1Umberto Eco, approaching a collection of proverbs from an earlier age with present-day skepticism about language – and aware of the potentially risible aspects of such collections – reduces an allusion to the proverb Things done cannot be undone, found in Macbeth, together with several others, to a series of unhelpful GPS messages:

• 1 Umberto Eco, “Living by Proverbs” in Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy and other occasional writings(...)

Traveling by road was difficult: assuming that he who leaves the old road for the new knows what he’s left but not what he’ll find. U-turns were prohibited (there’s no going back to where you began) as well as junctions (he who follows every path will discover many dangers).1

• 5 All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds (...)

Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl. I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s matters, but withal I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes: when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork.
(i.i.21-26)5

Let euery man exercise hym selfe in the facultie that he knoweth. Let the cobler medle with clowtynge his neighbours shoes, and not be a Captayne in felde, or meddell with matters concernynge a commonwealth. (fol.xxxiii leaf Ei recto)

7I start, in this essay, by glancing at selected aspects of Shakespeare’s proverbial tongue, with brief examples of what might be called straightforward, conventionally humanistic proverbial allusions, where the authority of the proverb’s signification or meaning is taken as given. Then, I will provide instances of proverbial allusions that suggest more complicated implications for the stability of proverbs signification, for the articulation of identity, as well as for concepts of language itself. This will lead to an attempt to register the extent to which Shakespeare’s proverbial tongue bespeaks an Early Modern humanistic sensibility as regards language, or, conversely, the extent to which it challenges conventional Early Modern concepts.

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9But respectful allusions to proverb idiom operate in various other ways. The member of Elizabeth’s Parliament who, in 1601, delivered a speech consisting entirely of proverbs, did so as a sign of wit but also to persuade other members to adopt his point of view regarding a bill to avoid double payment of debt:

• 14 Cited in Wilson, “Shakespeare and the Diction of Common Life,” p. 182-3.

It is now my chance to speak something, and that without humming or hawing. I think this law is a good law; even reckoning makes long friends; as far goes the penny as the penny’s master. Vigilantibus non dormientibus jura subveniunt. Pay the reckoning overnight, and you shall not be troubled in the morning. If ready money be Mensura Publica, let every man cut his coat according to his cloth. When his old suit is in the wain, let him stay till that his money bring a new suit in the increase. Therefore, I think the law to be good, and I wish it good passage.14

10Proverbs may also be played with verbally, in multiple ways, by a speaker, without bringing the inherent proverb’s signification into contention. When, in As You Like It, Orlando bursts in upon the peaceful courtiers of Arden with a threatening demand for attention, the Duke responds:

What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness.
(As You Like It, ii.vii.102-3)

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12I turn now to two simple examples of the more complex implications that may result from a doubtful reliance placed by certain dramatic characters upon proverb idiom. We may preface this by noting that when, in 1 Henry IV, Poins refers to Falstaff sarcastically as “Monsieur Remorse” (1 Henry IV, i.ii.112) and mocks his affected repentance in the first tavern scene, Hal joins in:

Sir John stands to his word, the devil shall have his bargain, for he was never yet a breaker of proverbs: he will give the devil his due.
(1 Henry IV, i.ii.116-118)

13The proverb Give the devil his due 1589 (Tilley, D273) is usually used to concede that even the bad are sometimes deserving of positive recognition. Hal, in his application of the proverb, displaces its usual meaning. He suggests that, despite the fact that Falstaff affects an attack of conscience and a need to repent, he will still remain true to the devil and relapse into his old ways. But Hal also frames his jest with the claim that Falstaff is “never yet a breaker of proverbs.” As part of the joke, the claim directs his audience to what, in an age steeped in proverbs, must nonetheless have been a familiar preoccupation: the extent to which age-old generalization might be reconfirmed in each particular situation, and more especially, the implications, often profound, that might result from a failure to do so. Furthermore, the “breaking” of proverbs in one or other way often challenges Early Modern humanistic faith in their transparency.

14One kind of instability suggested by the use of proverbial allusion occurs when Othello, attempting to convince himself of the veracity of Iago’s allegations as to an adulterous Desdemona, and, thus, to accept the unacceptable, grasps from time to time at the authority of proverb idiom. At one point, he cries:

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stol’n,
Let him not know’t, and he’s not robb’d at all
(Othello, iii.iii.347-348)

15alluding to the proverb He that is not sensible of his loss has lost nothing, c1526 (Tilley, L461). In citing proverbial authority, Othello attempts to elide the disjunction between his own knowledge of Desdemona, and the “knowledge” of her alleged behaviour with Cassio, which Iago has given him. His resort to the authority of the proverb posits his own inner doubt. To Othello, citation of the formulation ostensibly authorizes as credible the story of both his “ignorance” and Cassio’s “theft.” However, the fact that the audience knows the proverb’s signification to be in this case entirely misapplied questions the putative transparency in the usage of the proverbial language counter.

