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Figure 2 – uploaded by Adriana-Cecilia Neagu
Figure 2 An apt beginning for “one of the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s plays, riddled with sexual puns, double meanings, and bawdy innuendo” (Wells 184), the colloquial exchange between Samson and Gregory bristles with ribald wordplay, from obvious double entendres that still sound familiar (like “tool” and “weapon” at the end of the dialogue) to more obscure sexual allusions that would be completely lost on us today without the help of the textual notes provided by authoritative editions and of glossaries of Shakespearean bawdy. Thus, the clownish banter starts with a rather elaborate play on words featuring an idiomatic phrase (“to carry coals”), which might have had “a sexual undertone” — as the footnote in the latest Arden edition suggests, based on “its association with ‘privy lodging’ and sex in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi: ‘To see her in the shameful act of sin . . . with some strong-thighed bargeman . . . or else some lovely squire / That carries coals up to her privy lodgings’ (2.5.41- 5)” (124; my emphasis) — but to most Elizabethans meant to do the dirty work “performed by the lowest servants” and, by extension, “to put up with being humiliated” (Keeble 12), followed by a succession of near homophones with different meanings (“colliers,” “choler,” “collar”), the first being a derivative of “coal” which both reinforces the implication of social inferiority and suggests dishonesty, since “colliers had a bad reputation for cheating in Shakespeare’s time” (Weis 124). Iosif’s version uses antonymy (“sus” — “jos’’) in a failed attempt at meaningful wordplay, for only the first verb phrase (“sda ne ia de sus’) approximates the drift of Samson’s line, while Gregory’s reply neither completes nor develops the idea. Teodorescu’s solution is too creative, for he renders the non-punning wordplay by a homonymic pun (“sd nu te lasi” — “am fi lasi”) whose meanings stray rather liberally from the original. Our translation comes
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