make a quick buck; whilst, later in the play, Warwick describes Henry’s wife as “our quondam queen”. Being a Latin (and legal) term, it also occurs in the overblown language of Nathaniel in Love’s Labour’s Lost, who talks of how he met “this quondam day with a companion of the king’s who is intituled, nominated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.”

The sense that “quondam” is a rather formal way of saying “erstwhile” or “formerly” can be traced in every one of Shakespeare’s uses of the word. However, the three other passages to be treated here also all link “quondam” with sex. Pistol promises that “I have, and will hold the quondam Quickly” in a rather physical riff on the marriage vows in Henry V; Hector, in Troilus and Cressida, bates Menelaus by telling him that Helen, his “quondam wife swears still by Venus’ glove / She’s well, but bade me not commend her to you”; and Benedick describes former ladies’ men as “quondam carpet-mongers” in Much Ado About Nothing.

This relation between “quondam” and sexual mores has been explored elsewhere. Some, for example, point to the obvious sexual reference when Chaucer’s Wife of Bath describes how men have always loved her “quoniam” to elaborate a theory about “qu-” words and their relation bawdiness (cf. the Elizabethan “quean”, for a prostitute). Elsewhere, and perhaps most interestingly, research suggests that “quondam” may lie behind the modern word ‘condom’: eighteenth-century Scots routinely replaced a “C-” at the start of English words formerly beginning with “Qu-” (thus ‘corter’ for ‘quarter’), and so could be found giving advice about birth control through the use of a “quondam”. Quite whether this can be extended back to Shakespeare’s time is still a matter of debate, although Hector’s comments about “Venus’ glove” do make for tempting evidence…

“Neapolitan” describes someone or something from Naples. The difference between the adjective and the noun is the result of the latter having evolved much more rapidly than the former. from its original Greek ‘neapolis’ (‘new city’) to modern Napoli or Naples. The city, despite a name that proclaims its newness, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with its most famous resident being the Roman poet Virgil, much beloved by Shakespeare. Little of this storied history makes it into Shakespeare’s plays, however, which tend to focus on more general stereotypes about Neapolitans.

In the Merchant of Venice, a Neapolitan prince is amongst Portia’s unsuccessful suitors, not least because he “doth nothing but talk of his horse”, leading Portia to quip that she is “much afeard my lady his mother play’d false with a smith”. Neapolitan ancestry comes up in much more serious terms in Henry VI part II, when York, captured by Margaret and her Lancastrian forces, curses her in defiance as the “Outcast of Naples, England’s bloody scourge”.

Portia’s wit about sexual infidelity, and York’s violent outburst come together in Thersites description of the “Neapolitan bone-ache” that he finds on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. The “bone-ache” is syphilis, and marks yet another less than flattering reference to Naples in Shakespeare’s works. When Lucentio suggests that he disguise himself as “Some Neapolitan” in The Taming of the Shrew in order to deceive his beloved’s father, Biondello, he must surely have got a laugh, given that such a choice of disguise inadvertantly implies sexual decadence and disease as much as Neapolitan wealth.

Despite all these ignominious Neapolitans, there is one character in Shakespeare’s works who goes some way to redeeming the city. That character is Gonzalo, the elderly councillor mocked by the other court members in The Tempest, but revealed to have been a friend to Propsero in exile, and thus, in the magician’s words, “A noble Neapolitan”, valued all the more for his contradiction of a stereotype:

PROSPERO By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, – who being then appointed
Master of this design, / did give us, with
Rich garments, linens ,stuffs, and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much: so, of his gentleness.
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me,
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

This word, which only occurs once in Shakespeare’s works, is a neologism, a new word invented by Shakespeare. Of course, it is far from being the only neologism in the bard’s works: we have Shakespeare to thank for the words “brittle”, “bump”, “countless”, “dwindle”, “eventful” and many more. “Kated”, though, is a rather special neologism since it is created from a proper noun, from Katherine, the shrew of The Taming of the Shrew. Thanks to the new Duchess of Cambridge, every British person and most of the world now knows, Kate is the familiar form of K/Catherine, and Shakespeare has taken this form, turning it first into a verb (to kate someone) before conjugating that verb as a past participle and inserting it into some banter between Kate’s sister, Bianca and her suitor, Gremio:

LUCENTIO Mistress, what’s your opinion of your sister?
BIANCA That, being mad herself, she’s madly mated.
GREMIO I wattant him, Petruchio is Kated.

