In this episode, Anjna explores the ins and outs of emptying one's bowels and asks whether any of it was considered remotely funny during Shakespeare's lifetime. Invaluable insights from Dr Pete Smith, Dr Sara Read, Dr Tara Hamling and rollicking readings from Rich Bunn, Charlie Clee, Donald Craigie and Neil Hancock.
Please rate and review my little pod where possible, and follow me on Twitter: @ShakespearesPa2.
In this episode, Anjna explores the ins and outs of emptying one's bowels and asks whether any of it was considered remotely funny during Shakespeare's lifetime. Invaluable insights from Dr Pete Smith, Dr Sara Read, Dr Tara Hamling and rollicking readings from Rich Bunn, Charlie Clee, Donald Craigie and Neil Hancock.
Please rate and review my little pod where possible, and follow me on Twitter: @ShakespearesPa2.
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[00:00:02] Dr. Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants, the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one's life; but in my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. And so without further ado, here is my podcast: Shakespeare's Pants.
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[00:00:37] Narrator: Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:00:41] Anjna: In this episode of Shakespeare's Pants, I'll be plumbing lowly depths discussing the processes and paraphernalia around going to the loo across the different sorts or what we might call classes of people, and I'll try to get to the bottom of whether or not bodily functions were considered amusing for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. So let's do it with episode three of Shakespeare's Pants: Evacuating.
It seems a shame but inevitable to move from cleaning to pooing, but defecation and its related activity, including attitudes towards it, is an important indication of pre-enlightenment conceptualisations of privacy. Let's learn more from Dr. Pete Smith from Nottingham Trent University.
[00:01:36] Pete Smith: In the remains of Hailes Abbey, there is intact the monks' latrine built over a flowing waterway which is still there. So we know that there was quite high tech crapping as it were in the period. In the palaces, there would have been the use of commodes.
[00:01:56] Anjna: Private spaces for undertaking one's evacuations weren't really the norm. You might have a privy chamber if you're the king, or a house of easement if you're noble. The latrines at Hailes Abbey that Pete mentioned earlier were public, and they weren't retiring rooms or spaces one went to in order to be alone in middling households, let alone those of lower sorts.
I'm sure many a Shakespeare student would be ready to point out that people had closets. However, closets like Gertrude's in Hamlet were not bed chambers or indeed private spaces at all, they were in fact not dissimilar to studies or offices, a place for prayer or paperwork really. Remember John Russell's manual about being a good servant from episode on? Well, he also specifies how to be of service to one's master in the privy.
[00:02:54] Actor: See that the privy house for easement be fair, soothe and clean, and that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth fair and green/ and the hole himself, look there no board be seen/ there on a fair cushion. The odor no man to teen. Look there be blanket, cotton or linen, to wipe the nether end/ and ever when he calleth, wait ready and attend basin and ewer, and on your shoulder, a towel, my friend.
[00:03:27] Anjna: Having a sweet-smelling clean privy is clearly important, and the recommendation is to pop a cloth, preferably a green one over the board surrounding the hole and a cushion over the hole itself to cover the waste. When your master calls, you need to be ready with a blanket, cotton or linen, basically something with which to wipe, and you're supposed to have water ready in a basin and a ewer. There should be a spare towel that the master can wipe his hands on. It seems as though this is all fairly sensible for upper sorts at least.
[00:04:00] Pete: That's pretty high standards, I would've thought, in terms of more usual experience which is in a house probably of Shakespeare's size would have just been a chamber port or two.
[00:04:10] Anjna: So where did people go if they weren't this wealthy?
[00:04:14] Pete: On the fields. Obviously, if you are a farm labourer, you'd go wherever you were. In the towns, it seems as though you perhaps would have used a chamber pot and simply thrown out of the window in the morning. Middle classes may well have had something like a kind of cesspit underneath the house.
[00:04:31] Anjna: In Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II from the late 1580s to early 1590s, the king is captured and placed in the 'sink' of the castle, so this space beneath the house where all the feces and dirt was collected. This is exactly what Pete is talking about here.
[00:04:50] Edward II: This dungeon where they're keeping me is the sink wherein the filth of all the castle falls, and there in mire and puddle have I stood this 10 days space.
