It is the sort of headline that makes you do a double take: “Shakespeare accused of causing misery to people with skin conditions,” says the Independent; “Is Shakespeare to blame for our skin worries? Insults about sores, boils and moles may be behind lasting stigma, claims study”, adds the Daily Mail.
The stories are based on a research paper from dermatologists [PDF] in Nottingham, Leicester and Derby, “Is Shakespeare to blame for the negative connotations of skin disease?” Shakespeare, they point out, was no stranger to insults derived from skin troubles: “Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle,” we hear in King Lear, while rhinophyma – I had to look that up, it’s a big red nose – “seems to have triggered Shakespeare’s sense of humour: likening the resultant erythema to the glow of a lantern: ‘thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire night. Thou has saved me a thousand marks in links and torches’ (Henry IV)”.
Shakespeare “uses these negative undertones to his advantage, employing physical idiosyncrasies in his characters to signify foibles in their behaviour: ‘since the heavens have shaped my body so, let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it’ (Richard III); ‘patch’d with foul moles and eye-offending marks … then I should not love thee, no, nor thou become thy great birth, nor deserve a crown’ (King John).”
Disease, the researchers state, “was rife in Elizabethan England; visible signs of illness led to stigmatisation and pejorative connotations followed.” Shakespeare’s works, meanwhile, “have survived the intervening centuries”, leading them to ask: “has his success led to the perpetuation of Elizabethan negativity towards skin disease?”
Well – it’s a stretch, isn’t it? And it sort of assumes we might not have noticed that skin diseases aren’t exactly the most pleasant thing in the world, if it wasn’t for Mercutio gasping “A plague on both your houses”, etc. As the blogger Shakespeare Geek puts it: “In other news, Shakespeare’s popularity is also responsible for cross-dressing, bed-tricks and the occasional regicide.”
It does give me a chance, though, to roll out probably my favourite Shakespearean insult – also from King Lear and addressed by the Earl of Kent to the villanous Oswald. I seriously don’t think it can be topped.
“A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.”
Poor old Oswald. Time for a paper on whether Shakespeare is to blame for our poor perception of knaves, maybe?
The Guardian Book Blog 1/7/2014