This exchange occurs at the end of Act III, when Petruchio, declaring that Kate is “my good, my chattels … / My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” takes off with his wife from their own marriage celebration, leaving Bianca and the others in some consternation behind them. Brian Morris, who edited the play in 1981, hears an echo of Much Ado About Nothing in the sentiment that “Petruchio is Kated”, imagining “Kate” to be taken as some kind of disease in the same way that Beatrice fears that Claudio has “caught the Benedick”. Another possibility, entirely of my own invention, is the similarity between ‘Kate’ and ‘cates’, the latter referring to a choice food or delicacy, with the punning sense here that Petruchio does not want a marriage feast, but would rather enjoy his Kate/cates elsewhere.

Either way, this single word is rich with meaning, and is perhaps best understood as a sly joke on the similarities between Kate and Petruchio, which ultimately lead to one of the warmest relationships in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. With this in mind, perhaps “kated” should, like some of the playwright’s better-known neologisms, take up its place in our everyday speech, describing the moment when someone meets their match in matrimony. Now is an apt time for such an undertaking: after all, an obvious example in 2011 would be “Prince William is Kated”.

There are two hundred and twenty five defintions of the word jump, as adjective, noun, and verb, in the OED, many of them now obsolete (compare Merriam-Webster’s three). Shakespeare only uses the word fourteen times, but the way in which he does shows a marked divergence between modern usage and his own. Personally, jump for me will always be associated with leaps and bounds. This is also true of the sonneteer Shakespeare, who writes that “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, / Injurious distance should not stop my way; / … / For nimble thought can jump both sea and land”; and for Falstaff, describing how both Poins and the young Prince Hal both jump “upon joined stools” in Henry IV part II.

Rather less common nowadays than the sense of a jump over, away, or to something, is the meaning of “jumping” as “coinciding”. Shakespeare uses it frequently. In The Taming of the Shrew, the devious Trantio tells his fellow marriage-conspirator, Lucentio, that “Both our inventions meet and jump in one”; Viola, in Twelfth Night, recognises her brother because the elements of his story, “place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump / That I am Viola”; and the Prince of Arragon, suitor to Portio in Merchant of Venice, proves his egoism by choosing the golden cask and declaring that “I will not jump with common spirits”.

This sense of coincidence and similarity in “jump” is also found in its adjectival/adverbial usage, meaning “coinciding, exactly agreeing; even; exact, precise”. On the battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus tells Horatio that the Ghost has appeared “twice before, and jump at this dead hour”; and Iago plots to bring Othello “jump when he may Casio find / Soliciting his wife”.

Other uses of the word include: the sense of ‘chance’, as Caesar, facing down Antony’s Egyptian army, declares that “our fortune lies / Upon this jump”; and to surprise-attack, or set upon, as Coriolanus calls upon those in his public audience “That love the fundamental part of state / More than you doubt the change on’t; that prefer / A noble life before a long, and wish / To jump a body with dangerous physic / That’s sure of death without it.” However, perhaps the most memorable use of the word jump comes in what now passes as one of the bawdiest speeches in Shakespeare’s oeuvre: a rustic servant describing the not-so-innocent wares of Autolycus the courtier-peddlar in The Winter’s Tale, with a rhyme between “jump” and “thump”:

SERVANT He hath songs for man or woman of al sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves: he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos’ and ‘fadings’, ‘jump her and thump her’ [...]

Only three mentions of this rare wood occur in Shakespeare, twice in Love’s Labour’s Lost and once in Twelfth Night. The word itself could and still can refer to any of several different varieties of timber, found in India, Africa, and Indonesia. These valuable woods were extensively exported by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, but even by the end of the sixteenth century a rich trade in Ebony flourished in Antwerp and Paris. One legacy of this trade is the fact that French people still call cabinet-makers “ébéniste” to this day. As with ‘alabaster’, mention of ebony evokes rich blackness, ornament and beauty, as well as worldwide trade.