16Just before the moment of assassination in Julius Caesar, Caesar alludes to proverb idiom in a way that also suggests levels of disjunction. He structures a version of himself in the lines:

• 16 The proverbial phrase To be as flesh and blood as others are, 1541 (Tilley, F367) is used in other (...)

But there’s but one in all doth hold his place
So in the world: ’tis furnished well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion (Julius Caesar iii.i.65-70)16

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18Interestingly, Robert Greene, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, each in a different way, address the – for the humanist – omnipresent threat of disjunctive or unreliable speaking, specifically by means of allusion to the particular proverb Good that the teeth guard the tongue (var. from 1578, T424). Greene, firstly, reflects conventional reliance on the authority of the proverb:

It seemeth (saith Bias) that Nature by fortefying the tongue, would teach how precious and necessarie a virtue silence is; for she hath placed before it the Bulwarke of the teeth. (1587, Greene, Penelope’s Web, p. 221)

19Implicit in this straightforward proverbial recommendation for discrete silence, may be detected, in Greene’s imagery of a necessary “fortifying” of that tongue, Early Modern humanistic anxiety about its proclivity to speak the destructive, or the obfuscatory and the misleading. On the subversive potential, too, of the tongue, Jonson alludes to the proverb when he writes:

• 18 Ben Jonson, Timber or Discoveries, Made vpon Men and Matter: As they have flow’d out of his daily R (...)

a wise tongue should not be licentious and wandring: but moved and (as it were) govern’d with certaine raines from the heart, and bottome of the brest: and it was excellently said of the Philosopher: that there was a Wall or Parapet of teeth set in our mouth, to restraine the petulancy of our words: that the rashness of talking should not only bee retarded by the guard and watch of our heart: but be fenced in, and defended by certaine strengths, placed in the mouth it selfe, and within the lips.18

20Even as he recommends the “wise tongue,” Jonson is particularly wary of its capacity for bad or unruly speaking. Precisely because of the danger, in speech, of a “licentious […] wandring”, there is need of “the guard and watch of [the] heart” to help fortify, fence in and control “the petulancy of our words” and “the rashness of talking.”

21Shakespeare makes two allusions to the same proverb, that in each case also register problematics of language usage and of representation. In Richard II, Mowbray, responding to the King’s sentence of exile just meted out to him, contemplates the impossibility of using his “native English” in a foreign land:

Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips
(Richard II, i.iii. 160-161).

22His is a bitter semi-literal application of the proverb to his likely future inability, literally, ever to use his mother tongue when in exile. Whereas the signification of the proverb enjoins decorum (particularly here, in the presence of the monarch) he inverts the verbal content of the formulation, vociferously to protest against his cultural “en-jailing” or exile of his “English” tongue. What is, in the proverb, a recommendation to speak moderately is twisted by him into (an immoderate) protest at the King’s cruel punishment.

23Again, when, in Measure for Measure, the Duke, in disguise, asks the rascal Lucio about the reasons for the Duke’s withdrawal, Lucio replies: “ ’tis a secret must be locked within the teeth and the lips” (Measure for Measure, 3.1 397-398). Lucio here cunningly manipulates the proverb, even as he alludes to it, as a technique of self-defence. He uses the formulation – against the disguised Duke’s teasing scrutiny – to protest his own alleged “discretion.” On the one hand, his manipulation of the proverb and its signification for his own ends may be taken as implicit evidence of conventional humanistic anxieties about the deliberate abuse of language and its consequent lack of transparency. On the other hand, Lucio’s attempts to misrepresent or rewrite himself, with the aid of proverb manipulation, underline again, as in the case of Mowbray’s allusion, the potential slipperiness, in use, of proverb formulation.