[00:05:09] Anjna: By the mid-1600s, the term 'house of office' was in usage suggesting that a designated space, probably outdoors, was more the norm, certainly for middling and upper sorts, especially if they had gardens, which is why people had chamber pots for nighttime use, it's simpler than trudging outside in your smock in the dark and cold, presumably. Although this sounds rather vulgar, it's curious to think about what people used as wiping implements.
Russell mentions a cotton or a linen blanket specifically for the nether end, but given that linen was expensive, most people just used whatever was available, notably scrap cloth and paper. In fact, Thomas Nashe in his novel The Unfortunate Traveler from 1594, indirectly alluded to the inevitability of naff literature ending up as toilet paper or what he calls 'a privy token'. In 1549, the antiquarian, John Bale, lamented that historical manuscripts in the libraries of large properties, especially Catholic texts post the Reformation, were being destroyed and even used for unsavory purposes.
A great number of them which purchase just those superstitious mansions reserved of those library books, some to serve their jakes! Most famously or infamously, the French satirist François Rabelais in the first book of his Gargantua and Pantagruel series from the mid-16th century, dedicates a great portion of a chapter to the various wiping implements.
[00:06:55] Pete: Now, obviously, this is a comic send-up, but it must be at some point based in some kind of reality. Chapter 13, 'How Gargantua's Wonderful Understanding Became Known To his Father Grangousier by the Invention of Wipe-Breech.' He talks about the various things that he's wiped his bum on. "I did wipe me with a gentle woman's velvet mask, and found it to be good, for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time, with one of their hoods. In like manner, that was comfortable, it was another time with a ladies' neckerchief. After that, I wiped me with some ear pieces of hers made of crimson satin. There was such a number of golden spangles in them turdy round things on them that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance."
Then he goes on, he uses various herbs, he uses gob leaves, beetroots, vine tree, wool blade with mercury, parsley, nettles, comfrey, arras hangings, green carpet, tablecloth, napkin, handkerchief, combing cloth. He says he's used his paper, but he doesn't like that. "Who his foul tail with paper wipes shall have his bollocks leave some chips," he says. The list continues for a while, and the best thing he comes up with is the neck of a goose. [laughs]
[00:08:16] Anjna: So much for the practicalities. I'm curious about attitudes and assumptions now. For instance, was all this something people treated as commonplace as an annoyance or was it all actually a bit amusing? First of all, let's consider the moral dimension. Material culture historian, Dr. Tara Hamling draws attention to the connection between prayer and routine and the Protestant emphasis on the inevitability of death.
[00:08:48] Dr. Tara Hamling: People were encouraged to think about death all the time. They were encouraged to think about the way that the body was aging and would eventually die and decay, but that that was then liberating because that then liberated the soul for the afterlife. The idea was that you focused and you meditated on death during life. There's a phrase, memento mori, "Remember you must die," that you see a lot in the visual and material culture of the period. So objects could really help with prompting remembrance.
If you think about it, when are you most at liberty to think about things? It's when you're doing the mundane, the ordinary things in your daily routine. Protestant writers would encourage you to think about bodily functions in relation to memento mori.
[00:09:31] Anjna: In 2017, Tara and Catherine Richardson published their fascinating look at domestic life in the period called A Day at Home in Early Modern England. Tara spoke to me about an especially curious object that features in the book.
[00:09:49] Tara: In our book, we feature a chamber pot has an inscription written around it that reads that, "Earth I am it is most true. Disdain me not for so are you." It's really playing on its materiality. It's made from earthenware, earth I am, but it's also encouraging you to think about the fact that you will return to earth yourself and therefore think about your mortality and think about how ultimately if you're a good person and you were one of the elect that's predestined to go to heaven, you will have a very fruitful and happy afterlife.
[00:10:25] Anjna: Grotesque as it may seem, the humour of this connection by way of spirituality was not lost on courtier and poet, John Harrington, inventor of the first English flushing toilet. He elaborates on this and other toilet-related matter in his book, The Metamorphosis of Ajax from 1596. Any kind of toilet facility or( let's face it) hole, was known as a jakes or Ajax. Harrington conflates religion, sex, and learning, amongst other things, with defecation. In this passage, he calls being on a jakes a form of devotion.
