Empson\'s Dog

A QUARTERLY JOURNAL FOUNDED BY F. W. BATESON Vol. LVIII

January 2008

No. 1

CRITICAL OPINION

Empson’s Dog JENNIFER FORMICHELLI EMPSON WAS MUCH POSSESSED by dogs, and dug up a good deal around the matter. Though he would later write two essays on dogs in literature in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), the dogs of literature were already on his mind when, in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), he found something doggish in critics’ natures: Specialists usually have a strong Trades Union sense, and critics have been perhaps too willing to insist that the operation of poetry is something magical, to which only their own method of incantation can be applied, or like the growth of a flower, which it would be folly to allow analysis to destroy by digging the roots up and crushing out the juices into the light of day. Critics, as ‘barking dogs,’ on this view, are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; Essays in Criticism Vol. 58 No. 1 # The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgm026

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unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch. . .1

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Eliot too sniffed a little something of critics’ potentially currish nature only a year later, remarking upon ‘these days of dog-eat-dog in the criticism of literature and life’.2 And not just these days either, for both dogs and critics had long been thought of as maligned or maligning. Empson, in his essay ‘The English Dog’, points out that the ‘change in the stock proverb’ between 1546 and 1638 – from ‘As good a deed as to help a dog over a stile’ to ‘help a lame dog over a stile’ – ‘seems to show that the earlier feeling was that they deserve pity as being normally (yet therefore rightly) ill-treated’.3 Critics, on the other hand, were, according to the language, given rather to ill-treating. The OED records that ‘critic’ was originally a medical term for one who discerned disease, deriving from the Greek for judge. The medical sense stayed in use from 1544 to 1605 (Phaer, Daniel), during which time a pejorative sense crept in: ‘judging captiously or severely, censorious, carping, fault-finding’. The first quotation cited, from Florio (Critico, 1598), is mute on such matters – ‘criticke, judging mens acts and works written’ – but later that year Florio was more censorious, calling critics ‘Those notable pirates in this our paper-sea, those sea-dogs, or Land-Critikes, monsters of men’ (Italian Dictionary). This blunt association of dogs and critics is followed by Dekker’s more subtle scorn in 1606 (Newes from Hell): ‘Take heed of criticks; they bite, like fish, at anything, especially at bookes’. This admits the dog metaphor by resisting it; the bite of a fish is normally on the lure and is solicited, so that the bite here seems to apply instead to dogs. This parallel in the language was evoked by Empson, for whom the dog became one part of a metaphor for a kind of critic: the idea makes its first appearance in the barking, scratching, and pissing dogs of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and turns up again over twenty years later in the essay on ‘The English Dog’, where he takes a kinder view of critics’ natures:4

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‘Field’ and ‘game’ surface as Empson digs down to his own metaphorical dog, the critic with a ‘dog-nature’ who needn’t fear, as he put it in 1930, that the roots of beauty could be violated ‘by a little scratching’.6 ‘The reasons’, he wrote in Seven Types of Ambiguity, ‘that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are like the reasons for anything else; one can reason about them’.7 Empson’s reasoning about Shakespeare’s dogs takes us closer to the pleasures of his own critical nature. Whilst arguing that ‘“dog” in Timon is then a double symbol but not a master symbol’, he remarks: Apemantus is continually called ‘dog’ (in a play clearly meant to be taken as symbolic) with the sense ‘snarling and envious critic’, also as ‘ill-conditioned’ – he will ‘famish, a dog’s death’. But this kind of critic is a person of recognized value in Shakespeare; there is much of him in Jacques and Hamlet as well as Iago. At one end, as the character who though somehow low will tell the truth; . . . at another, he is the disappointed idealist.8 In ‘The English Dog’, Empson cites the proverb, ‘love me, love my dog’ as an example of the deprecatory qualities of ‘dog’, and it is a good one; at the same time the phrase, cited from St Bernard’s sermon ‘In Festi Sancti Michaelas’, ‘who loves me, also loves my dog’ suggests the sheer intimacy of feelings at work in the word, as does Empson himself when he argues that its sound ‘reaches across to something deep, personal to you, and despised’.9 The case is amplified when one considers the intimate relation of men with actual dogs which comes across clearly at one point in Macbeth:

