The Oscillation of Meaning in Volpone

 

                                   illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

 

     The aesthetic text has a capacity to represent contradictions and ambiguities with great economy, often using figures of speech.  Through devices such as oxymora and  irony, authors may suggest a proposition and its opposite as well, allowing thereby the delineation of logically incongruous complex experience.  This characteristic may appear even in highly conventionalized aesthetic texts.  Though the psychological types of the “comedy of humours” and the social conventions on which the satire of “city comedy” realism rely on values shared by author and audience with the plays reinforcing the expectations of the culture as a whole, this general alignment by no means forecloses the use of equivocal images. 

     Virtually all the pillars of bourgeois society are questioned and ridiculed In Ben Jonson’s most frequently performed play Volpone: lawyers and courts, merchants, and doctors.  Each is presented as driven solely by cupidity.  That unifying theme not only characterizes most of the characters; it seems very nearly their only trait.  Every act in  the drama arises out of self-interest, even (for Corbaccio) to providing euthanasia for a testator who inconveniently continues to live. (III, ix)  This simple, unvarying motivation is consistent with Jonson’s definition of a “humour.” [1]

 

Some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to run one way.

 

Marrie ile tell thee what it is (as tis

generally received in these daies) it is a

monster bred in a man by self loue, and „

affectation, and fed by folly.

 (III, i, 156-I58  Every Man in his Humour)

 

 

     The audience knows very little of any of the main male characters beyond their avarice.  The only exceptions are the hermaphrodite, eunuch, and dwarf who are fundamentally ornaments of Volpone’s establishment included only to indicate his affluence and peculiar taste, and the honorable Bonario and Celia to provide contrast and conflict as they are, so far as the reader may judge, perfect in every way.

     Jonson was careful to distinguish such deep-seated over-riding “humours” that dominate an individual’s actions from mere vogues to which any weak-minded person might be susceptible and which may vary over time.

 

 

As when some one peculiar quality

Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,

In their confluctions, all to runne one way,

This may be truly said to be a Humour.

But that a rooke, in wearing a pyed feather,

The cable hat-band, or the three-pild ruffe,

A yard of shooetye, or the Switzers knot

On his French garters, should affect a Humour!

0, 'tis more than most ridiculous.

(Every Man out of His Humour, Induction, I05-II4).

 

 

Sir Politic Would-be and his wife are examples of this minor sort of “humour,” a condition which is not deep-seated or permanent but which follows fashion.  Their absurdities (contrasted with Peregrine’s better sense) form a lighter parallel to the primary drama around Volpone’s wealth. They are surely ridiculous, but they are not wicked.

    Greed is associated with black bile and Volpone is clearly consumed with a rapacious selfishness.  This is evident not only in his miserliness, but also in his fondness for spectacle, for pranks that humiliate others while benefiting himself. 

 

 

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth

Than in the glad possession, since I gain

No common way.

                               (Volpone I,i)

 

 

Later he declares, “I must have my crochets/ And my conundrums!” (V, vii)  His cruel art form consists of arranging for others to make fools of themselves, but he pursues his medium to the point that he is ultimately found out.  Apart from this rather endearing theatricality, though, Volpone is a merciless and unattractive con man.

     This straightforward assignment of values, however, is complicated by ambiguities and contradictions, beginning with the very title.  The central metaphor of the play, of course, is there announced: the foxy man.  Foxes are admired in the folklore of the world, particularly in many trickster stories for their cleverness and sagacity.  During the European Middle Ages stories of Reynard the Fox were circulated throughout Western Europe.  Foxes are, like Odysseus πολύτροπος (“of many turns”), notoriously wily, yet sometimes the tables are turned on them and their adversaries carry the day.  In life the fox is most often seen as a chicken thief hated by farmers.  Oddly, foxes are also traditionally obliged to run for their lives, pursued by great crowds of loud men and dogs.  Volpone may be, as the dramatis personae names him, a “magnifico,” but he is one few would care to emulate not least because his arrogance seems likely to be heading for a fall.

