Three Words from Shakespeare

As I look forward to my annual pilgrimage to visit my friend, Elissa, and see a play at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival—this year, Measure for Measure—I figured that a blog on words from Shakespeare’s plays would be appropriate.  To this end, I consulted Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion by David Crystal and Ben Crystal.  To get a blog’s worth of material, I figured three words would do.  I chose “gleek,” an obsolete word that I particularly like; “tongue” because of an archaic meaning (which I found by “dictionary dipping); and “pretty,” because of an uncommon usage.

“Gleek,” as Nick Bottom uses it in my all-time favorite play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a verb means, “make a pointed joke, jest, jibe.”  Bottom is a bumbling bumpkin who spends much of the play with the head of an ass, caught in a juvenile joke in a dispute between two gods.  Oberon causes Titania to fall in love with the ass-headed Bottom through a love-in-idleness potion, and she fawns over him ad nauseum.  At one point, Bottom says to the love-besmitten goddess, “I can gleek upon occasion.”  In a way, it is a joke within a joke.  As a fan of gleeking, I use the word upon occasion.

“Tongue,” as Shakespeare uses it in Measure for Measure (another reason I chose this word), means “reproach, censure, berate.”  Angelo thinks he has taken sexual advantage of Isabella, who has recently entered a convent.  As part of a bed trick, Angelo has actually slept with his former fiancée.  In contemplating his predicament, as he is engaged in a war on fornication, he muses, “How might she tongue me out?”  Angelo is confident that Isabella’s shame as a nun in losing her virginity will prevent her from revealing his own extramarital lustful activity.  While according to my American Heritage Dictionary, 4^th edition, this usage of “tongue” is archaic, it does bear relation to “tongue-lashing.”

Finally, I found “pretty” looking to see if Shakespeare used any words similar to “Prescott.”  The name is actually a contraction of “priest’s cottage,” so I figured Shakespeare may have used a similar word.  Much to my disappointment, he did not.  However, I found a usage of “pretty” as an adjective meaning “clever, ingenious, artful.”  Shakespeare’s Words lists five different usages of “pretty” in this meaning.  It reminded me of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz who refers to Dorothy as “my pretty.”  Certainly, the witch means “clever, ingenious, artful” in this context more than she means to complement Dorothy on her good looks.  Actually, this usage is listed as in current in my American Heritage Dictionary.

A second usage of “pretty” as an adjective meaning “childish, trifling, naïve” caught my eye.  This usage comes from Sonnet 41, “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits . . ..”  This usage seems to be obsolete.  (I am away from home and so do not have my OED at hand.)  If someone is acting childishly, we can use the adverbial form of “pretty,” “to a fair degree, moderately” to claim that the person is “pretty pretty.”

At any rate, I will end with the injunction that I used to write on the bottom of chalkboards when Laura gave me tours of her classrooms at Smith:  “Read More Shakespeare!”