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The feeling that the dog blows the gaff on human nature somehow attached itself to the ambition of the thinker to do the same, and this helped to make him cheerful and goodhumoured. His view of our nature started from a solid rock-bottom, a dog-nature, which his analysis would certainly not break in digging down to it; this made him feel that the game was safe, and the field small enough to be knowable.5

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Partaking a little of what Empson describes as ‘the pastoral idea, that there is a complete copy of the human world among dogs’, this shows how the worlds might be thought of in terms of one another; they are kindred but also intersect.11 Empson remarks, in ‘The English Dog’, that ‘a queer suggestion of mutuality, not merely that we are in the same boat but that you could say about me what I say about you, clings to the words I want to examine, and finds a direct and splendid expression here’.12 This intimacy and mutuality of the dog also find a direct and splendid expression in those plays, as Empson keenly noticed, where the dog is himself a kind of critic, and so has a kindred feeling with dogs, as in Hamlet, King Lear, and Timon of Athens. Empson notes that ‘it is a popular but tactfully suppressed grievance that Shakespeare did not love dogs as he should’, and it is true that the rudeness about dogs in Shakespeare is rather marked, especially as it is not at all clear that the distaste was a common feeling of the time.13 The earliest book on dogs to appear in English, printed in 1576, gives some idea of the period feeling for what Empson termed ‘actual’ dogs rather than metaphorical ones, stressing the usefulness, agility, loyalty, and sportsmanship of the creatures, upbraiding only currish lapdogs kept mainly, it asserts, by barren women.14 Orion in Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament (composed 1592; performed 1600), as Empson remarks, makes a fine defence of dogs against Autumn’s disparagements, emphasising their hunting abilities, their wisdom, and their loyalty; he ends by calling them ‘rare creatures’.15 The OED even cites the strange obsolete phrase ‘dog-given’ as meaning ‘addicted to dogs’, instancing a 1611 quotation from Chapman’s Iliad (XI. 256). That Shakespeare recognised and dramatised such a kindred relation between men and dogs is evident from the scenes with Launce and Crab in Two

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1. Murth. We are men, my Liege. Macb. I, in the Catalogue ye goe for men; As Hounds, and Greyhounds, Mungrels, Spaniels, Curres, Showghes, Water-Rugs and Demy-Wolues are clipt All by the Name of Dogges: (III. i. 92-6)10

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I am your spaniell, and Demetrius, The more your beat me, I will fawne on you. Vse me but as your spaniell; spurne me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; onely giue me leaue (Vnworthy as I am) to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your loue, (And yet a place of high respect with me) Then to be vsed as you doe your dogge. (II. i. 203-10) This captures the mixture of feelings about dogs that Empson claims had crept already into the language; Helena in her lovesickness can at once acknowledge how ill used the dog is and yet find his position a ‘place of high respect’, perhaps for its honesty and unwavering fidelity, both of which, Empson remarks, get into the ‘“blow the gaff” feeling about calling a man a dog’, as ‘he does not hide the truth about himself and thereby shows the truth about us all’.17 In likening herself to a dog Helena finds ‘that queer mutuality’, becoming one of the first critical dogs in Shakespeare; she is not afraid to announce the truth about herself, and doing so finds a distinct dignity even in her very debasement. She has something here of the earshaking rogue (Harman, Caveat for Common Cursitors, 1566) in whom Empson took delight ‘that such independent creatures can be so gay and strong’.18 Empson remarks in ‘The English Dog’ on the ‘effect of the sound’, which makes the word dog ‘particularly ready to carry a duality of feeling’ (‘God’ being, in English, ‘its opposite in sound’), so that later, when applied metaphorically, ‘dog’ became what he calls ‘a rib-digging term of affection’, a kind of complimentary disparagement.19 This tension between various feelings in the word (and those perhaps more obscure

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Gentlemen of Verona, which run to Launce (whom Empson argues has his own fidelity and kinship with dogs for being himself ‘a kind of “natural”’) comically and heroically suffering the stocks to save Crab from punishment,16 and in the metaphor in which Helena couches her ill-received affection in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1593-8):

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ones behind it) finds expression Sir John Davies’s 1594-5 Epigramme 19, In Cineam:

