Shakespeare’s plays contain an awful lot of puns, which often don’t impress modern readers. This could be due to several reasons; firstly, like a lot of comedy, puns require a visceral, instinctive reaction. If a joke has to be explained, it loses a lot of its punch, and that’s doubly true of puns. They rely on a sudden link being shown between two ideas which have previously been completely separate. If those separate ideas haven’t been long established in the audience’s mind, the explosion which should occur when they are “short-circuited” just won’t happen.
Puns are also regarded as a simple and unsophisticated form of humour in modern English. Doctor Johnson held a similar opinion, describing the pun as Shakespeare’s “Cleopatra”, the fatal weakness which led him to waste his chance at greatness. This was not the case in the Renaissance, when a good pun was a highly rated weapon in the poet’s armoury. Much of the witty and religious poetry of the “metaphysical” school of poets, such as John Donne and George Herbert, relies upon conflating meanings within a pun.
Shakespeare uses puns and wordplay for various different purposes:
Gag puns
These are just jokes – they have no other justification than raising a quick laugh, and tend to attract groans when performed today. A good example would be Launce and Speed’s exchange in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, just after Launce has been criticising his dog, and Speed is advising him to hurry in case he misses the boat:
Speed: Away, ass! You’ll lose the tide if you tarry any longer.
Launce: It is no matter if the tied were lost; for it is the unkindest tied that ever any man tied.
Speed: What’s the unkindest tide?
Launce: Why, he that’s tied here, Crab, my dog.
An actor needs a strong constitution and a lot of nerve to put a gag like that across these days.
Bawdy puns
Despite most school editions refusing to acknowledge the fact in their notes, Shakespeare’s works are full of dirty innuendos, which depend upon two meanings being implied by one word. For instance, the title of Much Ado About Nothing may well be a reference to the private parts of the female characters.
A more elaborate example is the “ring plot” at the end of The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia and Nerissa confront their intended husbands about the rings with they gave the men earlier in the play. Unknown to Bassanio and Gratiano, the women were in fact the two “youths” to whom they gave away the rings. Pretending to be indignant, Portia declares that “I will ne’er come in your bed/ Until I see the ring.” (V.1) When all is explained, Gratiano remarks that “I’ll fear no other thing/ So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.” Under all these exchanges, of course, runs the pun in which “ring” represents both the physical object and the sexual organs. The jealousy and anxiety over who has got the “ring” resounds with issues of sexual fidelity and control over spouses.
Poetic puns
Some of Shakespeare’s puns raise more serious questions about how language, and poetry, operates. When Touchstone remarks in As You Like It, that “the truest poetry is the most feigning”, he quibbles between the verbs “to feign”, meaning to fake or pretend, and “to fain”, to desire or wish for something. His comment, on the face of it a paradox, since something cannot be true and feigning at the same time, opens up a whole series of questions about poetry.
Does he mean that feigning is the only way to a higher truth? That all poetry is made of lies? That true poetry comes from a lover’s deepest desires? That love poetry is deceitful, and provides a way to satisfy one’s desires under a pretence of love? From a simple pun on two words that sound the same when recited by a clown, Shakespeare asks us searching questions about art.
Jem Bloomfield - Jem Bloomfield was educated at the universities of Oxford and Exeter, and is currently working on a PhD on Webster's revenge tragedy "The ...
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