     Any ambiguity about Volpone’s character is instantly evaporated as he worships his money in the opening scene.  He is clearly in the grip of an obsession that has sunk him in vice and sin.  His servant, his “creature” or “parasite” Mosca, “the fly,” encourages his every move and remains entirely at his service until the end.  Mosca devotes considerable enthusiasm to carrying out his master’s deceptions.  Now a fly is an altogether despicable thing in the common view.  Though Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, was a deity to the ancient Philistines and Canaanites, he became for Jews and Christian a demon, though in Paradise Lost (II) a significant one, "than whom, Satan except, none higher sat."  Flies accumulate about a corpse almost immediately upon death where, as part of the machinery of dissolution, they are regarded with distaste by the living.  Cooks and tired campers and wide-awake front stoop loungers are mightily annoyed by flies.  Mosca lacks perhaps the grand, almost Byronic, defiance of Volpone’s plotting, but he feels the same relish that his master does in deceit.  Mosca is depicted as utterly obedient until the point when he conceives that he might grab Volpone’s wealth for himself, when he feels suddenly no trace of the loyalty that had seemed so central to him

     The three scavenger birds – crow, raven, and vulture – are equally inauspicious in folklore, though the first two are often considered tricksters, for instance among natives of the American Northwest and Australian Aborigines.  While this mythic role is doubtless facilitated by the impressive cognitive skills of corvids, in Jonson’s play Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore are ridiculous dupes, blinded by the golden bequest they expect to receive.  They think they are getting the better of each other, while they are only fooling themselves.  In the same way, Volpone and Mosca themselves turn out to be tricked.  Whereas in simpler and more stylized allegories such as Everyman most characters are stable with unambiguous, in Jonson’s more realistic drama, they have a certain equivocal looseness, cunning, yet careless due to greed.

     The same principle applies to metaphors.  When Mosca lures his master to new crimes by describing Corvin’s wife Celia as  “bright as your gold, and lovely as your gold,” (I,1), the qualities shared by tenor and vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms) include beauty, value, and prestige.  Yet in context the viewer knows that Volpone’s greed for gold has made him a selfish and hateful miser, and his appreciation of female beauty has been corrupted into lechery and sexual coercion.  Both passions can only inspire further duplicity and crime.  The love of both wealth and women, each of which might be a factor in a fulfilling life instead drives him toward both practical and moral ruin.  Each is thus presented as a potential evil as well as a positive good.

     When Celia is horrified at her husband’s suggestion that she join Volpone in bed, her husband calls her a “whore” (II, iii) specifically because she is not.  Thinking she might cost him a fortune, his nasty nature generates weird fantasies of degradation for her – the insulting name is less lurid than his threats to oblige her to walk only backwards, or to dissect her body as an anatomical lesson.  A little anxiety throws Corvino into hysterical misogyny. 

     The lovely and often-reprinted lyric, perhaps Jonson’s most well-known lines “Come, my Celia, let us prove,/ While we can, the sports of love” (II, iii), which out of context seems a sweet lover’s seduction plea much like “To His Coy Mistress,” is, in fact, delivered by a vicious predator to a most unwilling lady whose response is to wish herself dead. 

     While the characterization governed by the theory of “humours” might tend toward the reductive, in Jonson’s hands it is fleshed out by secondary traits, such as the gusto both Volpone and Mosca find in cheating others.  The readers’ partial sympathy is more easily engaged due to the fact that the  vulture, raven, and crow have equally low motives and less élan vital.  The clever fox turns out to be outfoxed, the fly can find  no fat corpse on which to feed, and the scavengers go hungry as well. 

     On the level of individual figures of speech terms like gold and whore have doubled ironic use in the play, indicating for the first both a positive good and a potential pitfall and, for the second, a degradation of woman that in fact indicates the degradation of the man uttering the insult.  Yet in the end retributive justice has restored a balance to society.  The play’s final lines appear to be moralizing.

 

1^st lawyer:                              Now you begin,

When crimes are done, and past, and to be punish'd,

To think what your crimes are: away with them.

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,

Take heart and love to study 'em! Mischiefs feed

Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

 

suggesting that the malefactors on stage might make the viewer reflect on morality, but this impulse is soon overrun by the realization that the play was all in fun, causing no real injury, and the audience's high comedic spirits can be expressed only by resounding applause.

Volpone:: The seasoning of a play, is the applause.

Now, though the Fox be punish'd by the laws,

He yet doth hope, there is no suffering due,

For any fact which he hath done 'gainst you;

If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands:

If not, fare jovially, and clap your hands.  (V, viii)

 

 

. 