This takes on a good number of deprecations about the metaphorical dog and balances them out with a hearty appreciation. The nastiness against dogs, one part of the dog metaphor, is turned round into positive praise, and then returned to jab on metaphor itself. But the term is thoroughly examined here, and is ‘rib-digging’ in both senses, for having a winning intimacy about it; ‘dog’ allows one to talk about something deeply personal without offending. It was because of this ability to dig up truths that the dog became for Empson a type of critic, of the kind he found in Shakespeare, where the word continually carries a lot of this double meaning, as in the way the dogs bark at Richard III, though himself called ‘That Dogge’ by Margaret (IV. iv. 49), as he ‘halt[s] by them’ (I. i. 23), or in the way Lear describes: ‘The little dogges, and all; / Trey, Blanche, and Sweet-heart: see, they barke at me’ (III. vi. 62-3). Lear’s dog sense, like Richard’s, is sly in allowing him to sound the alarm at himself

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Thou dogged Cineas hated like a dogge, For still thou grumblest like a masty dogge, Comparest thy selfe to nothing but a dogge. Thou saist thou art as weary as a dogge, As angry, sicke, and hungry as a dogge. As dul and melancholy as a dogge, As lazy, sleepy, and as idle as a dogge. But why dost thou compare thee to a dogge In that, for which all men despise a dogge? I will compare thee better to a dogge. Thou art as faire and comely as a dogge, Thou art as true & honest as a dogge. Thou art as kinde and liberall as a dogge, Thou art as wise and valiant as a dogge. But Cineas, I haue oft heard thee tell, Thou art as like thy father as may be. Tis like inough, and faith I like it well, But I am glad thou art not like to me.20

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Tom, will throw his head at them: Auaunt you Curres, be thy mouth or black or white: Tooth that poysons if it bite: Mastiffe, Grey-hound, Mongrill, Grim, Hound or Spaniell, Brache, or Hym: Or Bobtaile tight, or Troudle taile, Tom will make him weepe and waile, For with throwing thus my head; Dogs leapt the hatch, and all are fled. (III. vi. 63-72)21 This nonsense rhyme does a firm job of speaking the word politely, ‘Brache, or Hym’, in its purely technical sense. Lear cannot call his daughters ‘bitches’ and thereby imply they are badly bred and likely to engage in bad breeding (as is the case when Goneril and Regan fight to the death over the bastard Edmund). Lear cannot be allowed to suffer the fate of Gloucester, that doggish breeder of bastards, especially with Cordelia banished, and the kingdom and the royal line in serious danger. Edgar well knows the sharp tooth of such bad breeding, and he is therefore eager to avert the threat. The resistance here to any metaphorical meaning is the central point of his song, which swiftly banishes the dogs, keeping the sense firmly safe. Empson remarks in ‘The English Dog’ that the double senses of ‘dog’ developed exclusively from ‘bitch’, which ‘remained firmly rude because women could not make a joke of not being chaste’.22 The levity of the English ‘dog’, however, embraces more than a roguishly jocular lack of chastity, and

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without direct blame, alerting us to what we cannot plainly see, the storm in his conscience: ‘I did her wrong’ (I. v. 24). This bit of doggerel also provides one of the very few hints of the metaphorical ‘bitch’ in Shakespeare: Lear invites the suggestion with ‘Trey, Blanche, and Sweet-heart’, only just hedging it with ‘the little dogges, and all’, since ‘dogges’ can, though it only does so here by the skin of its teeth, refer to both sexes. In this defensive feat, he is adeptly assisted by Edgar, who, though near to tears at Lear’s state, sings a lullaby to assuage his fears:

