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Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World

Claire Guéron
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Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World, London, Bloomsbury, 2022, ISBN‏: ‎ 978-1350055490

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  • 1 References are to G. Blackmore Evans (ed). The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 199 (...)

1To many of us, Shakespearean insults have devolved into little more than pop culture artefacts, the stuff of coffee-mug inscriptions, T-shirt slogans, and internet memes. There is a playful appeal to such phrases as “thou greasy tallow-catch” (1Henry IV, 2.4.228)1 and “thou green sarcenet flap for a sore eye” (Troilus and Cressida, 5.1.31-2), phrases whose potency has become so diluted with time that amateur thespians can use them in vocal warm-ups, comfortably flinging them at each other without fear of offending. The strangeness of Shakespearean insults to our twenty-first century ears can make it easy to overlook the power Shakespeare packed into the injurious word, often making it a trigger of dramatic action and an emblem of a play’s agonistic structure. In The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin helps the reader see beyond the quaintness of Shakespeare’s insults, to their fundamental role in structuring characters’ relationships and identities, against a background of normative codes, laws, and habits.

2Vienne-Guerrin’s book is a sweeping, comprehensive and masterful work, which breaks new ground by bringing the full force of pragmatics, philology, and historical inquiry to bear on the issue of Shakespeare’s language of abuse, thereby recovering lost meanings, unlocking hidden contradictions, and restoring forgotten connections between the realm of injurious words and the realms of courtship, dueling, the market and the law. Vienne-Guerrin’s approach is a resolutely pragmatic one, emphasizing the effects produced by the insult, including mental anguish and loss of social status. Reception becomes the yardstick by which an insult is gauged, which allows the author to highlight the contingent dimension of the insult - its reliance on a network of social codes and on the specific situation in which it is uttered. This pragmatic approach is also an opportunity for the author to compare the effects of words and blows, and to explore the aftermaths of injurious speech, including trauma, revenge and legal action.

3One of the greatest strengths and originalities of Vienne-Guerrin’s book is its close attention to the construction and etymology of the word “insult” and its synonyms, including “injury”, “abuse”, “outrage”, “detracting”, “rating”, “noting” and “flyting”. Frequently harnessing her knowledge of French to track down a term’s Latin root and other etymologies, Vienne-Guerrin builds on the rich semantic field of insults to show how the plays associate injurious speech with broader fields of social experience. For example, the Introduction relates “insult” to its Latin origin in “saltare” (to jump), paving the way for a discussion of the relationship between verbal insults and physical action, a point later developed in Chapter 7. Similarly, in Chapter 6, the author teases out the polysemy of “rate”, as meaning both to “berate” and to “set a price on”, before proceeding to work out the economic implications of insults in The Merchant of Venice. This methodology acts as a thread throughout the book, offering fresh insights and producing delightful surprises along the way.

4The introduction, entitled “No abuse” (Falstaff’s propitiatory disclaimer to Prince Hal in 1Henry IV), outlines the concept of the “insulting effect”, coined by French sociologist Evelyne Larguèche as l’effet injure. This emphasis on effect points the way towards an exploration of Shakespearean insults in which meaning is rooted in the context of utterance, a notion that encompasses the dramatic situation, audience response and historical context. Contextualizing an insult naturally involves historical semantics, and Vienne-Guerrin’s etymological association of “insult” with “a leap of triumph” lays the groundwork for both the book’s emphasis on insult as a form of action, and for its etymological approach. The introduction also includes a discussion of “flyting”, a form of dialogue patterned on dueling, which may be genuinely confrontational (as in Richard III) or playful (as in Much Ado About Nothing). The term, now archaic, helps call attention to the uncomfortable proximity of insults and jests, and to Shakespeare’s dramatic exploitation of that proximity, mainly in his comedies and histories. Vienne-Guerrin makes the point that by dint of their ambiguity, dialogical nature, and proximity to physical action, insults are inherently theatrical, as the following chapters demonstrate.

5Chapter 1, entitled “The spectacular rhetoric of insult”, highlights this theatricality by exploring the rich imagery of Shakespearean insults, their festive associations, their reliance on hyperbole, and their easy inscription within the give-and-take of “flyting” dialogues. Taking Henry IV, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as its case studies, this chapter shows that the inherently entertaining value of insults comes in a range of tones, running the gamut from the playful to the cynical, from light comedy to dark satire. The chapter also discusses how Timon of Athens’s conflation of injurious speech with harmful actions (such as hurling mud or stones), emphasizes the performative power of insults.

6Chapter 2 explores the tonal shifts from playful banter to hurtful insult in Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the second play, the tonal shift is spatialized, as the green world away from court literally becomes a place of dis-courtesy, where compliments turn to insult. Through these modulations, the chapter demonstrates the ambiguity of insults, showing that the difference between praise and abuse often boils down to the intention behind the words, rather than the words themselves.

7The third chapter, centered on “insult and dueling codes”, demonstrates the extent to which the quarrels in Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night are underpinned by sixteenth-century Italian fencing master Vincentio Saviolo’s Practice (1595). Vienne-Guerrin expertly shows how Shakespeare exploited Saviolo’s painstakingly exhaustive breakdown of different-case scenarios to spin the common premise of an insult into plots of great stylistic and generic variety. In the process, she analyses the intricate interplay of word and deed involved in the shift from insult to dueling. Though words may count as deeds in the heavily coded chain of events that leads from a verbal provocation to a potentially deadly exchange of blows, verbal insults are distinct from both offensive gestures (biting the thumb) and offensive touch (the boxing of ears) in that they amount to an accusation. In the subtle friction of word and deed that may or may not lead to a duel, the broader issue of the status and power of words comes to light.

