How Profane were Shakespeare and his Peers?

Vincent A. Kennedy | University of Kent 

In the somewhat alien verse and prose of early modern plays, a beginning reader may find themselves remembering not the moving speeches nor contemporaneous jokes, but the rude parts that made them laugh; lists of Shakespeare’s insults are plentiful and easily searchable online. While his contemporaries might not be so fortunate to have dedicated corners of the internet for their audience-pleasing parts, one needs only come across the cunning Volpone’s ‘turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-farticall rogues’ line once to remember it. 

A form of rude language that has little presence in our modern world, though, is that of profane oaths. What makes an oath profane is that it is, in historian John Spurr’s words, ‘sworn in inappropriate circumstances, to support a lie or a frivolous statement. It is a breach of the third commandment’s ban on the misuse of God’s name’. The impact of profane oaths is no longer the ‘common knowledge’ it was in Shakespeare’s day, and sensitivity has shifted around the language used to rudely swear. We still laugh at the phrase used by the three Vices in the anonymously authored Medieval play Mankind, as they sing how man ‘shitteth with his hole’. One could also be excused for being surprised the way satirist Thomas Nashe refers to the common kestrel in his writing – it is one letter ruder than the later-used name of ‘wind-sucker’ – but we regard blankly the emphatically spoken profane oath, ‘Sblood!’.

Early Modernist Hugh Gazzard examines the change in profane oaths following the 1606 ‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players.’ A censorship imposed upon the theatre, the Act threatened a fine of ‘tenne Pounds’ should anyone performing on stage ‘prophanely speake or use the holy Name of God, or of Christ Jesus, or of the holy Ghost, or of the Trinitie’. Gazzard also collates a sample of nouns against which these holy names could be sworn: ‘wounds, blood, bones, sides, body, heart, nails, foot, feet, arms, finger, flesh, guts, nostrils, tongue, eyes, light, life, death, soul, fast, passion, mother, truth’.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries have variations in their spellings, though. The playwright Christopher Marlowe, for example, has a plethora of alternate spellings for his surname; it is sometimes ‘Marlow’ (written by himself), sometimes ‘Merlin’ (Cambridge University records used this), sometimes ‘Morley’ (as his father was commonly named on legal documents). We can also see spelling variation in profane oaths, further widening the range of rude language. For example, the recognisable ‘God’s’ becomes ‘gog’s’, ‘dod’s’, ‘gad’s’, ‘ud’s’ or even just ‘’s’.

Far from the modern English speaker swearing with one of a handful of regularised terms, if we want to find out who the most profane playwright is, we must somehow account for various matchings-up of words. I acknowledge that this analysis may not catch every profane oath sworn in the plays by Shakespeare and his peers, but the list of words to search for, formed from Gazzard’s valuable collation above and supplemented by my knowledge, provides a good sample. We have a manageable collection of phrases that occur either wholly or mostly as profane oaths that should be countable in a play, allowing for quantitative computational analysis. We will combine knowledge of theatre history with the digital humanities technique of distant reading to locate, quantify and visualise the results. The opposite of close reading, distant reading, a term coined by literary historian Franco Moretti, is analysing literature at a vast scale to locate patterns. Through doing this, we can demonstrate empirically that Shakespeare has fewer instances of certain profane oaths than average. Our Bard is not too profane, but who amongst Shakespeare’s peers uses the most profane oaths? 

An extract of code from the XML file of Hamlet. The words of the play, in white, are held between tags that each contain information relating to that word. Note the ‘lemma’ attribute – we will meet it shortly. (File Credit: The Folger Shakespeare, CC BY-NC 3.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en]).

To prepare to answer this question, we create a corpus of 363 plays, from 1570 to 1660, sourced from the Folger Shakespeare and the Folger Early Modern English Drama (EMED) digital anthology. The plays included in this corpus are those for which encoded XML files are present that include specific tags that assist with analysing different parts of speech. This transforms the play into a structured document of code, where each act, scene, or even word can be ‘marked up’ with extra data. Shakespeare’s famous line ‘To be or not to be – that is the question’ transforms into code full of data, as in the image below. 

