Shakespeare’s bawdy

A couple of selections from Eric Partridge’s book on the bawdy in Shakespeare.

“Flatulence was, in Shakespeare’s day, the source and the target of humour and wit among all classes: nowadays, its popularity as a subject is, in the main, confined to the lower and lower-middle classes and to morons elsewhere. The days when, as at the end of the 17th century, a pamphlet dealing with noisy venting and written by a pseudonymous Don Fartaudo could be published and enjoyed and when the ability to play tunes by skillfully regulating and controlling one’s windy expressions was regarded as evidence of a most joyous and praiseworthy form of wit, – such days have ‘gone with the wind.’”

On Hamlet’s “buz buz” to Polonius: “Hamlet, already possessed of the news, as, referring to Roscius, he subtly shows the far from subtle Polonius, is irritated by the old busybody’s stupidity: to indicate his irritation, he makes that ‘rude noise,’ imitative of the breaking of wind, which, from probably even before Shakespeare’s days, had been ‘the groundlings’ means of showing their disapproval of bad acting, and thus repeats his intimation that he new knew all about the arrival of the actors. When Polonius, thinking that this unexpectedly course ‘raspberry’ . . . signifies the prince’s disbelief, solemnly avers, ‘Upon mine honour,’ Hamlet puns on the word honour [‘on her’] and impugns Polonius’s conception of honour by saying ‘The came each actor on his ass,’ thus passing from wind-breaking to the source of the noise.”