'A Whispering Parasite'

In Act III, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal hopes to convince his father that he has mended his ways, is a worthy successor and will in the future avoid the riff raff (“rude society,” the king calls them; i.e., Falstaff). Hal says: 

“So please your majesty, I would I could

Quit all offences with as clear excuse

As well as I am doubtless I can purge

Myself of many I am charged withal:

Yet such extenuation let me beg,

As, in reproof of many tales devised,

which oft the ear of greatness needs must hear,

By smiling pick-thanks and base news-mongers,

I may, for some things true, wherein my youth

Hath faulty wander’d and irregular,

Find pardon on my true submission.”

 

If I were compelled to say why I read Shakespeare’s plays, and limited to a single compelling reason, I could answer with one word: language. I revel in his words. There’s much else in the play to enjoy, I know. One definition of a great book is endless rereadability coupled with inexhaustibility. There’s always something new. The phrase I love here is “smiling pick-thanks and base news-mongers.”

 

The OED defines pickthank as “a person who curries favour with another, esp. by informing against someone else; a flatterer, a sycophant; a telltale.” I’m partial to toady, but flatterer, lickspittle and apparatchik are good. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson gives us “an officious fellow, who does what he is not desired; a whispering parasite.” Pickthanks are an emblem of our era. In Shakespeare, the quintessential pickthank is Iago, Coleridge's “motiveless malignity.” Pickthank entered the language around 1500, in plenty of time for Shakespeare to gift it to Prince Hal.

 

In 1975, for the French television show Apostrophes, Bernard Pivot asked Vladimir Nabokov, “You play a lot with words? You make lots of puns?” Nabokov replied:

 

“One must draw everything one can from words, because it’s the one real treasure a true writer has. Big general ideas are in yesterday’s newspaper. If I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on it upperside, it’s not at all out of idle curiosity, one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word—unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word.”

 

[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]