[00:11:06] John Harrington: For I happening to demand of a dear friend of mine, concerning a great companion of his, whether he were religious or no, and namely, if he used to pray. He told me that to his remembrance, he never heard him ask anything of God, nor thank God for anything, except it were at a jakes! He heard him say he thanked God he had had a good stool. Thus, you see, a good stool might move as great devotion in some men as a bad sermon and sure it suits very well that Quorum Deus est venter, eorum templum sit cloaca. He that makes his belly his God, I would have him make a jakes his chapel.
[00:11:50] Anjna: Although this is tongue in cheek, as it were, the connection between defecating and godliness was subliminal in early modern post-reformation culture, because of the interconnecting theme of death. Dr. Pete Smith explains the relationship between death and evacuating really well.
[00:12:09] Pete: We're talking about an agrarian economy where Shakespeare's family - even they are quite urbanised in their little town, Stratford upon Avon, would have had a much, much closer relationship to the earth. Technology and urbanisation have both separated human populations from the natural world and introduced things like the idea of self has been something which needs to be clean, deodorized, perfumed, and pomaded; but it's also related, I think, from the separation of the living from the dead, and that the dead are often seen, particularly in a time of plague, are seen to be corrupt, and therefore need to be, hugger-mugger, they need to be buried very, very quickly.
Again, that's become more intense, the more modern it is because the undertaker comes around, takes away the corpse and the family doesn't do anything to the corpse. Some cultures do ritual washing, and so on and so forth but in terms of Western culture, the sooner we can get rid of the corpse, the better really, and part of that fear of death and fear of corruption and fear of excrement is is all wrapped up with a sort of horror about our own pristine selves.
[00:13:22] Anjna: This kind of horror about our own bodies and corruption was less prominent in the early modern period outside of, as Pete has suggested, plague. What an interesting notion that disease makes us wary and perhaps less likely to want to talk about, let alone engage with, bodily excretions, and by extension, mortality.
The implications of not having private toilet spaces meant that in real terms, defecating was much more normalised, natural, and unshameful than it seems to be today.
Samuel Pepys, the mid-17th century diarist, was remarkably explicit about his toilet activities. On a couple of occasions, he finds himself without a chamber pot in the night. In this instance, he was staying at an inn and recalled:
[00:14:21] Samuel Pepys: In the night I was mightily troubled with a looseness, I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night, and feeling for a chamber pot, there was none. I, having called the maid up out of her bed she had forgot, I suppose, to put one there, so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney, twice.
[00:14:39] Anjna: Another time, Pepys wrote--
[00:14:42] Pepys: I waked in the morning, about six o'clock, and my wife not come to bed. I lacked a pot. There was none and bitter cold, so I was forced to rise and piss in the chimney, and to bed again.
[00:14:54] Anjna: Going in the chimney was evidently not uncommon because it comes up in Henry IV, Part One when Carriers are exchanging grumbles about the state of an inn at Rochester.
[00:15:07] Carrier: Why, they will allow us ne’er a jordan and then we leak in your chimney and your chamber-lye breads fleas like a loach.
[00:15:13] Anjna: The Carrier complains that for want of a jordan or chamber pot, he was obliged to urinate in the chimney, which he says, attracts fleas. Chamber-lye was a common term for urine, which was collected and used for bleaching and leather tanning, for example. Not only was going to the loo worthy of documenting, but and I think more commonly, what came out was of great interest especially in medical terms.
John Hall, physician and son-in-law to Shakespeare almost always noted the number and consistency of his patients' stools and invariably prescribed enemas for anything from stomachache and constipation to ulcers and even fever.
And feces itself featured in some of the remedies he used, including the droppings of swallows, dogs, and pheasants. The ability to defecate or purge was a fundamental process in humoral pathology because it signified that the body was literally excreting what it didn't require, and by extension, maintaining a healthy humoral balance. An object used to administer enemas was found on the Mary Rose ship. This is Dr. Hannah Lilly.