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the senses of ‘dog’ which appeal to Empson – a curious critic, a natural, a jovial creature, a rogue, loyal, dejected, but gay – were already embedded or developing in the neutral substantive ‘dog’ by the time ‘bitch’ gained metaphorical senses, so that those attained by ‘bitch’ are distinct from those already encompassed by ‘dog’ (exempting a short-lived ‘whimsical’ sense of ‘bitch’, quoted from 1500 as applied to a man in the same sense as ‘dog’).23 This slight history of ‘bitch’ – evidenced by abrupt OED definitions and quotations, as against the vast entries and extensive morphology accorded to ‘dog’ – suggests that the word was slower than ‘dog’ to develop metaphorical senses, and those it does develop early on are narrower, relating mainly to breeding. This is probably due in part to the word’s independence from its base noun, so that ‘bitch’ does not, as ‘doggess’ would have done, partake of the ‘dog’. Additionally, in English – unlike French for example, where the female dog, chienne, is cognate to the male, chien – no separate word (such as the French catin) arises to encompass the word’s metaphorical senses.24 This historical conflation gives the English bitch an especial edge, with the joke stretching beyond female chastity and into females’ progeny: the bitch, likely breeding with many different dogs while she is on heat, and also capable of bearing in one litter the puppies of different dogs, is a near-certain source of bastards, hence the double insult of ‘son of a bitch’, an early instance of which appears in King Lear (II. ii. 13).25 The air of bad breeding that lingers round the English bitch is pregnant with class implications, helping to explain the not infrequent application of the word to men in its metaphorical senses, despite the OED’s assertion that the opprobrious use adheres only when the word is ‘applied to or about women’. But since the nicety of stepping round the dangerous issue of ill breeding wasn’t available in English, the insult carried in the word when applied to women was quite serious, and in fact the application the OED mentions, ‘to or about women’, remained rare: the OED dates it from 1400, but contains only one quotation from the sixteenth century.

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One can conjecture, in fact, that ‘bitch’ was so metaphorically rude that ‘brach’ stepped briefly into the breach: a quotation from 1686, in Gentleman’s Magazine, informs us that ‘brach’, an earlier word denoting a female hound, ‘is a mannerly name for all hound-bitches’: ‘brach’ had briefly taken over the embattled technical sense of ‘bitch’, whose slim usage (compared, for instance, to the more prevalent ‘bastard’) probably implies how very rude rude was here. Yet the distinction is short-lived: ‘brach’, being ‘mannerly’, was also metaphorically serviceable, and therefore could not quite remain completely technical; it seems in fact to have furnished another metaphorical sense of ‘bitch’: the verbal sense of complaining, with its numerous derivatives, such as ‘bitched’, ‘bitching’, ‘bitchy’. This slide of ‘brach’ also carries a sense of upheaval in the social order: the female hound, as the OED’s quotations imply, was a strong sounder, a talent that likely made her a frequent leader of the pack.26 ‘Brach’ surfaces twice in King Lear, along with a singular use of the metaphorical ‘bitch’. This is not surprising in a play where ladies and dogs are placed so suggestively together, and in which both the social and natural order is upended, as the Fool continually remarks in his quips about divisions. Lear’s ill-considered courting ritual for his own affections allows Goneril and Regan not only to challenge their father the king’s authority, but also to contravene that of their husbands; the metaphorical ‘brach’, leader of the pack, is hard at work here, with the ‘bitch’ deftly held at bay. Part of the struggle of King Lear, in fact, revolves around this strikingly conservative subversion, a revolution turning on the play’s resolute withholding of the metaphorical ‘bitch’ that is constantly howling at its door. And it achieves this partly by daring to make its great lady a dog, for the commendable virtues of unshakeable fidelity and inexpressible love. This grand and surprising bout of dog-praise serves to make the play remarkably resistant to any rudeness about women, so that the insults levied at Goneril and Regan have to do with children, or daughters, rather than women generally; even Edmund cannot criticise his mother. Despite many temptations, only one metaphorical instance of ‘brach’ is admitted – ‘Truth’s a dog must to kennell, he must bee whipt out, when the Lady

