Subject
Re: Danish stilettto
From
Date
Body
In a message dated 02/12/2006 19:42:04 GMT Standard Time,
penmc@BTCONNECT.COM writes:
Charles, But a bodkin is a Danish stiletto. Hamlet’s ‘bare bodkin’ – a
dagger held by a Danish prince. Penny.
You've made me feel a bit foolish, Penny!
I mentioned this interesting word, bodkin, in my post of 12/11/2006:
The most famous soliloquy in Northern literature is usually interpreted as
solely a meditation on suicide. However, also present in Hamlet's troubled
mind are thoughts of revenge by murder, as well as his sense of sexual
frustration and/or disgust. Is the passage
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
(or botkin, to adopt Kinbote's improved spelling, p 175) supposed to signal
to us that "bodkin" was also common Elizabethan slang for "penis" ?
I'd always simply assumed that the primary meaning of "bodkin" was that
given in my handy dictionary (Cassell, 1989, 160,000 definitions +), viz "an
instrument for piercing holes, a large-eyed and blunt-pointed needle for leading
a tape or cord through a hem, loop etc; a pin; an awl-like tool"; but I see it
also, to my surprise, gives "a small dagger", to which definition an
inscrutable small dagger is prefixed. In spite of combing the book from end to end
I can find no clear explanation of the small dagger symbol, but I suspect it
indicates "poetic" or "rare" or "obsolete" or "archaic" or something of the
sort. "Bodikin" is also so distinguished, and means "a little body". The
etymology of the word is given as unknown. I'd always thus assumed it was a
uniquely English word meaning blunt needle, and that Shakespeare was employing it
with two basic, rather specialized, metaphorical senses: (1) as a tool either
to kill himself or King Claudius with, or (2) to satisfy his suppressed and
jealous Oedipal lust for his own mother, as well as similar feelings for
Ophelia. The speech, throughout, imho, admits of all these readings, although I've
never known anyone else make this observation.
In any case, "stiletto" seems to me to set up all sorts of elegant
Italianate resonances, off-key for such a simple, bluntish northern awl, and the
dictionary provides no indication at all of its nationality, which I take to be
fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. I can't really accept "Danish stiletto" as anything
other than a mischievously misleading Kinbotean kind of definition, but I
must pursue its etymology. I must also check my Arden "Hamlet".
Charles
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm