You ‘fen-sucked brassy nut-hook’ ... and other Shakespearean insults

I first learned the pleasure of Shakespearean insults in ninth grade, when I was assigned to read “Henry IV, Part I.� My teacher was a gifted man named Greg Lombardo who instilled in our class a sense of literature as provocative, pointed, even dangerous — something that lived and breathed and mattered and bled.

For “Henry IV, Part I,� he focused on the humor, and encouraged us to stage an Elizabethan festival in class. We played music, had a feast and called each other the names we’d learned from Falstaff:

“’Sblood, you starveling, you elfskin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish! O, for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck—�

Such expletives reside at the heart of Sarah Royal and Jillian Hoffer’s “Thou Spleeny Swag-Bellied Miscreant: Create Your Own Shakespearean Insults� (Running Press: unpaged, $12.95), a parlor game between hard covers, or an internet meme brought to analog life.

The idea is not a new one (a Google search yields several similarly intended websites), but the book is deftly put together: It features three sets of cards, spiral bound, that can be flipped in various combinations; on each is a derogatory Elizabethan adjective or noun.

“Foul-reeking onion-eyed fustarian,� reads one such combination. “Ruttish mammering clotpoll,� proclaims another. If there’s a flaw to this it’s that these words don’t come with definitions, although most of the time — as with “pernicious swaggering varlot� — they’re pretty easy to figure out.

In any case, I like the music of the language, not to mention the fellowship of the foul-mouthed, to which I lovingly belong.

Indeed, it was Shakespeare’s skill with an insult, especially in the banter between Falstaff and Prince Hal, that made his writing accessible to me: not as the canonical musings of an “unmannerly cullionly bed-swerver,� but rather as the street-level utterances of a “craven roguish miscreant.�

This is the Shakespeare Royal and Hoffer mean to celebrate, and their book brings me back to Greg Lombardo’s classroom, with its emphasis on Shakespeare as unfiltered, sharp and entertaining — a writer, in other words, who spoke the language of his audience.

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