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Brach may stand by’th’fire and stinke’ (I. iv. 15-17) – and it is said by the Fool, the only character willing and allowed to test the play’s resolute armour of chivalry, which at times appears single-handedly and miraculously to hold together a world in dissolution. In its implications, this offhand remark about the stench of the lying brach is the Fool’s most daring and racy comment, betraying what is felt throughout the play: a persistent, deadly threat posed by the young against the old; a danger only narrowly averted by Edgar’s grateful understanding in the end, that ‘the oldest hath borne most’ (V. viii. 326).27 This contradictory dog-praise of the play lingers at its end, a strange residue after the disastrous struggle between love and despite subsides. One feels it keenly as Lear’s ghost is at last let out, as Edgar’s rhyme had predicted: it is finally safe for the gates to be opened, making it clear that Lear has destroyed himself defending the territory, even if badly; he is very much the dog in office. Kent’s death seals the strange and miserable dog-feeling of this, as he follows even Lear’s ghost with characteristic doggishness, remarking that ‘My Master calls me’ (V. iii. 322). The final praise here is for the consolation of the dog, his mere presence bespeaking steadfast and selfless loyalty; it is a point seized on earlier by Cordelia, who takes it for granted that even a biting dog is worth keeping about one. Caius’ book Of Englishe Dogges tells us the English called one type of spaniel ‘the comforter’, and this plain virtue of companionship is a solid strength and charm of the English dog: his presence, like the Fool’s, is somehow heartening, even if unwanted.28 This is especially so in Timon of Athens, whose dog-kindness is bound up with these critical comforts of the dog: he is at once good company and discomforting, and both for telling the truth. This contradiction, most evident in Apemantus’ solicitation of Timon’s friendship, is raised early on when Timon hosts his last banquet, and commands his guests to ‘Uncouer Dogges, and lap’ (III. vi. 89). He says this because he has uncovered a truth about them, but it is only half of the truth: the Folio punctuation, with the comma after ‘Dogges’, shows how much weight ‘uncouer’ bears here. Now made low, he can also

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Destruction phang mankinde; Earthe yeeld me Rootes, Who seekes for better of thee, sawce his pallate With thy most operant Poyson. What is heere? Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious Gold? No Gods, I am no idle Votarist, Roots you cleere Heauens. (IV. iii. 23-8) The word ‘phang’ is strange here, especially in the function of verb. It occurs only two other times in Shakespeare: as a substantive meaning ‘grip’ in the Duke’s ‘Sweet are the vses of aduersitie’ speech in As You Like It (II. i. 6), and as the proper name of the constable Master Fang in 2 Henry IV, the aptly named partner of Master Snare (II. i). The OED cites the Timon quotation under the definition ‘to seize upon (booty)’; but only the Shakespeare citation has the ‘ph’ spelling, and the oddity of the word comes here from its summoning up its more dominant substantive meaning (from 1555), for the tooth of a dog.30 Timon tacitly praises dogs not only because they, like himself, would find roots a more valuable commodity than gold; but also for the viciousness with which they were commonly upbraided: he can claim an odd kinship with them in assuming they hate man as much as he does, and praise them for doing what he now considers the good of destroying them. There is a strong symbolism in the fact that it is only a few lines later that he refers to the soldiers of Alcibiades as beagles: ‘Get thee away / And take thy Beagles with thee’ (IV. iii. 175-6). The current of this is especially strong when one considers that the main focus here is Timon’s digging, an action which fuses before our eyes the metaphorical and actual dog of the play: the noble-natured creature Timon has become a dog, while the dog is in some sense held up to be a noble-natured creature (for not caring about money).31 The paradox is expressed by

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reveal the truth about himself; this is marked in his acknowledgement of kinship with dogs. Perhaps one of the more remarkable of what Empson termed ‘the mysterious pro-dog gestures’ in the play29 is that of Timon digging for roots and yielding gold:

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King. Take thy faire houre Laertes, time be thine, And thy best graces spend it at thy will: But now my Cosin Hamlet, and my Sonne? Ham. A little more then kin, and lesse then kinde. (I. ii. 62-5) The dropping of honorifics in Hamlet is an audibly serious matter, so that their absence can be heard quite clearly in this first address to the King: the remark is so nasty that Theobald (1740) was compelled to mark it as an aside, despite the fact that Claudius immediately replies: ‘How is it that the Clouds still hang on you?’ (I. ii. 66). Empson ingeniously conjectures that ‘Shakespeare’s opening words for Hamlet’ are ‘simply repeated from Kyd; a dramatic moment for the first-night audience, because they wanted to know whether the new Hamlet would be different’.35 The ‘kin and kindness’ pun was a stock one, even proverbial amongst Elizabethans (Tilley K38); but it has another and especial robustness here.36 Hamlet’s use of the pun is not only dramatically exciting (it tips the audience off right away that Hamlet has a grievance against Claudius); it also has a good deal of the dog-feeling in it: for ‘kin’ and ‘kind’ played against each other cannot help