[00:16:35] Dr. Hannah Lilly: It appears kind of like a pipe that you would play for example. It's very similar in its appearance and made of wood; but at the bottom, it's got the remnants of some leather on it. When it was first excavated in the 1980s, people just thought it was a musical instrument, which is understandable because it does look like one, but then they noticed the leather at the bottom, then to their horror discovered it was actually an enema pipe. It would have had a sack attached to it underneath and this could have been filled with medicine in order to administer medicine rectally.
[00:17:18] Anjna: Medical practice encompassed the arts of piss and poo gazing. Observing urine known as uroscopy was a common way of diagnosing illness and so too was examining the colour, consistency, and size of stools. Physician Thomas Cogan offered up this rhyme as a way of diagnosing feces.
[00:17:40] Thomas Cogan: Filthy dung and fecs most vile, many colors in ones stool be evil/The dregs of nature's food when they be diverse colors made the signs be never good./ If the siege be likened to the meat, new drawn into the moor,/ or fleeting with flame and bubbles great, the body is windy and raw./ The yellow dust from color calm, the green is burned a dust,/ the black and lead be deadly signs, the flesh will turn to dust./ The excrement that is in the jakes cast, if it have oil or fat,/ consumption of the body begin the chiefest sign is that the privy, soft, well, compact/ made in the accustomed time is ever good and the hard is ill, and thus I end my rhyme.
[00:18:41] Anjna: Basically, when you look into your Jake's you want to be seeing soft and dense turds instead of hard ones. Speaking of the jakes, all of these cesspits, sinks, and pots obviously had to be emptied. In Henry IV Part Two, Falstaff instructs the somewhat put-upon servant, Frnaces to:
[00:19:06] Falstaff: Empty the jordan!
[00:19:08] Anjna: It's common knowledge that this would have been emptied into the cesspits and even out of windows, but who cleaned up that mess?
[00:19:17] Pete Smith: The night soil men also known as the gong farmers or the dung farmers who came around with horse and cart and would go through your house with buckets and simply take it out and take it down to the river Thames and dump it.
[00:19:32] Anjna: Let's hear from Dr. Sara Read from Loughborough University.
[00:19:36] Dr. Sara Read: It was an expensive business getting your privy emptied. They used to talk about how wealthy the night soil men were because obviously nobody wanted to do that job; but when you read about it, they wheeling the wheelbarrow through your house to the privy emptying it all, and then whelling it back throuhg which is just ehhh! {Laughs]
[00:19:57] Anjna: Samuel Pepys also took great interest in the soil men writing that:
[00:20:03] Samuel Pepys: From thence home where my house of office was emptying and I find they will do it with much more cleanness than I expected. I went up and down among them a good while.
[00:20:15] Anjna: Before Pepys, Shakespeare was perhaps less kind to the muck clearers, admittedly through the mouths of his aristocratic characters. Richard, Duke of Gloucester in Henry VI, Part One is outraged at the servants or warders who refuse to open the Gates of the Tower of London.
[00:20:35] Richard: Whose will stands but mine? There's none protector of the realm, but I. Break up the gates I'll be your warrantize. Shall I be flouted thus by dunghill grooms?
[00:20:46] Anjna: Richard's attitude towards the servants is that they attend to dung, possibly horse dung, but it's not very clear; but as dunghill grooms, they are categorically inferior and ought not dare to oppose him. Later in Henry VI Part Two, Richard addresses someone as--
[00:21:06] Richard: Base dung hill villain and mechanical!
[00:21:09] Anjna: Mechanical is the term used for labourers, the lower sorts. One might infer that Richard perceives all lower sorts as dung dealers. Unsurprisingly, Richard is meant to be kind of a jerk. Circling back to my question about how funny all of this actually was, I suppose I'm harking back to Rabelais and Harrington, for example, mocking arse-wiping and defecating, respectively.
Shakespeare, or at least his audiences, seemed to enjoy references to posteriors. There's a joke about bottoms being different shapes and sizes in All's Well that Ends Well.
[00:21:49] Speaker 3: It is like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks, the pin buttock, the quatch buttock, the braun buttock, or any buttock.
[00:22:04] Anjna: My absolute favorite arse gag in Shakespeare's repertoire comes by way of the pimp Pompey in Measure for Measure who has the magnificent surname, Bum. Playwright Thomas Middleton had a character called Shortyard who boasts about urinating in one of London's public water cisterns or conduits. In this case, he's referring to the standard, which was in Cheapside.