Using the Python package BeautifulSoup, we can navigate through this XML. However, we don’t want the raw words in the plays. As we saw above, spelling isn’t regularised in the Early Modern period, and many of our files retain original spellings. While we could run a program to regularise the spellings, we will adopt an alternative method which utilises a secret weapon already present in these XML files: every word tag contains a lemma, which can be understood to be the ‘root’ of a given word. Therefore, the mutated ‘gad’ and ‘ud’ share the root, or lemma, ‘God.’ 

We can now extract the lemmas of each word, count the number of profane oath phrases as they would appear lemmatised, and export the results. Along with the totals, we also calculate the average frequency of oaths per play for each playwright. Without this, playwrights who either wrote more plays, or for whom more plays have survived, could have only one profane oath per play, but have a very high total. Finally, we filter out playwrights who had fewer than three plays each included in the corpus: some dramatists, such as Tomas Lodge and Samuel Rowley, do not have enough data in this corpus from which to conclude their use of profane oaths. Similarly, some plays are written collaboratively and would need more analysis. However, frequent collaborators, such as John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, are included in the results due to the frequency with which they wrote together. 

Graph displaying total frequency of profane oaths and average oaths per play for 25 playwrights, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others. (Credit: Author).

George Chapman, dramatist behind the tragedy Bussy D’Ambois, appears to be a great user of profane oaths: he has the highest frequency of profane oaths overall, with 159 counted in his 14 plays. City comedy writer and classicist Ben Jonson is next in line, having a massive 138 profane oaths in only five plays. Equally successful playwright and poet Thomas Middleton comes third, with 108 profane oaths in 13 plays. Shakespeare sits at 83 across 27 plays.

The top three most profane dramatists in this case. Thomas Middleton (left) - by Unknown artist; pen and ink, engraved 1795 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG D19970). Ben Jonson (centre) - by Abraham van Blyenberch; oil on canvas, circa 1617 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2752). George Chapman (right) - by William Hole (Holle), after Unknown artist; line engraving, published 1616 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG D2941). (Credit: National Portrait Gallery [https://www.npg.org.uk/], with images under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]).

To get a fuller picture, let’s also examine the average of profane oaths per play for each playwright: where Chapman was in the lead with the highest frequency, Jonson has a staggering lead in this metric. Chapman’s 12.23 oaths per play is dwarfed by Jonson’s 27.6 across only five of his plays. Middleton and Dekker are jostling for third place with almost the same average, but Middleton wins out: he has 8.3 profane oaths per play versus Dekker’s 8.25. As further evidence of Jonson and Chapman’s rife use, we can turn to the play they wrote collaboratively with John Marston, Eastward Ho! This play contains a huge 26 profane oaths overall, bringing it up in line with the two most profane dramatists in this group.

However, this is not the whole story. These results offer a simplified view and succeed in texturing the dramatists behind these Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. However, we have only counted the oaths that are present on the page. Of course we have: how can something that is not there be counted, or discounted?

I wish to introduce from this study the complexity of early modern theatre and how a play’s journey from pen to print is a battle of transmission: what the dramatist originally wrote may not be the same as what gets printed and what later ends up being analysed. What is lost is just as important and, in this case, what could be lost is the true count of a playwright’s profane oaths. It is all too easy to fall into speculation within the topic of document loss, however, so let’s turn our attention to what evidence we do have and thus give an indication of the hidden complexity of the topic. Our most profane dramatist, Ben Jonson, is by far the most transparent example. A writer with a keen interest in his own theory of authorship, he has left us with much to examine regarding the effect of transmission upon the presence of profane oaths.