It is the blackness of ebony that most interests Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Feste the clown (disguised as Sir Topas the priest) tortures the imprisoned Malvolio with a nonsensical description of the steward’s surroundings.

FESTE Say’st thou that the house is dark?
MALVOLIO As hell, Sir Topas.
FESTE Why it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complain’st thou of obstruction?

The joke of course is that Feste accurately describes the “barricadoes” and ebon darkness of the prison, only to draw the conclusion that the “barricadoes” are “transparent” and the ebon “clerestories” (church windows) are “lustrous”. In reply to this, Malvolio can only insist that “I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you this house is dark.”

The uncomfortable comedy of Feste torturing Malvolio is far removed from the use made of “ebony” in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the word is used by the King of Navarre to describe Berowne’s beloved Rosaline.

KING By heaven, thy love is black as ebony!
BEROWNE Is ebony like her? O word divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.
O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack
If that she learn not of her eye to look.
No face is fair that is not so full of black.

Whereas Feste was busy contorting his language to befuddle Malvolio, Berowne’s ornamental punning is aiming straight for courtly wit. To understand him, it is necessary to recall both the value of ebony and the fact that blackness might also be shameful (cf. Malvolio’s “[black] As hell” above, or Gertrude’s “black and grained spots” of guilt in Hamlet). Consequently, the King’s “black as ebony” pulls two ways: beautiful as ebony yet ugly as blackness. Berowne takes this doubleness as improvises upon it, emphasising the beauty of darkness, and particular of Rosaline’s dark eyes. Elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works similar reconstruction of blackness takes place: the dark lady of the Sonnets is praised, for example, with the comment that “now is black beauty’s successive heir”. Shakespeare’s near contemporary, Philip Sidney, also praised dark beauties, focussing like Berowne on the beloved’s eyes. Stella in Astrophil and Stella (1592) is thus possessed of eyes “in beamy black”.

Overall then, blackness is the dominate feature of ebony when it appears in Shakespeare’s works, with the added complexity occuring when Berowne uses its beautiful, ornamental properties to challenge (like Sidney) other preconceptions about blackness in the period. I should probably mention Othello at this point, but would rather avoid a lengthy article.

The word “alabaster” is now part of an established style of poetic language, and has been since Shakespeare’s time. However, this does not mean that there is nothing to say here: for example, there are in fact two kinds of alabaster, gypsum and calcite. The former constitutes modern alabaster and the latter that of the ancients and Shakespeare. This calcite alabaster was an oriental material, widely used for ornament, and it is in this decorative aesthetic way that the word appears, for example, in Shakespeare’s description of Venus holding Adonis’ hand as “ivory in an alabaster band”. Similarly, Lucrece’s beauty is blazoned with the aid of the mineral.

What could he see but mightily he noted?
What did he note but strongly he desir’d?
What he beheld, on that he firmly doted,
And in his will his wilful eye he tir’d.
With more than admiration he admir’d
Her azure veins, her alabaster skin,
Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin.

In contrast to Venus and Adonis, this portrayal of Lucrece is rather disturbing, made through the eyes of Tarquin, her future rapist. The reference to alabaster in the final line, along with coral and azure (originally another name for lapis lazuli), all contribute to render Lucrece an object and an ornament in Tarquin’s view, something to be possessed. Calcite alabaster has two specific properties that may also be relevant here: it resists water, but can be marked with a knife (Lucrece, of course, after many tears eventally commits suicide with just such an implement); and it was once used for windows. The translucent properties of alabaster are perhaps active here since a central theme of the poem is Lucrece’s sense of her own vulnerability, her feeling that her violation is plain for all those who “[pry] through my window” to see.

