The word occurs seven times in Shakespeare, in comedies, tragedies, histories and late plays, but it is not with Shakespeare, but rather the King James Bible that I want to begin. Matthew 7:3 to be precise:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thy own eye?

Or in other words, do not make fun of another’s imperfections when you are blind to your own. Modern Bibles give: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your eye?” This then allows us to see a certain irony in Demetrius’ comments on the mechanicals’ play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

DEMETRIUS A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe, is the better.

Demetrius is, of course, criticising a poor performance, but his choice of ‘mote’ to describe the actors’ merits suggests that he may have his own problems when it comes to observation. After all, earlier in the play, he has received the “love-juice” in the play, something rather more than a “mote”.

Some similar irony occurs in a famous scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here, almost all the male characters manage to overhear each other’s love-sick wailings, except for Berowne who manages to pour out his heart in solitude and then, taking refuge in a tree, to listen in on everyone else’s. His hypocritical position becomes very clear when he starts talking about motes…

BEROWNE But are you not asham’d? nay, are you not,
All three of you, to be thus much o’ershot?
You found his mote; the king your mote did see;
But I a beam do find in each of three.

This scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost with the association of infatuation and the mote / beam of weakness, leads to a rather more sober use of the word in Shakespeare’s long, tragic poem, The Rape of Lucrece:

Their smoothness, like a goodly champaign plain,
Lays open all the little worms that creep;
In men, as in a rough-grown grove, remain
Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep:
Through crystal walls each little mote will peep:
Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks,
Poor women’s faces are their own faults’ books.

Here, Lucrece describes the position of women as being fatally open, as beings whose every weakness is exposed to men, whilst those men, using violence and “bold stern looks” can – hypocritically – disguise their own, most likely larger, flaws (the wooden beams that the motes of dust imply). This being Shakespeare, the biblical language is combined with traditional allegory of “grove” and “cave” to describe error and danger, as well as intense self-referentence to this literary Lucrece being like a “book”.

My final example is simple, but useful as a conclusion. It comes from Pericles, and is used not describe any kind of hypocritical position, but rather the smallness of the dramatic characters themselves, as small as motes of dust.

GOWER Like motes and shadows see them move awhile;
Your ears unto your eyes I’ll reconcile.

Of course, as my earlier example showed, motes are never far from beams, and the tiny object one sees in another may suggest that one is missing something much larger. When Gower speaks these lines then, as the chorus in Pericles, and uses them to describe dramatic art, are the audience meant to wonder about their own position, the possibility that they too might be actors? All the world’s a scene…

If we include ‘basilisco-like’ in King John (I.i.244), there are nine recorded instances of ‘basilisk’ in Shakespeare’s works, and an additional four uses of the synonym ‘cockatrice’. A fabulous serpent said to be hatched from a cock’s egg and able kill with a glance (or with its breath) (OED 1), the cockatrice or basilisk is an appropriate point of comparison for the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III) – as his own mother grimly acknowledges:

DUCHESS.
O ill-dispersing wind of misery!–
O my accursed womb, the bed of death!
A cockatrice hast thou hatch’d to the world.
(Richard III IV.i.54)

But in fact Gloucester got to the analogy first; ruminating on the living obstacles between himself and the crown in Henry VI, Part III, the would-be King prophesies:

I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk.
(III.ii.187)

Another Shakespearian villain associated with the mythological serpent – again, somewhat prophetically – is Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece: the mortal consequences of the rape are anticipated when his lustful gaze is compared to ‘a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye’ (l. 540). But it is especially fitting that Gloucester should bear the comparison twice. ‘Basilisk’ derives from the ancient Greek for ‘king’, the serpent being named, according to Pliny, for the spot on its head resembling a crown (cf. ‘basilisk’, OED 1). Medieval tradition bestowed a more explicitly crown-like comb or crest on the legendary serpent’s head, so that the basilisk really was a giant lizard wearing a crown – Richard III indeed.

