jamesharrimansmith.org

Canker comes to us from the classical Latin ‘cancer’, meaning the sign of the zodiac, an actual crab, and anything from a whole range of tumours, abscesses, sores and even worms. According to Paulus Aeginata’s Epitomae Medicomae, the overlap between crabs and tumours in the word ‘cancer’ arises from the apparent resemblance between the swollen veins around a tumour and the limbs of a crab. This seventh-century a.d. hypothesis being the only available explanation for the link between crustaceans and carcinoma, the OED cites it.

Jumping forward to Shakespeare’s time, and the playwright’s twenty ‘cankers’ cover almost all the various meanings of the word, save that of ‘crab’. First, and most simply, a ‘canker’ is a tumour, of the kind that a misanthropic Timon wishes would “gnaw” the heart of Alcibiades. Second, a ‘canker’ is another word for the damage caused by oxidation, as is clear from the way Venus concludes a speech designed to entice Adonis into her arms: “Foul-cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, / But gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”

By far the most frequent use of canker in Shakespeare’s works, however, is in relation to its botanical meaning. A ‘canker’ is either a type of wild rose (for Hotspur, Bolingbroke is a “canker” next to the “lovely rose” that was Richard II; and Much Ado’s Don John would “rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in [the] grace” of his brother, Prince of Arragon) or a ‘cankerworm’. This ‘cankerworm’ is a type of insect that attacks the fragile buds and flowers of plants: Blake reuses the motif in his ‘The Sick Rose’ (1794), and Shakespeare has no less than six clear references to this worm. Titania orders her fairies to hunt “cankers in the musk-rose buds” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Proteus and Valentine bandy talk of “cankers” in “the sweetest bud” between them at the start of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the famous rose-picking scene of Henry VI part I would not be complete without the future Richard III asking Somerset if his white rose “Hast not […] a canker”.

Beyond all these specific uses of the word, each more or less metaphorical or allegorical, Shakespeare makes ‘canker’ his own in two other distinctive ways, both rich with insight into the thoughts of his characters. It becomes, for example, part of a compound adjective, as in Edgar’s pithy and bitter summary of his ordeals at the end of King Lear: “Know my name is lost; / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.” In this transformation, we leave the original cankerworm far behind. Similarly, Prospero concentrates all his disdain for Caliban into the word ‘canker’, turning it into a verb in the process, to describe “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, / Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost; / And as with age his uglier body grows, / So his mind cankers.”

“A good varlet, a good varlet, a very good varlet”, says Shallow of his servant, after having drunk a few too many glasses of “sack” (wine). The question is, though, is the inebriated rustic being decorous or insulting? To judge by some of Shakespeare’s twenty-one other uses of the word “varlet”, it seems pretty likely to be an insult. An irate (and malapropism-prone) constable Elbow turns, for example, on an aspersion-casting Pompey with the words “Varlet, thou liest; thou liest, wicked varlet: the time is yet to come that [my wife] was ever respected with man, woman, or child.” And King Lear, as well as Measure for Measure is also rich in varlets, with Kent calling Oswald a “brazen-faced Varlet”, and Lear repeating the insult a few scenes later.

If there were a prize for ‘varletry’, however, it would have to go to Troilus and Cressida. Thersites calls Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus a “male varlet”, Troilus asks for his “varlet” to help him unarm, and Thersites, again, this time surveying all the Greek and Trojan heroes, sums the lot up as a “bunch of incontinent varlets”. This great variety allows us to see the various senses of the word a little more clearly, and, hence, resolve the Shallow conundrum that I began this article with. When Troilus asks for his “varlet”, he is simply asking for a servant, in the same way one might ask for a ‘valet’. If this is Shallow’s sense, then he is being pretty positive about his “very good” servant.

Unfortunately, the sense of ‘servant’ is not too far removed from some less positive meanings, such as ‘social inferior’ (that used by Lear and Kent to insult the courtier Oswald), or even ‘sex slave’ (Patroclus as “Achilles’ male varlet”). All this eventually brings us to a more general meaning of ‘scoundrel’, employed by Elbow to describe Pompey and Thersites to describe everyone around him. Not employed, however, by Shallow, whom I take as an incompetent but far from malign presence in Henry IV part II, and thus not likely to cast aspersions on his servant as he enjoys some wine with his old friend Falstaff.