Sinking deeper into the menacing possibilities of alabaster, we come to Othello, who vows that “I’ll not shed [Desdemona’s] blood; / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster”. He keeps his promise, but still suffocates his beloved at the play’s conclusion. The “monumental alabaster” differs from other uses of the mineral in relation to ornament, and is typical of Othello’s tendancy to aggrandise (see Wilson-Knight on “the Othello music” for a long description of this). Alabaster was used on monuments as well as ornaments, namely tombs and effigies, because of the ease with which it might be carved. When Othello speaks of “monumental alabaster”, a macabre note is sounded.

There is a darker appearance of the word, than even Othello’s, however: it comes in Richard III and Tyrrel’s soliloquy describing how the two young princes were murdered at the king’s orders. “Thus…girdling one another / Within their alabaster innoent arms / …We smothered / The most replenished sweer work of nature.” These lines unite the ornamental littleness of alabaster (the children’s fragility), its whiteness and translucency (their innocence), and its macabre usages (their murder).

To conclude, I turn to the fifth, final and cheeriest usage of alabaster in the canon. Gratiano’s speech to his friend Antonio about his passionate nature, and his subsequent rejection of alabaster and all that it represents in The Merchant of Venice. His lines set him apart in the play, distinct from Antonio’s anxieties and Shylock’s macabre plots, themselves the true analogues of alabaster. After all, Antonio’s ships may well have been carrying the precious mineral.

GRATIANO Let me play the fool;
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come;
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
Why should a man whose blood is warm within
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster,
Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice
By being peevish?

In 1592, Robert Greene provided what many now take to be crucial evidence of Shakespeare’s rise to fame in the London theatre scene when he mentioned, in his Groats-worth of Witte that

…there is an upstart Crow, beautiful with our feathers, that his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke vierse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceite the onely Shake-scene in a countrey..”

There is much to be discussed here, but – noting only that “Johannes fac totum” means something like ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ (‘Johnny-do-it-all’) – I shall concentrate specifically on the now famous description of Shakespeare as an “upstart Crow”. In particular, I shall reveal how Shakespeare himself uses the word, both to illuminate Greene’s insult and, as ever, to explore the myriad-mindedness of our playwright.

There are fifty uses of the word “crow” in the plays and poems, but not all of them refer to the bird. For example, neither Friar Lawrence nor Antipholus of Ephesus make use of avian assistance to break down, respectively, the door of the Capulet monument or that of their own house, but rather demand what we now call a ‘crow-bar’, so named for its resemblance either to the bird’s beak or talons.

When the crow does appear in Shakespeare’s writing, it is not to its beak nor its talons but, as with Greene, to its feathers that reference is often made. Punning, for example, on the senses of crow as bird and bar, Dromio asks his master if he wants “A crow without feather” to break down the door of his house in Ephesus. Elsewhere, the blackness of the crows’ plumage is made to carry a whole range of meaning: its “sable” places it amongst the “mourners” of the Phoenix and the Turtle, and Autolycus sells “Cypreis black as e’er was crow” to the rustics of The Winter’s Tale. “Our feathers” that Greene accuses Shakespeare of stealing, are thus to be taken as something that covers a colouring strongly associated with not just death and mourning, but more nastily, both ugliness (for Romeo, Juliet is a beautiful dove amongst crows) and corruption (the rapist Tarquin is compared to a “crow” in Lucrece).

Corruption and blackness is not just limited to moral depravity, but also disease: the crow’s colour fits its larcenous activities, and Shakespeare repeatedly portrays the crow as a battlefield scavenger. York boasts that he has made Clifford “prey for carrion kites and crows” in Henry VI part II, Grandpré describes the birds hovering over the English forces at Agincourt in Henry V, and Pandarus invokes them on the battlefield of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. Although such a portrayal of the crow as scavenger fits Greene’s purposes in calling Shakespeare an “upstart Crow”, aligning him with both the repulsive and the unromantic elements of martial society, the fact that Greene claims that Shakespeare has stolen his and others’ feathers also portrays Greene as one of the crows’ habitual targets, namely carrion. Of course, this is not to Greene’s purpose, but the extension of the metaphor seems a neat defence of the bard if not the bird.

