'Full of Maggot Ostentation'

Biron (sometimes Berowne) gets the choicest lines in Love’s Labours Lost -- “Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief” –but he is not above candied eloquence, love talk and flirtation in Act V, Scene 2. Neither is the princess:

BIRON: “White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee.”

PRINCESS: “Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three.”

BIRON: “Nay then, two treys, and if you grow so nice,

Metheglin, wort, and malmsey: well run, dice!

There’s half-a-dozen sweets.”

For plain-speaking and truth, Biron almost corresponds to Cordelia in Lear, but he does love to turn on the purple:

“Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,

Figures pedantical; these summer-flies

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:

I do forswear them; and I here protest,

By this white glove;—how white the hand, God knows!—

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d

In russet yeas and honest kersey noes:

And, to begin, wench,—so God help me, la!—

My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.”

One could write a book glossing this speech. Rosaline’s reply keeps it simple: “Sans sans, I pray you.” I love “Taffeta phrases.” The OED cites it as a figurative usage of taffeta: “florid, bombastic; over-dressed; dainty, delicate, fastidious.” “Three-piled” is used to describe fabrics (we think of carpet), the OED informs us: “growing thickly with a soft surface like velvet.” Best of all is “these summer-flies / Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.” (The phrase recalls Gloucester’s “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport.”) Johnson cites this in his Dictionary entry for maggot, which he defines commonsensically as “a small grub which turns into a fly.” He also tells us maddock and mawk are much older words for maggot. “Maggot ostentation” suggests the swelling and swarming of a body in decomposition. More fabric-related imagery: “russet” “a coarse woollen cloth of a reddish-brown or subdued colour”; kersey is “plain, homely” – all in contrast to “three-piled” velvet.

No language is so rich and delicious as Shakespeare’s. Nabokov has John Shade say in Pale Fire: “First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull.” Kinbote asks: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?” Shade replies: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”