[00:22:30] Shortyard: Sometimes I carry my water all London over only to deliver it proudly at the Standard. And do I pass all together unnoted, think you? No, a man can no sooner peep out his head, but there's a bow bent at him out of some Watchtower or other.
[00:22:48] Anjna: Shortyard obviously knows that he's doing something naughty and is, by extension, funny in a gross way. It's documented that on celebratory occasions, notably royal pageants, some of the conduits ran with wine for the enjoyment of the public. I don't think anyone would take kindly to someone pissing into it, therefore. This slightly icky and naughty aspect of evacuating intrigues me because it forms the basis of so much early modern humour. People pee and fart and are generally gassy, and they find it all terribly amusing.
[00:23:28] Pete: There's a very interesting crossover between medical discourse and the idea of the involuntary bodily expulsion. It's clearly a taboo. It's clearly something which is beyond this idea of courtliness and manners and etiquette, where you simply cannot control yourself. Perhaps most famously in Shakespeare's lifetime, in 1607 is Sir Henry Ludlow who comes into the House of Commons and just lets one go. There's a whole poem called The Fart Censured in the Parliament House about Ludlow cracking one off in a debate. It's a poem which circulates in manuscript and people are adding more and more fart gags to it. It gets longer and longer and longer.
[00:24:16] Anjna: Shakespeare's works are also peppered with references to bottoms, cracks, and farts and other bodily emissions.
[00:24:25] Speaker 5: Of course that's writ large in the name Jacques as you like it, which is a whole debate about - Jacques talks about how he will purge the world, how he will blow wind upon the world to purge it and clean it and so forth. There's a whole load of scatological vocabulary around that character and it's no accident, he's not called Jacques he's called Jakes! It seems to me that Shakespeare's onto, onto a fart gag winner here.
[00:24:52] Jacques: I must have liberty with all as a large a charter as the wind to blow on whom I please.
[00:25:01] Anjna: Remember Harrington and the Ajax? Pete also argues that this is the basis of a gag in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
[00:25:11] Pete: Thersites talks about how Ajax is so frightened of fighting with Hector that he's walking up and down the field looking for himself. In other words, he's looking for a Jakes ‘cause he needs a crap because he's so frightened.
[00:25:25] Thersites: Ajax goes up and down the field asking for himself. He must fight singly tomorrow with Hector and is si prohetically proud of an heroical cudgelling that he raves in saying nothing.
[00:25:38] Anjna: In the Merry Wives of Windsor again, Falstaff has to disguise himself as the fat lady of Brentford or the Witch of Brentford. And this is a terrific reference to a fictional woman named Gillian of Brentford, first appearing in a poem by Robert Copeland printed in 1563. The story became fairly ubiquitous in low literature and even on stage. The essential plot is that the widow, Gillian of Brentford calls a curate to her home in order to make a will in which she bequeaths 26 and a half farts to people who annoyed her. The half a fart being reserved for the curate against whom she'd clearly taken a dislike.
The cantankerous farting old lady is very comically referenced in the Merry Wives of Windsor and that it should be Falstaff who impersonates her merely solidifies the arguably deserved humiliation heaped upon the lusty, covetous old knight.
No matter who you are, a fart anecdote is always worth a chuckle!
It seems to me that Elizabethan and early Jacobean English folks of all sorts weren't really ashamed of their bodily functions. Everyone pooed and peed with or without witnesses; but not everyone had access to privies. I'm convinced that there was less prudery about bottoms and feces than perhaps we might be ready to acknowledge today. And, I don't know what a pinch buttocks is, but I feel as though I want one. So grab your literary trash, aim for the chimney and don't forget to chuck out that waste so it doesn't start breeding flies!
That's it for this episode of Shakespeare's Pants. Tune in next time to learn all about sex in early modern England. In this episode you heard from Dr. Pete Smith, Dr. Tara Hamling, Dr. Hannah Lilly, Dr. Sara Read and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also heard the voices of Donald Craigie, Neil Hancock, Richard Bunn, and Charlie Clee. Thank you very much for listening to Shakespeare's Pants. Adieu!
[00:27:54] Narrator: Shakespeare's pants.
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