It is in The Merchant of Venice that Shakespeare uses the bird for more moral ends, illustrating this time Portia’s support for a judgment that takes into account all mitigating circumstances. Such a use of the crow, although dependent on less flattering representations for the power of its reversal, is nevertheless proof of Shakespeare’s inventiveness. These lines take the symbolism of the crow, evident elsewhere in the plays and poems, and viciously employed by Greene, and then add to it in a new and unexpected way: the point that the crow is only criticised when heard (“attended”) is, one is tempted to say, a response to Greene, whose angry slur is also praise of Shakespeare, since it proves his rise through the cultural echelons of his day.

PORTIA The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark
When neither is attended; and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season’d are
To their right praise and true perfection!

This article could have been about the verb, which is used to describe, variously, Jupiter’s eagle (in Cymbeline), Berowne’s stereotypical lover (in Love’s Labour’s Lost), and the dangerously ambitious Worcester (in Henry IV part I). However, I will continue to mine the rich depository of Shakespeare’s foodstuffs and concentrate on the noun. It occurs eight times, almost always in the mouths of comic characters. Twice, for example, we find it spoken by figures the folio stage headings call “Clown”: a shepherd in The Winter’s Tale and Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure.

Before we discuss these passages, I would like my reader to imagine a prune. In Elizabethan times, this subspecies of plum was served dried as a delicacy. Small, round, and wrinkly, it seems to have been considered reminiscent of a testicle. Pompey, describing the quite possibly fictitious visit of constable Elbow’s wife to a house of ill repute, says that “she came in great with child; and longing – saving your honour’s reverence – for stew’d prunes”. The prunes in question, on which Pompey dwells so fulsomely as to drive a frustrated Angelo from the court, are a transparent reference to male sexual favours, underlined by the use of “stew’d”, a culinary term synonymous with low-life and immorality.

The simple shepherd, although in conversation with the far from pure Autolycus (famous now as an early purveyor of the “dildo”) is not quite so lewd as Pompey when it comes to fruit. Whereas Pompey details how Mrs Elbow supposedly sat “cracking the stones of the foresaid prunes”, the shepherd innocently thinks about the feast’s need for “four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’the sun”. Note that these are fresh prunes (in contrast to the sun-dried grapes), and thus, one imagines, less prone to insalubrious insinuations.

My last reference to prunes is given to us by Falstaff, a frequent figure in these articles, not least because of his great appetite for food and drink. Participating in the ‘Pompey’ tradition, the old knight tells the Hostess that “There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune”, where “stew’d prune” is the fruity synonym of ‘prostitute’. In Henry IV part II, the same equivalence lies behind Doll’s tyrade against Pistol, when she, in the presence of Falstaff and others, accuses the hot-blooded captain of living “upon moldy stewed prunes and dried cakes”. Of course, only one of these nouns actually refers to a foodstuff, and so Doll’s phrase provides a final example of how objects answering one bodily need may represent the satiation of another, and thus a whole network of moral judgments founded on the humble “prunus domestica”.

This word, used twenty-two times (including the stage directions) in Shakespeare’s works, does not refer to a piece of furniture, but rather a profession. You would, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, find drawers in a tavern, drawing. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, puns on the many meanings of the verb.

MERCUTIO Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says ‘God send me no need of thee!’ and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.

The ‘drawer’, of course, refers to the barman, the ‘tapster’, who – as the OED puts it – “draws liquor for customers”. Mercutio’s banter with Benvolio puns on the differing situations of drawing a sword and drawing a pint: strangely, his is the only use of the word that does not occur in a scene with Falstaff, another character very able to distinguish between swords and beverages. That said, it is not Falstaff who speaks about drawers in these scenes, but rather his royal companion, Prince Hal.

PRINCE. I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers; and can call them all by their Christian names, as, Tom, Dick, and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy; and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack, like Falstaff, but a corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy,–by the Lord, so they call me;–and, when I am King of England, I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.