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the soldier who finds Timon’s tomb and remarks: ‘Some Beast reade this; There do’s not liue a Man’ (V. iii. 4). The idea that the critical dog blows his own gaff as well as others’ is, as Empson brilliantly argues, also played up strongly in Hamlet: he shrewdly points out that ‘a man who models himself on Hamlet in common life (as has been done) tends to appear a mean-minded neurotic; but if you take the plot seriously Hamlet is at least assumed to have special reasons for his behaviour’.32 This is a good point, for Hamlet himself takes the plot rather seriously, sometimes using it to justify his behaviour; this can make him seem sincere, as Empson notes, though also mean-minded and, as in the scenes with Ophelia, abominably cruel.33 Empson remarked that there was much of the dog-critic in Hamlet,34 and this aspect of his nature comes across clearly in his first line, itself a rounded bit of criticism:

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Would not this Sir, and a Forrest of Feathers, if the rest of my Fortunes turne Turke with me; with two Prouinciall Roses on my rac’d Shooes, get me a Fellowship in a crie of Players sir. (III. ii. 283-7) Empson remarks that ‘crie of players’ is ‘another searching joke phrase not used elsewhere’; the OED cites Shakespeare’s use here in an obsolete metaphorical sense under ‘a pack of hounds’, defining it as, ‘contemptuously, a “pack” of people’, citing only one other use, by Cleveland in 1658.38 This contemptuous sense is only mildly insinuated in Hamlet’s remark that the

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but suggest a relation of their own, ‘king’, Hamlet being both less and more than king himself. This dog-nature of Hamlet’s is perhaps most notable when he is near actors or thinking about playing; he can at once be the sincere dog who blows the gaff and the fawning dog who acts to get what he wants. This comes out clearly in the ‘Oh what a Rogue and Pesant slaue am I’ speech (II. ii. 571-631), following on the heels of the player’s speech about Pyrrhus. Empson notes of this that Hamlet forthrightly addresses ‘the shame of theatrical behaviour and the paradoxes of sincerity’, but ‘has only proved he is a better actor, and indeed “rogue” might make him say this, by recalling that actors were legally rogues and vagabonds’.37 This is one of the few speeches which Hamlet gives while alone (‘Now I am alone’, he begins), so the selfaccusation of roguery has a particular weight: he is at once aspiring to and despising of the roguish condition of an actor, who though potentially insincere has yet the power to evoke sincerity, to ‘Make mad the guilty, and apale the free’ (II. ii. 587). This sparks the idea that the actors could be of use in blowing the gaff on Claudius, and in the tight couplet ending this speech Hamlet positively identifies himself with them. This is not surprising since the scheme is a collaborative one (in which the actors are ignorant of their actual parts): ‘The Play’s the thing, / Wherein Ile catch the Conscience of the King’ (II. ii. 587). The dog-feeling returns strongly after the play within the play, when Hamlet boasts to Horatio:

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in any case the basic legend is a dream glorification of having your cake and eating it, keeping your secret for years, till you kill, and yet perpetually enjoying boasts about it. Here we are among the roots of the race of man; rather a smelly bit perhaps, but a bit that appeals at once to any child.39 It could be left to the dog-critic to dig up the roots of man, especially the smelly bits; so that perhaps Hamlet’s most exposed moment is the scene by Ophelia’s grave, when he actually gets into the earth and nearly calls himself a dog outright to Laertes: Heare you Sir; What is the reason that you vse me thus? I loud’ you euer; but it is no matter: Let Hercules himselfe doe what he may, The Cat will Mew, and Dogge will haue his day. (V. ii. 300-4) The Prince who had called himself a rogue might call himself a dog, too, though he would not mean to do so publicly, later regretting ‘That to Laertes I forgot my selfe’ (V. ii. 75-6). Empson argues of the graveside scene that: The Hamlet of the sources descends to sordid behaviour in his pretence of madness; the great prince can only win by being more low-class than you or I dare be. We may be

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fellowship would be a refuge if his luck goes badly; but there is still a great deal of praise in it, so that Horatio can smartly check this ambition with his comment: ‘Halfe a share’ (III. ii. 287). The use of ‘crie’ in so boasting and jocular a way captures much of the double feeling about dogs: the actors are admired by the Prince for being independent, honest, good fellows, like dogs, and as the doggish critic Hamlet can identify himself with them, showing that, if the dog is to be sincere about the nature of others, he must also be sincere about his own. Empson sniffed this truth-telling out as part of the very plot of the play, arguing that