‘Basilisk’ was also a type of very large cannon used from the Middle Ages until the sixteenth century (OED 3), so called because, like the legendary serpent, it had a habit of wiping out everything in view (one particularly famous basilisk, now housed at Dover Castle and weighing over two tonnes, is nicknamed ‘Queen Elizabeth’s pocket pistol’). There is mention of a military basilisk in Henry IV, Part I (II.iii.53), but of greater interest, perhaps, is the moment in Henry V when we see the two meanings of the word conflated:

QUEEN ISABEL.
So happy be the issue, brother England,
Of this good day and of this gracious meeting
As we are now glad to behold your eyes;
Your eyes, which hitherto have borne in them
Against the French that met them in their bent
The fatal balls of murdering basilisks.
The venom of such looks, we fairly hope,
Have lost their quality; and that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
(V.ii.12-20)

Lastly, it may be worth noting that Shakespeare resisted any bawdy puns on cockatrice, and made nothing of the association between basilisks, pocket pistols, cannon shot, and monarchical power…

Contributed by Victoria Coldham-Fussell

As the festive season draws on, let’s join the revelry by exploring the choicer morsels from Shakespeare’s ten recorded uses of the word ‘cake’. Most famous is Sir Toby Belch’s riposte to Malvolio in Twelfth Night:

Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

“Cakes and ale” is an example of the rhetorical device of hendiadys, the use of two concrete nouns to stand in for a wider abstract concept: here, having a good time. (“Slings and arrows” is the other famous Shakespearean example of hendiadys.) The device’s tendency to stick in the head is shown by the fact that Shakespeare uses it again at the very end of his career, when the Porter in Henry VIII complains:

Belong to the gallows, and be hang’d, ye rogue! Is this a place to roar in?… Do you look for ale and cakes here, you rude rascals?

The OED cites Sir Toby as one of the earliest examples of cake being used “figuratively in obvious allusion to its estimation (esp. by children) as a ‘good thing’” – it’s a sign that the word was now firmly accepted in England as referring specifically to sweet pastry, as opposed to any sort of small, flat loaf. It’s not surprising that a mind like Shakespeare’s began to use this connotation of sweetness as a basis for innuendo. In Henry IV Part II, Doll adds some sauce to the word ‘cake’ by connecting it with another type of food served in brothels:

He a captain! hang him, rogue! he lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes.

And, at the opening of Troilus and Cressida, the bawdy Pandarus insists that Troilus needs to be as patient and hard-working while wooing Cressida as he would be while baking (not that the Trojan War left much time for the latter):

…here’s yet in the word ‘hereafter’ the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking; nay, you must stay the cooling too, or you may chance to burn your lips.

Eat, drink and be merry indeed…

For actors, directors and scholars, Shakespeare’s use of ‘ha’ is no laughing matter. Given that laughter is never included in stage directions, it’s not always clear whether the appearance of ‘ha! ha! ha!’ in dialogue is meant to represent genuine spontaneous laughter or something forced, sarcastic, even sinister. Justice Shallow’s reaction to the unfortunately-named Robert Mouldy in Henry IV Part II (III.ii.106) seems to be genuine enough. However, when Cassio comes out with it three times in Othello IV.i, in response to Iago’s claim that he will marry Desdemona, a laugh that he intends to sound dismissive has quite the opposite effect on Othello who overhears it. Titus Andronicus‘s ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ has to be a genuinely mad response to the butchery that he sees around him, but recognisable enough for Marcus to ask him ‘Why dost thou laugh?’ (III.i.264) And I haven’t even mentioned Lear’s response to his Fool… (I.v.14)

Perhaps what’s so scary about these instances of tragic laughter is that, in plays where power is bound up in the characters’ ability to manipulate language, seeing them resort to the inarticulacy of laughing is a terrifying sign of slipping out of control. Also not insignificant is the similarity between ‘Ha, ha, ha’ and ‘Sa, sa, sa’, a fencing term (from the French: ‘ca, ca, ca’ ) uttered during the sword’s thrust. In the contemporary The Revenger’s Tragedy, the protagonist Vindice (who has earlier come out with a rather forced laugh while disguised as Piato) shouts this as he finally stabs a victim.