For Hal, the drawer is more than an unremarkable figure useful for a pun but nor more like he is for Mercutio. Instead, the drawer represents another world, that the young prince enters into with both a wry smile and an eye on his future role as king. This speech occurs early in Henry IV Part I, and is paralleled by another episode in Part II where Hal and Poins disguise themselves as Drawers to trick Falstaff. This comic venture then becomes more serious when Hal becomes King Henry and, on the eve of Agincourt, once more alters his dress and blends in with the common people, culminating with his dawn meditation on “ceremony”. That great speech has its roots here in the tavern, where the prince’s fascination with the many echelons of society, the trappings of a profession and the “Tom, Dick and Francis” beneath them, begins with “a leash of drawers”.

“Good dawning to thee, friend: art of this house?” So Oswald greets the disguised Kent in King Lear, providing us with the first of eight uses of the word “Dawn” in Shakespeare’s works and a neat example of his own superciliousness. By calling Kent (disguised and serving as one of Lear’s entourage) “thee”, and not the more polite “you”, Oswald immediately gets off on the wrong foot. Kent replies to the greeting with a laconic “Ay”, and then precipitates a brawl with a man he knows as “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats” and much more. Oswald’s morning begins badly, and Kent – much to the humiliation of the former King – finishes his in the stocks.

The little episode between Kent and Oswald functions by betraying the hope and freshness that a new morning represents. Their brawl is yet another sign of the erosion of Lear’s power. In contrast to this, the disguised Duke Vincentio – another leader who delegates his power, albeit more successfully than Lear – reassures the Provost, with a statesman’s eye for symbolism, that “As near the dawning .. as it is, / You shall hear more ere morning”. This intimation is part of a sequence of night-time scenes in Measure for Measure, during which the disguised Duke unravels the orders of his corrupt deputy, Angelo, and so saves Claudio from execution for adultery, even as he prepares his own reappearance in Vienna. Frequent references to the fact that “it is almost clear dawn” rush the audience through a sequence of scenes that culminate with the final Duke’s dispensation of justice “like power divine”.

From dawn, to sun, to God, the same sequence of thoughts runs through another leader who disguises himself: Henry V. Wrapped in a common soldier’s garb, he reprises a theme of his sleepless father’s in Henry IV pt II, musing on “Ceremony” before the battle of Agincourt. Just as his father contrasted the poor “ship-boy’s” capacity to sleep in a storm when “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, Henry V imagines the slave

…Who with a body fill’d and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm’d with distressful bread,
Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
But, like a lackey, from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,
Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,
And follows so the ever-running year,
With profitable labour, to his grave…

Hyperion was one of the Greek titans, ultimately associated with the sun in Greek mythology, and here by Shakespeare. This personification of the sun as Hyperion also makes both sun and titan similar to King Henry, who will simself soon be helped “to his horse” by a servant. Hyperion, as a titan, was cast down by the younger Gods (the Olympians, led by Zeus against Chronos), and one cannot help but wonder whether the King’s comparison between himself and the sun-titan does not also carry a hint of night-time anxiety. After all, his father was “uneasy” under a crown that he took from a weak Richard II.

There are other dawns in Shakespeare’s works, but I will not analyse them in such detail as these three mornings. Many of these other examples are sinister: Titus Andronicus, in words that become very ironic indeed, praises the morning of the hunt which will finish with his daughter raped and mutilated; Marcellus, trying to work out why the Ghost disappeared at the start of Hamlet, describes the cockerel’s role at “dawning”; and, finally, Iachimo, having stolen Imogen’s bracelet, crawls back into the trunk to await the dawn and the fulfilment of his plot in Cymbeline.

Sinister or not, all these examples are part of one of the most complex stage illusions of Shakespeare’s works: the compression of time. Criticised for this by later neoclassicists like Rymer, his use of little words like dawn or night, or phrases like “The clock hath stricken three” (a very anachronistic moment in Julius Caesar), alert us to shifts of time as much as other phrases alert us to shifts of place. With these words, though, comes more than additional detail, but an atmosphere. After all, Iachimo’s nascent plot is all the more powerful for proceeding just before dawn, and Henry V’s battleside worries soon dissipate with the coming light. Later, facing down a French messenger, the young King delivers a celestial threat, which operates not on the pale light of morning, but the stifling warmth of midday.

A many of our bodies shall no doubt
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work:
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be famed; for there the sun shall greet them,
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.