Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  In 1596, though, Harington had mocked this custom as “French,” pretty much the worst insult an Englishman could throw at something in the Renaissance without resorting to sirreverence. Harington suggests that multiseat privies are going out of fashion, that the most socially acceptable way to defecate is in privacy. A woodcut from his Metamorphosis illustrates this new custom of performing one’s bodily functions in private, while pointing out the potential dangers of such solitude—the devil comes to annoy the defecator. Harington was a member of high society, a courtier and Queen Elizabeth’s godson, and was ahead of the curve. He extolled the virtues of the private privy long before the country family, rusticated more than a hundred miles from London, thought to be ashamed of their bodily functions and started to discuss the day’s events at the breakfast table, not in the shithouse.

  For true privacy, a wealthy person could repair to his or her closet. In the Renaissance, this was not the room for storing clothes or books or your grandmother’s sewing machine, but a small room like a study, used for reading or prayer. According to historian Mark Girouard, “it was perhaps the only room in which its occupant could be entirely on his own,” since servants would likely be present even in a bedchamber. Closets, and the solitude they represented, were at first an elite phenomenon, seen only in the houses of the wealthy. But, as Thomas Gyll shows, the idea of privacy actually did trickle down. People of the middling and lower sorts also participated in the “Great Rebuilding,” adding rooms to their houses where, eventually, they would seek to be alone.

  These architectural changes are tied up with the development of privacy and the feelings of delicacy and shame we’ve linked to it. Some historians, such as Nicholas Cooper, suggest that “evolving civility showed itself in the desire for greater privacy and the need for more rooms”; others reverse the causation and see the increased number of rooms as creating spaces in which the modern notion of privacy could develop. Either way, privacy is inextricably linked to the advancing threshold of shame. Just as people started to wall themselves off physically from others in their new rooms, they began to wall themselves off psychically, as it were. Privacy created what we’ve seen Elias call “the invisible wall of affects,” and with it the embarrassment and shame at the sight or mention of bodily functions that medieval people lacked.

  A solitary defecator from The Metamorphosis of Ajax. The motto Sprinto non spinto is perhaps best translated as “I go quickly, I don’t push or strain.”

  The shame threshold trickled down too, like the idea of privacy, spreading from the upper classes to the middling and lower sorts. At first it was offensive to expose oneself or to use obscene language only if it was done before people of greater rank. In his influential treatise on manners, Galateo (1558), Giovanni Della Casa dictates that

  one should not sit with one’s back or posterior turned towards another, nor raise a thigh so high that the members of the human body, which should properly be covered with clothing at all times, might be exposed to view. For this and similar things are not done, except among people before whom one is not ashamed. It is true that a great lord might do so before one of his servants or in the presence of a friend of lower rank; for in this he would not show him arrogance but rather a particular affection and friendship.

  Della Casa is not talking about sexual relationships here. He means that it would be a sign of “condescension”—a mark of favor—to let a social inferior get a glimpse of, say, your balls. He introduces the (to us) quite foreign category of “people before whom one is not ashamed.” At this point, in 1558, one could feel shame before equals or social superiors, but not before “inferiors” such as servants or even friends of lower rank.

  The idea that people could be ashamed only before their social superiors led to some interesting fashion choices in the Renaissance. In portraits, Queen Elizabeth is buttoned up and surrounded by ruffs, poufy sleeves, and symbolic attributes of virginity, such as sieves and moons (symbols of Cynthia/Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt). In life, she liked to show her breasts to the French ambassador. André Hurault, envoy of King Henri IV, recorded his meetings with the queen in great detail, including one occasion when “she kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom, and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot.” Another time “she had a petticoat of white damask, girdled, and open in front, as was also her chemise, in such a manner that she often opened this dress and one could see all her belly, even to her navel.” Hurault does not appear to record this with shock or even particular interest (he does note that “her bosom is somewhat wrinkled,” but in the same tone in which he reports that she had pearls hanging down on her forehead, “but of no great worth”). Elizabeth’s behavior was not a desperate attempt by a batty old woman to hang on to the threads of her sex appeal (she was sixty-four years old at this point) but was a gracious sign of condescension to her social inferior.

  Under Elizabeth’s successors James I and Charles I (until Puritans put a stop to the practice after the Revolution), women also routinely bared their breasts in court masques. These were plays put on by a combination of professional and amateur aristocratic performers; Queen Anne (James I’s wife) and Queen Henrietta Maria (Charles I’s) themselves took part. The architect Inigo Jones designed many of the costumes, and the drawings he made of his designs show clearly that many aristocratic bosoms were on display at these events.

