What Does Shakespeare Say--Turkey

What Does Shakespeare Say? It has been a while since I have tackled that question on “Be-Worded.” With Thanksgiving fast approaching, and the winter holiday season hard upon it, I figured now would be a good time to write another WDSS installment about food, specifically turkey, since a lot of turkeys will be eating turkey over the next several weeks. Since my print concordance to Shakespeare’s plays is at Schroon Lake, I Googled “references to turkey in Shakespeare’s plays.” I found some references to the country of Turkey, to Turks, and to bird imagery in Shakespeare’s plays, but nothing about the fowl itself. Finally, I found the on-line Shakespeare concordance where I discovered that in his plays, Shakespeare references the “large North American bird . . . that has brownish plumage and a bare wattled head and neck and is widely domesticated for food”--as my American Heritage College Dictionary, 4^th ed. (AHCD) defines it--only four times.

• In Henry the Fourth, Part 1, a character mentions turkeys in his basket.
•  In Twelfth Night, Fabian whispers to Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek that “contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him,” an insult directed at the misplaced ego of the oblivious Malvolio.
•  In Henry the Fifth, Gower comments upon the approach of Pistol, “Why here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock.” Fluellen responds, “’Tis no matter for his swellings or his turkey-cocks.—God bless you, Ancient Pistol! You scurvy, lousy knave, God bless you!”

Three of these four usages actually refer to a “turkey-cock,” or as the (AHCD) defines it, “1. a male turkey. 2. A strutting and conceited person.” While Shakespeare uses the turkey to insult characters, his plays have no references to characters actually sitting down to a turkey dinner. Thus, the immigrant turkey began its life in England as a symbol of pomposity, useful for ridicule.

While I ask the question “What Does Shakespeare Say About Turkeys,” That Shakespeare Girl, Cassidy Cash, asks in her blog, “Did Shakespeare Eat Turkey?” In answering this question, she reports that the turkey as we know it today had made its way to England from America in the mid-16^th Century and was served at court banquets as an exotic dish. As a player at court, Shakespeare certainly partook of this dish but chose not to put it in his plays.

LAGNIAPPE:

When I looked up “turkey-cock” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I discovered that in the early years after turkeys made their way to English dinner tables, they were frequently confused with Guinea-fowl: “In the 16^th c. synonymous with Guinea-cock or Guinea-fowl, an African bird known to the ancients . . . the American bird at first identified with or treated as a species of this.”

When I consulted the Chambers Slang Dictionary, I found an interesting usage involving turkeys. “To bleed one’s turkey” means to urinate. Imagine the stir one could create around the dinner table by excusing oneself to go bleed one’s turkey. One might be accused at that point of “having a turkey on one’s back”—that is, being drunk. However, if one chooses to remain silent, one might be accused of “not saying pea-turkey,” a different kind of “pea” than the slang term for urination.

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 Hand turkeys from classrooms past.