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24Proverbial allusions, during a conversation, early in Julius Caesar, between Brutus and Cassius, also propose unsettlings of identity and, by implication, praxis. But in this instance, there is no implicit destabilizing of aspects of the authority of proverb idiom. On the contrary, the extent to which the construction of identity may be relative, dependent also upon narrative intersections with the linguistic or discursive structures available within particular locations and moments – and therefore also potentially unstable – is actually foregrounded by proverbial authority. Firstly, when, at the opening of the play, Caesar and his train have left the stage, Brutus, directly on the subject of self-representation, replies to Cassius’ enquiry, “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?”:

No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
(Julius Caesar, i.ii.54-55)

Mine Eyes, which (view) all obiects nigh and farre,
Looke not into this litle world of mine,
Nor see my face, wherein they fixed are.

26Tilley quotes some lines from Nosce Teipsum to illustrate an allusion to a related proverb, The eye that sees all things else sees not itself, a1591 (Tilley, E232):

• 20 Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, [1599], 1622 edition in The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed A (...)

Is it because the minde is like the eye
(Through which it gathers knowledge by degrees,)
Whose ray reflect not, but spread outwardly,
Not seeing it selfe, when other things it sees?20

27and he gives another citation anterior to Julius Caesar, also registered in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs:

• 21 Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, [1584] in Works, R. B. McKerrow, ed., II [1904], 201, Ded. (...)

How wel or ill I haue done in it, I am ignorant: (the eye that sees round about it selfe, sees not into it selfe).21

28while Dent, in Appendix A to his Index adds:

Many of them are like the eye, which seeth all thinges and cannot see it selfe.
(1581, Bisse, J, Two Sermons A8v)

29Whiting, too, lists several other formulations that may have been proverbial or at least quasi-proverbial, using related imagery which, to a present-day audience, not only expresses desire for self-knowledge, but implies the dependence of the “self”, for that knowledge, on representation. For one of these, Who that beholds in the glass well he sees himself, 1484 (Whiting, G126) he supplies the following citation:

• 22 William Caxton, The Fables of Aesop as first printed by William Caxton in 1484, J. Jacobs (ed) II [ (...)

For men sayn comynly who that beholdeth in the glass wel he seeth himself. And who seeth hym self wel he knoweth hym self, And who that knowith him self lytell he preyseth hym self, and who that preyseth him self lytell he is ful wyse and sage.22

30Cassius’ proposal to Brutus, a little later in their conversation, should be heard in the context of such traditionally proverbial concerns with representations of “self”-knowledge:

And since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.
(Julius Caesar, i.ii.69-72)

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32Such an awareness of the potential instability of proverbs, or of a proverbial recognition of problems of representation, is of course paralleled by a concern about the unreliability of language in other ways in Shakespeare’s texts, as is well known. Moreover, the Early Modern humanistic dimensions to this anxiety have famously been seen to intersect with present-day concerns about language. Thus, in his recent book on Shakespeare in French theory, Richard Wilson notes:

• 24 Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows, London, Routledge, 2007, p. 1.

Fineman was struck how much “the languageness of language” is foregrounded by Shakespeare with a self-reflexiveness which anticipates post-structuralist theories of the priority of the signifier over the signified, as well as by the fact that Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of self-presence is prefigured in Shakespeare’s dispersal of identity.24

33But in the case of Early Modern allusions to proverbs, my examples suggest so far a proverbial tongue, in the language of Shakespeare’s texts, which has mixed effects. Although some allusions propose aspects of volatility in signification or function that appear to intersect with contemporary sensibilities about language, other allusions operate in what may now remain for us a noticeably “foreign,” Early Modern humanistic way. It is true, for example that, as I have been arguing, some of Shakespeare’s proverbial allusions posit the slipperiness of the proverb seen as a not always reliable language counter or marker of identity. But, at least as often, the authority of proverb idiom is re-iterated, in matters unrelated to, as well as including, problems of equivocation or representation, in proverb argument or play,. If Lucio may be said, on the one hand, to be manipulating the proverb Good that the teeth guard the tongue in a way that undermines humanists’ faith in its “depe botome or secret priuetie,” the allusion does, on the other hand, posit an additional irony that is not akin to twentieth- and twenty-first century skepticism about language. For the proverb Shakespeare makes him pick to mislead the disguised Duke about his own identity, also ironically redounds upon Lucio’s own lack of discretion in his unwittingly self-damaging verbosity everywhere else in their conversation. In this respect, the instance of Lucio’s use of proverbial language also provides a case in point for the truth of the proverb’s signification. This particular kind of proverb manipulation in Shakespeare has, then, complicated effects – a manipulative prevarication that challenges humanistic notions of the proverb even as it ratifies them.