  Lavatorily, the same thing went on. Petitioners who sought to speak to James I could judge their perceived importance from the room in which the king received them. There was a hierarchy of chambers, starting with the public spaces for common visitors and ending with the king’s closet. It was condescension, in the good, old-fashioned sense, if the king received someone before he got up from bed; it was only those petitioners who were kept to the more public throne room and audience chambers who might have reason to worry about their status and their requests. John Harington relates the story of another ambassador, this one a Venetian in France, who “hearing a Noble person was come to speak with him, made him stay til he had untied his points; and when he was new set on his stool, sent for the Noble man to come to him at that time; as a very special favour.” The ambassador untrusses his trousers and sits on his closestool—only then is he ready to receive his honored guest. Harington, though, disparages this as a “French courtesie,” like the “French pox” (syphilis). The ambassador, like the family at Chilthorne Domer with their multiseat privy, is behind the times. According to Harington’s elite courtly standards, receiving someone while defecating is turning from gracious condescension to insult; defecation is turning into a private matter.

  A dress for Queen Henrietta Maria, designed by Inigo Jones for the masque Chloris in 1631.

  As the years progressed, society agreed more and more with Harington and less and less with the Venetian ambassador. As distinctions of rank became more fungible, and as the middling sort acquired the material prosperity to emulate the aristocrats, the number of people in front of whom one had to be ashamed—to censor one’s behavior and language—increased. By the eighteenth century, even kings and queens felt shame before their inferiors. Everyone began to be ashamed before everyone else.

  The New Obscenity

  As the shame threshold marched forward, obscenity became increasingly prevalent and important in the Renaissance. Dictionary makers such as Thomas Elyot had thought long and hard about it, in particular about which words should be avoided, while those such as Florio and Palsgrave almost reveled in the abundance of wanton words. In the wider literary world, some authors seem to have been more on Elyot’s side, and some to have followed Florio. This lack of a consistent standard can be seen in the prefaces to the editions of two different poets, Chaucer and Homer, published at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century, Chaucer was beginning to be thought of as England’s founding poet, its answer to the great Greek and Latin authors—Homer, Virgil,
Horace, and others—of antiquity. Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer was intended to burnish further the reputation of the medieval poet, who is “no less worthy than the best of them amongst all the Poets of the world.” Speght had a problem, however, in that some of Chaucer’s language, as we saw so many times in the previous chapter, fell into the new category of obscenity. Speght had to defend his decision to reprint Chaucer’s work at all, let alone make him out to be the founding father of English literature. Though Chaucer “is somewhat too broad in some of his speeches,” Speght’s preface admits, he is no more nor less obscene than the famous Roman “good authors” Ovid and Catullus, who were revered at the time. His obscenity—unremarkable in the Middle Ages—is by 1600 almost, but not quite, enough to disqualify him as England’s premier poet.

  In 1616, George Chapman published what he hoped would be the definitive edition of Homer, who had long been established as a canonical poet, perhaps the canonical poet. It is thus something of a surprise to read, in Chapman’s preface, his attack on “a certain envious Windfucker.” This person, Chapman complains, has spread rumors that he has translated Homer from Latin editions rather than from the original Greek. Windfucker is, arguably, just as bad a word as anything in Chaucer. (In Victorian editions of Chapman’s Homer, it is replaced with Windsucker.) If on one hand Speght must explain away Chaucer’s broad language while on the other Chapman can insult someone as a “Windfucker,” it seems that there was no agreement about which words were acceptable and which were not in this period, even in such a narrow genre as literary prefaces to the works of canonical poets.

  Playwrights were quick to take advantage of the new obscenity, but again the line as to which words were acceptable and which were not was blurry. Plays in this period, as any reader of Shakespeare knows, are full of double entendres (words or phrases that can be understood in two senses), puns, and other plays on obscene words. You can open Shakespeare’s collected plays to just about any page and find dirty jokes and obscene innuendos; here is a tiny, tiny sampling. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a Welshman examines a boy on the Latin “focative” (vocative) case, obviously a play on fuck. When, in the same play, a Frenchman announces, “If dere be one or two, I shall make-a de turd [third],” the Welshman replies, “In your teeth: for shame!” “Turd in your teeth,” as we learned from the grammar school textbooks of the previous chapter, was a popular expression of defiance. In Henry V, there is an extended scene in which the French princess Katherine tries to learn some English and discovers that words innocuous in English are obscene in French. Pied is “le foot,” as she pronounces it (sounding like the French for “fuck”), and la robe (the gown) is “le count” (cunt). Katherine is shocked by this and declares, “O Lord, those are bad words, wicked, coarse, and immodest, and not proper for well-bred ladies to use!” The title Much Ado About Nothing puns on “much ado about an o thing,” o being Elizabethan slang for le count. Hamlet’s line to Ophelia, “Do you think I meant country matters?” is so direct it almost doesn’t qualify as innuendo. Her reply, “I think nothing, my lord” also plays on an o thing, or at least that’s the way Hamlet takes it when he responds, “That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.” Pretty much anything that might be bawdy in Shakespeare is bawdy, including the puzzling “to fill a bottle with a tun-dish” (sex; a tun-dish is a funnel), “to hide his bauble in a hole” (sex), and “to change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail” (nobody is really sure what this one means, but it must have something to do with sex because cod, as in codpiece, means “scrotum,” and tail means “genitalia,” either male or female).