8In Chapter 4, Vienne-Guerrin explores an alternative to the duel: the lawsuit. Entitled “Insults as actionable words”, this chapter looks at the insult as a form of defamation, examining the slander plots and motifs in Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure against the backdrop of the late sixteenth-century surge in defamation lawsuits in England’s ecclesiastical and common law courts. This chapter sheds light on the plays by exploring the “thin line” (24) between slander and defamation on the one hand, and between “insult” and both of those categories on the other. Though thin, these lines were significant, as slander and defamation were originally prosecuted under different judicial systems (common law for the first and ecclesiastical for the second), while a mere “insult” was not actionable at all. This chapter shows how Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure reflect contemporary concerns about which words were actionable, in virtue of what, when spoken to whom, and which forms of punishment were appropriate. In Much Ado About Nothing, the Claudio-Hero slander plot unfolds within an ecclesiastical framework of sin and penance, while Dogberry’s insistence on legal redress for being called “an ass” is informed by debates over the legal status of insults. In Measure for Measure, a play full of casuistry and mistaken identities, the focus is on the circumstances which turn a light-hearted jest into an act of slander, or even of treason, the foremost of these involving the social and political status of the recipient.

9In Chapter 5, entitled “Insult and the taming of the tongue”, the focus is on unruly tongues – especially women’s – and the means of controlling them. Taking Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew as this chapter’s case studies, Vienne-Guerrin explores how these plays constitute malediction – cursing - as a means for female characters to infuse their insults with power. Because the cursing woman is either a shrew, a prophetess or a witch – and possibly a combination of all three – her tongue is a threat that must be contained. As Vienne-Guerrin demonstrates, the power of the female curse is worked into the plot of Richard III, where Margaret’s curses double as prophesies, foreshadowing (or bringing about?) sinister outcomes. Yet women’s curses are ultimately a sign of powerlessness, as they both substitute for action, and may result in punitive action against the curser. As Vienne-Guerrin concludes, the response to the scold’s cursing may be the greater form of abuse.

10Chapter 6, entitled “The trauma of insult”, argues that the damage inflicted by insults in Hamlet, Othello and The Merchant of Venice fits current clinical definitions of traumatic stress, in spite of the apparent anachronism. The power to inflict damage is partly suggested by weapon metaphors implying the materiality of words, but an insult’s power to hurt also has to do with its power to haunt. In this chapter, Vienne-Guerrin builds on Denise Riley’s theory of “aural flashbacks”, to demonstrate how post-insult trauma is registered by a “reverberation” or “buzzing” of the insult in the character’s mind. This goes for the word “whore”, which Desdemona keeps hearing in her mind after being so described by her husband, for “Jew” in The Merchant of Venice, and, on a more grotesque note, for “his meanest garment” in Cymbeline, after Imogen tells Cloten that she rates him no higher than that somewhat ill-defined item in Posthumus’s wardrobe. In Cymbeline, insults are associated with memory, not only because of the lasting hurt they inflict, but also because they have the power to wipe away one’s native good name and replace it with a name of infamy.

11Chapter 7, “Insult beyond words”, focusses on body language. Using Miranda Fay Thomas’s Shakespeare’s Body Language as a springboard, Vienne-Guerrin explores the way gestures and symbolic actions may function as insults in Henry V and King Lear. Though the chapter looks at insults “beyond words”, Vienne-Guerrin’s etymological and multi-lingual methodology stands her in good stead, allowing her to unearth hidden connections between terms and gestures of abuse. A wonderful example of this is her dissection of the “tennis-ball” scene in Henry V, where the bilingual “jest/geste” pun equates offensive jesting with an act of military aggression. In King Lear, the operative words are “outrage”, which establishes the “raging” storm as a cosmic insult, and “frontlet”, which constitutes a frowning face as an “affront”, another term for insult.

12The epilogue expands on the idea of Shakespeare’s plays as “a theatre of insults” and stresses that the ultimate effect of a dramatized insult depends on its staged performance. Vienne-Guerrin also discusses the relevance of Shakespearean insults, in all their elusiveness and ambiguity, to the fraught forum of our present-day digital conversations and to the ever-shifting landscape of which words are deemed offensive and which not. As illustrated by the newly crowned Henry V’s cold response to Falstaff’s greeting (“I know thee not, old man”; 2Henry IV, 5.5.47), so much depends on who is being addressed, when, and by whom. It is this dependence of the “insult effect” on the here and now of social and theatrical communication that makes the performance of Shakespeare’s insults so compelling.

13The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s World does a remarkable job of showing how tightly Shakespeare’s insults are woven into the fabric of his plays. Part and parcel of the dramatic action, insults also serve to tie together such apparently dissimilar forms of agonistic interaction as banter, dueling, brawling, warring, and litigating. More broadly, though, Vienne-Guerrin inscribes her study of Shakespeare’s insults within the larger framework of the playwright’s fascination with the power of words. This study, with its broad scope, solid scholarship, and original insights, shares with the best books in the field the ability to cast well-known plays and passages in a brand-new light. Eye-opening, informative and entertaining, The Anatomy of Insults should be required reading for anyone interested in Shakespeare’s language of insults, and ultimately, in Shakespeare’s language.

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Notes

1 References are to G. Blackmore Evans (ed). The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

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References

Electronic reference

Claire Guéron, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. The Anatomy of Insults in Shakespeare’s WorldMiranda [Online], 28 | 2023, Online since 13 October 2023, connection on 20 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/55903; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.55903

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