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A part of the power of Hamlet’s character is his ability to act and yet remain sincere: like the metaphorical dog he is at once honest and not. The dog-feeling of the play reaches its height here. It was to return six years later in King Lear, in which there is a similar association of dogs and kindness, this time hinging on flattery. Empson remarked that: Lear brings in dogs fifteen times, or more if you count synonyms; partly because it stresses animals in general, to call up the mysteries of nature. They chiefly appear as snobs, cruel to the unfortunate, also either as flatterers or as habitually flattered . . .41 In the scene of the division of the kingdom, Lear extracts and expects a dog-like flattery from his daughters, and is later surprised to discover that their flattery does not herald a genuine kindness, unlike the ‘kind nursery’ of Cordelia, who ‘cannot heaue’ her ‘heart into [her] mouth’ (I. i. 123, 91). He is later himself treated like a dog when Regan bars her doors to his knights and shuts them all outside in the storm. This is pointed up by Cordelia, whose natural kindness is emphasised through the dog: Mine Enemies dogge, thou he had bit me, Should haue stood that night against my fire, And was’t thou faine (poore Father), To houell thee with Swine and Rogues forlorne, In short, and musty straw? (IV. vii. 36-40) There is significant dog praise in this: she ranks the dog she would take in above the rogues who are left outside ‘forlorne’,

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sure that Kyd did not want this, but Shakespeare restored about as much of it as the stage could bear. The revulsion of his Hamlet from doing it . . . was I think clear to the first audiences; they were ready for him to feel that he must have been mad to be so unprincely as to fight in the grave. There are other times, of course, when his behaviour is extravagantly princely without effort or thought.40

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They flatter’d me like a Dogge, and told mee I had the white hayres in my Beard, ere the blacke ones were there. To say I, and no, to euery thing that I said; I, and no too, was no good Diuinity. When the raine came to wet me once, and the winde to make me chatter: when the Thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. (IV. vi. 97-102) Dogs are both flattered – like Lear – and flattering, with Lear himself also ‘like a Dogge’, and a critical one, for having finally smelt out a truth. It is a rare moment of honesty, ending with a quick flash of irony when he proclaims to Gloucester in the old way that he is ‘euery inch a King’ (IV. vi. 107). This betrays the powerfully subtle ways in which the metaphorical dog could embody such contradictions, and the critical dog expose them. Similarly Timon proclaims to Alcibiades, in what Empson calls a ‘surprising remark’ in which ‘it is hard to deny that dogs receive obscure but real praise’,43 I am Misantropos, and hate Mankinde. For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dogge,

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while in saying it she is exercising the virtue of loyalty accorded to the metaphorical dog, which might be taken for a vituperative flattery. Lear himself confuses the two in an opposite way. The central dog-feeling of King Lear comes from this confusion of duty, kindness, and flattery, shown up by the many different dogs in the play: Lear himself, the ‘great image of Authoritie’, ‘a Dogg’s obey’d in Office’ (IV. vi. 158-9), a truth he sees clearly enough himself when he speaks to the blinded Gloucester, who for his loyalty to Lear is thrust ‘out at gates’ to ‘smell / His way to Douer’ (III. vii. 93-4); and the doggishly treated Kent and Cordelia, both too loyal to flatter and so banished from the house, as the Fool suggests when he remarks that ‘Truth’s a dog must to kennell, he must bee whipt out, when the Lady Brach may stand by’th’fire and stinke’.42 Even Lear himself encompasses the contradictions of the metaphorical dog:

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That I might loue thee something. (IV. iii. 52-4)

Boston University NOTES 1

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1930, 1947, 1966), p. 9. 2 T. S. Eliot, English Review, 53 (1931), 118. 3 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 163. 4 Cf. William Empson, The Taming of Shakespeare’s Shrew, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield, 1996), pp. 72-4. 5 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 169. 6 Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 9. 7 Ibid. 8 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 176. 9 John Simpson, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford, 1985) p. 141; The Structure of Complex Words, p. 164. 10 The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman, 2nd edn. (New York, 1996). 11 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 168. 12 Ibid., p. 161. 13 Ibid., p. 176.

