The Rhetoric of Character Construction: Othello

Summary

‘Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death’, says Mercutio mortally wounded before being led off stage; and Hamlet, at the climactic point of the graveyard scene, faces Laertes in Ophelia’s grave with ‘Swounds, show me what thou’t do’. Modern producers are uncertain whether to keep the old-fashioned strong oaths (Christ’s wounds), or to accept the weak replacements suggested by the Folio versions, ‘What’ and ‘Come’ respectively, though there is no need today to take those precautions that the King’s Men took in their time. If the 1606 Act imposing a ten-pound fine on the actors each time a swear word or even mildly blasphemous expression was used on the stage were still in operation now, the contemporary London stage would be one of the major contributors to the British economy, and comfortable prospects would open up for professional informers, who were rewarded with half of the fines collected. I am not advocating a re-enactment of that law; on the contrary, I deplore that it was enforced, because it has deprived us of what I consider an important element in assessing one of Shakespeare’s most relevant rhetorical devices: the gradation in the use of oaths and interjections. Apart from Fluellen’s “Sblood’ in Henry V, 4.8.9 (but that’s Welsh, anyway), only the bastard Faulconbridge’s ‘Zounds’ in King John, 2.1.466, escaped Heminges and Condell’s overcareful expurgation of the texts – overcareful because the act applied only to performances and not to the printed page: but being actors themselves, it is likely that they had suffered personally from it.