An unfolded printed sheet of a quarto. Folded twice and printed on both sides, one large sheet of paper transforms into four leaves (hence ‘quarto’), with eight pages of print in total when folded. The text is printed in a manner to form the correct order once the sheet is folded. An octavo is folded a third more time, resulting in eight leaves (hence ‘octavo’), and 16 pages of print. (Credit: ANCHORA by Adam G. Hooks [http://www.adamghooks.net/2012/07/in-quarto.html], with image under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]).

Plays were typically first printed in cheap editions called quartos or octavos (sometimes written 4o or 8o respectively), the names relating to the number of leaves after paper was folded, which also affected their size. Jonson, being deeply invested in the print process, made many textual changes to his plays to prepare them for a wider readership. These are authorial changes, but what do we lose by having them?

I would informe you, that this Booke, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the publike Stage, wherein a second Pen had a good share: in place of which I haue rather chosen, to put weaker (and no doubt lesse pleasing) of mine own, than to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my lothed vsurpation.

               This is Jonson’s opening ‘To the Reader’ paratext in the first quarto printing of his play Sejanus from 1605. The text printed is not the same as what was acted, because Jonson has seen fit to remove the sections by the ‘second Pen’. The work of this collaborator, identified as likely to be George Chapman, is lost. With no extant manuscript of the original play, Jonson’s authorial change here has sliced away at Chapman’s canon. We also lose here another text in which to trace the pair’s joint profane oath use.

Jonson’s 1616 volume of his Works is a significant moment in print. Preceding Shakespeare’s First Folio by several years, Jonson ignored the ridicule that came his way and succeeded in presenting plays as serious works of literature in Early Modern London. In this text, many religious oaths and other passages that may have been considered offensive were changed, if not entirely removed, perhaps in response to the ‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’ from 1606, among other contemporary factors. In one play, The Alchemist, we can see some of these changes. ‘By Gad’ in the quarto version becomes the non-profane ‘By Jove’ in the folio, and ‘’Sblood’ is swapped for the milder oath ‘’Slight.’

However, scholars are divided on whether it was Jonson or the printers who made these changes. If it was Jonson, this is another example of authorial decision making; if it was the printers, though, then this brings us to the factor of compositor agency. Those who arranged the type for printing are just as capable of either making mistakes, or electing to change something, as those who copied out plays by hand in the theatre. Paul Werstine, for example, points out six instances in one of John Fletcher’s plays where the theatrical scribe Edward Knight chose to expand contractions, while creating a poor copy as he struggled to make his sheet of expensive parchment attractive despite his mistakes. The agency of these vital individuals in the transmission of play texts may have greatly impacted our understanding of early modern plays today, even through making minor changes.

Even long after these playwrights lived, changes can still be made. Shakespeare’s works were heavily altered in the nineteenth century by Thomas Bowdler, from whose name the term ‘bowdlerising’ comes, meaning: ‘to remove words or parts from a book, play, or film that are considered to be unsuitable or offensive.’ The Family Shakespeare, apparently more suitable for women and children, is not used by scholars today but remains an example of textual changes being made because of contemporary censorship.

In asking how profane Shakespeare and his peers were, I invited you to engage with a simple question with an answer derived from quantifiable data. Armed with a plausible answer, now I invite you to consider the words we cannot see, that did not survive this process of transmission, and which cannot be counted.

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Further Reading:

• Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

• Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

• Hugh Craig and Arthur Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

• Tiffany Stern (ed.), Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

• Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (eds.), Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare’s Time (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Vincent is a digital literary historian with a focus on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama currently working towards his PhD at the University of Kent. The topic, Christopher Marlowe’s Lost Copy-Texts, aims to uncover possible features present on the non-extant manuscripts that preceded print editions of Marlowe’s plays through computational analysis of Early Modern print culture, theatrical document transmission and scribal habits. He is also interested in developing scholarship around Shakespeare’s contemporaries and furthering responsible, sustainable and ethical use of digital techniques and computational methods as a crucial and viable branch of humanities scholarship.

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