I have just been out running, and, having confirmed Corin’s knowledge that “the property of rain is to wet”, decided to write about some of Shakespeare’s fifty-six uses of the word “rain”. Surprisingly few of the uses of the word actually describe literal precipitation: Borachio in Much Ado invites Dogberry and company to “Stand thee close then under this penthouse, for it drizzles rain, and I will, like a true drunkard, utter all to thee”, whilst Banquo’s murder is prefaced by his guess that “It will be rain tonight”. In both cases, as with the Sentinel’s complaints in Henry VI pt I, the description of the rain serves to create an impression of isolation be it dangerous, miserable, conspiratorial, or – as in The Merry Wives of Windsor – absolutely ludicrous:

FALSTAFF My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of ‘greensleeves’; hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.

A world away from Falstaff’s ejaculation, but still part of the many imprecations hurled to the heavens in Shakespeare is the famous speech of King Lear’s where meteorological and psychological phenomena are dangerously confused:

LEAR Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children…

This speech serves also to demonstrate the metaphorical uses to which the rain can be. Later in this very rainy play, Lear speaks of “woman’s weapons, water drops”, and the conflation of tears and rain is to be found throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Titus Andronicus, himself another tortured patriarch, is fond of the trope, as is the Duke of Gloucester (future Richard III) when he tries to woo Anne with a series of affecting scenes.

Sometimes the comparison of tears to rain is extended to other properties of precipitation. Demetrius in Titus demonstrates his geological knowledge when he advises his mother to make her heart like unto an “unrelenting flint to drops of rain” before the tearful Lavinia. Sonnet CXXXV urges the Dark Lady to be bountiful through reference to the hydrogen cycle between airborne rain and accommodating ocean. Finally, Lady Percy, in Henry IV pt II, vows to so weep over her husband’s grave that she will nourish new growth there.

With that last, fairly positive, example, this catalogue shall finish. Before I conclude, it is worth remembering that the (impoverished) majority of the Globe’s audience would be exposed to the elements, as would the actors, so that Shakespeare’s lines on the weather may have sometimes had an unexpected resonance. Even today, it is hard not to wryly smile at Feste’s song when it is performed on a waterlogged outdoor stage. Yet I will remain positive, and conclude by citing perhaps the most poignant description of the rain in all of Shakespeare, one that draws its force from the peculiarly ambiguous moment it describes, halfway between clear skies and grey:

GENTLEMAN Not to a rage: patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
Were like, a better day: those happy smilets
That play’d on her ripe lip seem’d not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence
As pearls from diamonds dropp’d.–In brief, sorrow
Would be a rarity most belov’d, if all
Could so become it.

This is a common word in Shakespeare, with over two hundred hits in the Open Shakespeare search engine. Needless to say, I’m not going to go through all of them, but concentrate on one aspect of the word which has been a little lost over the centuries. Our starting point will be an innocuous little line from Romeo and Juliet:

PARIS Younger than she are happy mothers made.

Now, let us leave this line from Paris’ argument with the Capulet about his marriage chances, and head back two thousand years to Ancient Greece, and three goddesses called Thallo, Arxo, and Carpo. These three goddesses were collectively called the Horai, the plural of the word ‘Hora’, which is best translated by our English word, ‘Hour’. This should not be too surprising, given the resemblance between the Attic word and our own. What is important here, though, is not the word ‘hour’ but the word ‘happy’.

The Horai had many roles in the long and tangled course of Greek mythology, but they are consistently representative of times of life and of growth. From this, the ‘Horai’ become those goddesses who represent many things which make humans happy: Thallo means ‘one who brings blossoms’ (youth); Auxo, ‘one who brings increase’ (wealth); and Carpo, ‘one who brings food’. In the Greek tradition, happiness and timing are inextricably linked.