  As bawdy as he is, Shakespeare never employs a primary obscenity. Other Renaissance dramatists had fewer qualms about using them, however, like Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson. In his plays you get, to name just a few, “Windfucker,” as well as “turd i’ your teeth … And turd i’ your little wife’s teeth too,” “Marry, shit o’ your hood,” and “Kiss the whore o’ the arse.” As with literary prefaces, it seems, there was no accepted standard of what sort of language was appropriate for drama.

  Renaissance drama is an especially interesting place to examine the period’s attitudes to obscenity, because we have fairly extensive records of its censorship. Plays were licensed for performance and sometimes for print by the master of the revels, a functionary appointed by the king or queen. Theater companies had to submit every script to the master, who looked it over and decided whether it was fit to be performed. Sir Henry Herbert left the most complete records, covering the years 1623 to 1642, and from his comments we can infer that what rendered plays unfit was, first of all, too pointed political commentary or scenes that might offend powerful people; second, oath swearing; and only then obscenity. The master had in fact a legal duty to censor oaths in plays. In 1606 Parliament had passed the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, which made it illegal to “jestingly or profanely” use God’s name onstage. Any expletives involving God’s name—by God, God’s blood, and even the minced forms ’sblood and zounds (God’s wounds)—were forbidden in drama. (In 1623, “profane oaths” were banned in real life as well, on penalty of a fine, or of the stocks if a swearer could not pay.) You can see this 1606 law reflected everywhere in printed playbooks. Since printed editions of plays were often based on the scripts used by actors, plays published before 1606 tend to contain a great deal of swearing; those published after, very little. In The Famous Victories of Henry V (1598), Prince Hal and his friends can’t get through two lines of dialogue without an oath. Here is a speech by the prince, early in the play:

  Gogs [God’s] wounds how like you this Jockey?

  Blood [God’s blood] you villains my father robbed of his money abroad

  …

  Gogs wounds you lamed them fairly.*

  Shakespeare’s own Henry plays, which were based partly on The Famous Victories, also contain a fair number of oaths, including zounds and ’sblood. By the time his later tragedies are published, however, zounds and ’sblood have disappeared, and in plays such as Othello, most references to God have been replaced by references to heaven.

  Sir Henry Herbert is so concerned about oath swearing in the drama he is charged with regulating that he is willing to risk a formal disagreement with King Charles I. As was his usual practice, Herbert had cut the oaths from a play, The Wits, written by the courtier William Davenant. Davenant and his friends complained to the king, who called Herbert into his rooms and told him that “faith and slight [were] asseverations only, and no oaths.” Herbert has no choice but to allow these words into the play, since the king has commanded it, but he records his disgruntlement in his book: “The king is pleased to take faith, death, slight for asseverations … [but I] conceive them to be oaths, and enter them here, to declare my opinion and submission.” There is no question of God’s blood or God’s wounds being allowed in a play by this time, in 1633. Herbert feels strongly that even the most mild of minced oaths should be censored, but he cannot cross the king. And so playgoers received the pleasure of hearing faith, death, and slight used by various characters more than a hundred times when they saw The Wits.

  Herbert once burns a play he receives “for the ribaldry and offense that was in it,” but scholars argue that he censored the play more for its “offense”—political satire—than for its bawdy language. Scholars argue that obscenity alone was not reason enough to ban a play in this period. The first acknowledged case of censorship on grounds of obscenity occurred a century later, with the prosecution of Edmund Curll in 1727. (He was accused of “obscene libel” and “disturbing the King’s peace” by publishing the pornographic novel Venus in the Cloister.) More often, Herbert links “ribaldry” with oath swearing, as in “oaths, profaneness, or obsceneness,” or “oaths, profaneness, and ribaldry.” These two kinds of bad language often appear together, and both must be avoided. In this respect, Herbert’s attitude is closer to the Victorian than to the medieval. In the Middle Ages, we have seen, the sins of the ton
gue were numerous and varied, from scolding your neighbors to singing hymns of praise with too much expression. By the nineteenth century these “sins” have been narrowed down to two, which are almost constantly associated, as they are in Herbert’s record book—oaths and obscene language.

  What best sums up the period’s mixture of oaths and obscenity, its shifting combination of Holy and Shit, is a religious group from the 1650s called the Ranters. Ranters are like witches—the popular imagination had a firm image of them, and many tracts were written that revealed their evil dealings, but it is unclear whether anyone actually self-identified as one. Ranters, it was thought, believed that God manifested himself in each individual believer; therefore, any impulse a person had was holy. It thus became impossible to sin, and the Ranters became the seventeenth-century id let loose. They had orgies, they masturbated in public, they kissed each other’s naked buttocks, they entered polygamous “marriages.” One of their songs prefigures the 1960s sentiment of “Love the One You’re With”: