'Mome, Malthorse, Capon, Coxcombe, Idiot, Patch'

Why read A Comedy of Errors again? This is early Shakespeare, slapstick mostly in the sorry sense, two sets of identical twins separated at birth. On stage, enormous energy is required to animate the creaky plot. On the page, few of us are likely to laugh – except at the play of language. Puns abound. Stock exchanges of dialogue are kept lively with word play. In Act III, Scene 1, Dromio of Ephesus calls “Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cicel, Gillian, Ginn!” and Dromio of Syracuse replies: 

“Mome, Malthorse, Capon, Coxcombe, Idiot, Patch.

Either get thee from the door, or sit down at the hatch.”

 

A line of six words, all insults. My favorite is mome because it echoes moke and mum. Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary gives “a dull, stupid blockhead.” The OED is comparably terse: “a fool, a dolt.” The word’s origin is unknown, but “apparently not related to French môme little child.” Why is it that so many obscenities and words of insult are of one syllable? Because they can be spit out so forcefully. They are projectiles, not closely reasoned epithets.

 

Malthorse mean pretty much what it sounds like: “a heavy kind of horse used by maltsters; occasionally used as a term of abuse.” The OED cites Shakespeare’s usage and another by Ben Jonson. One thinks of Julie Brown’s “I Like ’em Big and Stupid.” A capon is a castrated cock. The OED cites Shakespeare’s line and adds a secondary definition: "a type of dullness, and a term of reproach.” Coxcombe (usually coxcomb) is still in use. In addition to the avian reference it means “a stupid person, a fool.” You know idiot. Patch – “foolish person, a simpleton; a fool, a clown” – has an interesting history. Patch was the nickname of Cardinal Wolsey’s – and later, Henry VIII’s – jester, Thomas Sexten (or Sexton). Tough audience.

 

In his Lectures on Shakespeare (2000), Auden devotes a single lecture to A Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (mostly the latter). He distinguishes the comic from comedy and says the former is “a contradiction in the relation of the individual or the personal to the universal.” Then he recalls a joke:

 

“Sydney Smith walks down a slum street in Edinburgh and sees two women arguing – fishwives from two houses. ‘Those two women will never agree,’ he says, ‘they argue from different premises.’ Communication is based on the law of language that any given verbal sound always means the same thing and only that thing. The pun comes from one word with two different meanings brought together – ‘premises’ in the Sydney Smith story – and understood by both the speaker and the hearer. The farther apart the two meanings are, the funnier the pun.”

 

Not a bad gloss on Shakespeare, Lamb and Joyce, among others. As Joyce advised: “Wipe your glosses with what you know.”