Skipping forward a few thousand years, and across a few thousand kilometres brings us to another example of the link between time and emotional state. In French, the word for ‘hour’, and occasionally ‘time’, is ‘heure’. Put that word next to the French for happiness, ‘bonheur’, or for ‘happy’, ‘heureux’, and the resemblance is obvious. Now, back to the debate between Lord Capulet and Paris:

CAPULET But saying o’er what I have said before:
My child is yet a stranger in the world,
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years;
Let two more summers wither in their pride
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
PARIS Younger than she are happy mothers made.

It is a debate, of course, about both time and happiness. Capulet’s language looks back to the fertility roles of the original Hours/Horai with his use of “summer”, “ripe”, and even “wither”. Meanwhile, Paris’ reply picks up all these themes and the parental concerns behind them with the apparently simple “happy”. Juliet will, in Paris’ eyes, be both a contented mother and one made a mother at a good time.

Thus concludes our journey through Ancient Greek mythology, French happiness, parental concern, and juvenile eagerness. All to resurrect an ambiguity that is more common than one might think. After all, one notes a certain similarity between ‘happy’ and ‘happen’. To finish then, here is a small smorgasbord of such ambiguous moments where emotion and timing are inextricably linked:

Two Gentlemen of Verona

VALENTINE My lord, I will be thankful
To any happy messenger from thence…

Richard III

ANNE God give your graces both
A happy and a joyful time of day!

Henry VI pt.3

KING EDWARD The harder match’d, the greater victory;
My mind presageth happy gain and conquest.

Henry V

HENRY V And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

This is the latest in a long and fruitful liaison between this series of articles and all the fauna of Shakespeare’s works. If you join us here, do venture back and hunt down Shakespeare’s parrots, sharks, lapwings, and – if one accepts cooked animals – capons.

Now, the whales. Nine of them no less, although none of them are presented on the stage. Two of the occurrences are, in fact, about a whale in the sky. I refer of course, to the increasingly ludicrous menagerie that Polonius and Hamlet see in the shape of clouds:

HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET Or like a whale.
POLONIUS Very like a whale.

Brief aside for keen Shakespeare naturalists: here are two of the six appearances of the word ‘weasel’, and, similarly, two out of six Shakespearean camels.

Back to the whales, about which there is much more to inspire than the obviously ironic emphasis on their cetacean spines. They are for example, notorious examples of large and very hungry creatures, feeding endlessly on a diet of frail and helpless plankton. They thus helpfully illustrate many a situation of exploitation. Parolles, in All’s Well comes up with this inspired equation of virgins and protozoans:

PAROLLES My meaning in’t, I protest, was very honest in the behalf of the maid; for I knew the young count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds.

Whilst in the rather more maritime Pericles, the hungry whale appears not once, but twice, not this time as a virgin devourer but as a “rich miser” who “plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful”, and then, free from metaphor, as a “belching” part of the ocean that Pericles fears will swallow his wife’s corpse.

‘Swallow’, ‘belch’, ‘devour’, and big-backed are not only ways of describing whales, but also of portraying people. It is Mrs Ford, in The Merry Wives of Windsor who asks, “What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?” The person in question here is – who else? – Falstaff, a man well-deserving of such a gargantuan comparison.

Completely at the other end of the scale from Falstaff, we have one example from Troilus and Cressida, and one from Love’s Labour’s Lost. In the former, the whale is used to describe Hector’s non-Falstaffian valour, whilst in the latter it is the whiteness of whalebones that Berowne uses as a measure of Boyet’s brilliant teeth.

Last but not least, King Henry IV seizes upon the whale as an image that unites both body politic and the humours of his own son, the future king.

KING HENRY His temper, therefore, must be well observed:
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclined to mirth;
But, being moody, give him line and scope,
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working. Learn this, Thomas,
And thou shalt prove a shelter to thy friends,
A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,
That the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion–
As, force perforce, the age will pour it in–
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong
As aconitum or rash gunpowder.

The “hoop of gold” rather neatly returns us to the whale-watcher with whom this odyssey began: Polonius – himself, like Henry IV, an anxious father – and his most famous speech.

POLONIUS Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.