Although it’s not very polite, one can still say nowadays that someone is looking a bit ‘haggard’. Unfortunately, what we use the word to mean – “Wild-looking, applied [...] to the injurious effect upon the countenance of privation, want of rest, fatigue, anxiety, terror, or worry.” (OED) – is not the same as Shakespeare’s aim, as this passage from The Taming of the Shrew makes clear:

HORTENSIO Would all the world but he had quite forsworn!
For me, that I may surely keep mine oath,
I will be married to a wealtlly widow
Ere three days pass, which hath as long lov’d me
As I have lov’d this proud disdainful haggard.

Here Hortensio abandons his attempts to woo Kate (the eponymous ‘shrew’ of the play), taking leave of a woman he finds “proud, disdaindul”, and a “haggard”: that is to say, not ‘run-down’, but rather “wild”, or, better yet, “untamed”. “Haggard”, although it evolved to mean ‘wild-looking’, actually originates in falconry, where it means “a wild (female) hawk caught when in her adult plumage” (OED). Thus Petruchio, following what was once a common, euphuistic, metaphor, describes his plans for Kate, his shrewish future wife:

PETRUCHIO [...] Another way I have to man my haggard,
To make her come, and know her keeper’s call,
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat, and will not be obedient.

Peculiarly, this way of describing people in Shakespeare is only ever applied to women, and often carries overtones of male domination. Petruchio’s is ultimately comic, but Othello’s talk of haggards certainly is not. Enthralled by Iago, he promises that “If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, / I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune.” Removing the metaphor, one could paraphrase as folllows, ‘If I find out that she’s disobedient, then – no matter what the cost – I’d cut all ties (jesses) between us.’

Last but not least in this swift flight over Shakespeare’s falconry, we have a woman using the word “haggard”. However, this woman is Twelfth Night’s Viola and she uses the word when disguised as a man. Continuing the gender-bending, she even portrays a man, and not a woman, “haggard”. That man is Feste, whom she likens to the touchy “haggard” who “check[s] at every feather / That comes before his eye”. The Fool of the play, unconstrained by decorum, reminds us of the wildness and hence the particular dramatic potential within this word in Shakespeare’s falconing time.

Everyone knows that this word refers to the most insignificant piece on the chessboard, and from this, it is tempting to understand Kent’s use of the word in his pledge of loyalty to an irate King Lear in a particular way:

KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

The tempting paraphrase of this, and the one given in the No Fear Shakespeare (and in many translations), is “I never considered my life as anything more than a chess pawn for you to play off against your enemies”. This is, however, quite likely to be wrong. The word ‘pawn’ never refers to a chess piece in any of Shakespeare’s twenty-eight other uses of the word. Instead, it often appears as a verb, and often in close proximity to the word “honour”.

There are several other meanings of the word pawn in the OED. The chess term, going back to 1400 and the Anglo-Norman for foot-soldier (paun), is the first; but the sense that interests me here, and the sense that Shakespeare uses widely, is the third, from the Middle French pant:

The state or condition of being given or held as a pledge, or as security for the repayment of a loan; chiefly in at pawn, in pawn, †to pawn, etc. Also fig.

This is quite clearly what the Hostess of King Henry IV part II is talking about when she complains that Falstaff has been running up a tab of such proportions that she will have to “pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining-chambers”, even though she eventually softens up and serves him, regardless of the fact that she might have to “pawn [her] gown” to pay for it.

Returning to questions of honour, and loftier characters than the Hostess, the word “pawn” as noun or verb is everywhere: Tarquin is described “Pawning his honour to obtain his lust” in The Rape of Lucrece; the history plays are full of challenges in which the throwing of the guantlet is accompanied by the words “There is my honour’s pawn”; an Old Athenian begs for Timon’s approbation with the words “Pawn me to this your honour”; and Imogen, agreeing to keep a chest of jewels in her bedchamber (with – unbeknownst to her Iachimo – hidden inside), says, with some dramatic irony, that she will “pawn my honour for their safety”.

All this and more suggests that the correct reading of those lines from King Lear has nothing to do with chess. Rather,

KENT My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it,
Thy safety being the motive.

Means: ‘I considered my life as something to be pawned, to be pledged on my honour, in order to secure thy safety’. The word “wage”, which might mislead here by evoking the language of combat too strongly, nevertheless means also, to quote the OED once more, “To deposit or give as a pledge or security”. Kent’s life is no chess piece, but rather something with a clear value in terms of both his own sense of honour and his service to Lear.