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The dog can still inspire human feelings in a Timon determined against them. Hating mankind, Timon exercises one of his most noble and singular qualities: the ability to love a creature that is not kind, and in this case one which even more singularly sometimes loves man back. Such a reciprocity was sussed by the keen-nosed Empson, who noted, with that kindness so remarkable in him, that ‘the flattery given by a dog is a type of how you can be foolish and mercenary and yet sincere; the creature shows love to get still more food but is really affectionate’.44

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John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges, the diversities, the names, the natures, and the properties, trans. Abraham Fleming (London, 1576; repr. 1880). 15 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 169. 16 IV. iv. 1-43: ‘nay, ile be sworne I haue sat in the stockes, for puddings he hath stolne, otherwise he had bin executed: I haue stood on the Pillorie for Geese he hath kil’d, otherwise he had sufferd for’t’. 17 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 168. 18 Ibid., p. 161. 19 Ibid., p. 163, pp. 166–7. 20 Christopher Marlowe (trans.), Ovid’s Elegies, together with the Epigrammes of Sir John Davies, with Decorations Engraved on Wood by John Nash (1925), pp. 90-1. 21 Q has ‘Lym’, to denote specifically a male pure hound, for F’s ‘Hym’. 22 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 167. This of course does not address whether men could make a joke of women not being chaste; the sonnets, Hamlet, Henry IV, and Troilus and Cressida, for example, have numerous such jokes. 23 A search of Literature Online reveals thirty-eight instances of ‘bitch’ in verse, prose, and drama (some technical, some metaphorical) from 1550 to 1623, with ‘dog’ having more than 400 instances. Tilley cites only one proverb with ‘bitch’, and it is used in the technical sense. In addition to its resistance to proverb and metaphor, the word did not expand in slang senses, as ‘dog’ so voluminously did. 24 Cf. ‘vixen’, where the female form is similarly distinct from the male base noun ‘fox’, yet the metaphorical meaning has more citations (particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) than the technical meaning. 25 Cf. the anonymous 1608 Hystorie of Hamblet: ‘O Queene Geruthe, it is the part of a bitch, to couple with many, and desire acquaintance of diuers mastiffes’, which uses both the technical and metaphorical senses at once. 26 This sense of ‘brach’ accounts for the two derogatory uses in Shakespeare: Thersites to Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida, and the Fool in King Lear. A sense of the dog’s, or bitch’s, noise as a

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kind of complaint is possibly classical: the Latin queror, to complain, from which ‘querulous’ is formed, is likely related at least in part to discomforting noises of the dog (howling, whimpering, etc). Cf. Empson’s remark on critics as ‘barking dogs’ (Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 9). 27 This line is spoken by Albany in Q. 28 ‘The vertue which remaineth in the Spaniell gentle otherwise called the comforter’: Of Englishe Dogges, p. 21. 29 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 166. 30 Shakespeare’s other uses cited in the OED both have the ‘phang’ spelling: one is used in the sense of capture, in As You Like It, III. i. 6 (ambiguous), and the other for the tooth of a dog in Twelfth Night, I. v. 196. From the quotations it seems the word was spelt interchangeably, but that ‘fang’ was the more usual spelling for capture, as in ‘Master Fang’. 31 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 166; cf. pp. 180 and 182, on Timon’s ‘golden nature’. 32 William Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge, 1986), p. 91. 33 Ibid., p. 90. 34 The Structure of Complex Words, p. 176. 35 Essays on Shakespeare, p. 89. 36 The words share a root, yet are teased by a possible strong contrast in meaning between them. On the relation of dogs to ‘kin’ and ‘kind’, see OED. The first quotation cited for the word as a term of praise, 1618, has Queen Anne calling Buckingham ‘My Kind Dog’ in a private letter. 37 Essays on Shakespeare, p. 86. 38 Ibid., p. 87. 39 Ibid., p. 90. 40 Ibid., pp. 100-1. 41 The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 165-6. 42 Cf. Kent at II. ii. 133-4: ‘Why Madam, if I were your Fathers dog / You should not vse me so’. 43 The Structure of Complex Words, pp. 178-9. 44 Ibid., pp. 176-7.