1.  George Chapman, Jonson’s friend and sometime collaborator, had introduced the theory of “humours” slightly before Jonson with his plays The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and An Humourous Day's Mirth. 

Catullus’ Currency of Kisses: New translations of Catullus V, VII, and XLVIII

 

 The Latin texts of the poems are appended.

 

 

     Erotic relationships seem sometimes, to some lovers, reducible to the rules of accountancy: a bit of pleasure in return for a certain amount of trouble, a financial cost balanced against flights of delight.  When upbraiding Ameana for an excessive fee (41) or complaining of Aulifilena’s deception (110), Catullus displays the confident misogyny of a substantial citizen in a patriarchy.

     Yet with passionate attachments, the values shift dramatically.  One lover’s side, at least, of the exchange can balloon to virtually infinite value which may or may not be equaled by the love object.  Catullus expresses the degree of romantic love by a figure of speech, as innumerable kisses. [1]  The association of love and kisses is natural, of course, but, when the kisses become uncountable, the image signifies the power of eros.  Such lover’s desperation may lead either to love-sickness, depression, and the miserable conviction that one has been playing the fool or, for the more fortunate, to an ascent to Elysium. 

     In Catullus XLVIII the convention appears at its simplest in the context of gay relationship. 

 

Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,

if I could kiss them on and on,

three hundred thousand times would not

suffice.  I’d never have enough,

not if they numbered more than grains

could grow in fields of one estate.

 

     A hyperbolic compliment, but one fully intended in passionate moods, the hundreds of thousands of kisses remain still insufficient to express the lover’s emotion.  He cannot rest in languorous pleasure, but always wants more.  Love is measured by a currency of kisses, and the quantity must be countless to indicate the ineffable magnitude of the love. 

     The association here, first with honey and then with ears of cereal grain reinforces this indefinite and enthusiastic measure of love, and links the poem to archaic practices designed to foster fertility, human, animal, and vegetable alike. [2]  If, as Frazer reported, people would copulate in their fields in hopes of a good harvest, holding one’s lover may remain, in a vestigial way, a ritual of sympathetic magic to renew the world.  Such a link has at least an emotional reality, recorded in all the poems of spring’s regreening accompanying the blossoming of romance. 

     Catullus VII first extends the hyperbole, with an elaborate series of references at first geographical, then historic and cosmic. 

 

How many, Lesbia, kisses between us,

might be enough to surfeit me and more?

As many as the grains of Libyan sand

that lie in Cyrene where the silphium grows,

between the oracle of torrid Jove

and Battus’ old and holy sepulchre,

as many as the stars in silent night

that see all peoples’ secret love affairs.

So many kisses must the mad Catullus have

to be enough and then some, too,

so that the curious can never count

nor any tongue cast evil words our way.

 

This lyric reinforces the kisses’ meaning familiar from XLVIII and expandss it with concrete specifics, while also adding considerable semantic territory.  Extravagant love, measurable only by countless kisses, is associated with the exotic (Cyrene), the rare and precious (silphium or asafoetida), the sensual (“torrid”), and yet the venerable (the grave of the city’s founder) and indeed the universally human (“peoples’ secret love affairs”). 

     Rich in content if lacking the straightforward and spontaneous-seeming apparent speaking from the heart of XLVIII this poem suddenly turns in the final two lines to reveal a new aspect of the lovers’ situation.  Whereas the original referent of the currency of kisses had been erotic intensity, here they provide a mystical protection from hostile busybodies very like the “jealous ones” of Troubadour lyric over a millennium later.  As a subjective experience of the lovers from which all others are excluded, the kisses create a private utopian world, protected against all threats by the power of their affection.  These ill-wishers are the projection of the lovers’ fear that their bliss is endangered and perhaps cannot last.

     In V, likely the most familiar Catullan carmina, the motif of countless kisses is employed in service of the carpe diem topos.  Here it spotlights the contrast between the couple’s delirium of love-making and those disapproving superannuated meddlers. 

 

Oh, let us live, my Lesbia, let us love!

And any idle talk of crabbed old men

we’ll value at one pennyworth, no more.

The sun, we know, will set and rise again,

and yet, for us, when our brief light is gone,

what follows then will be an endless sleep. 

A thousand kisses and a hundred more I want,

another thousand, and a hundred yet,

and when the thousands upon thousands mount,

we’ll stir the pot and then we’ll never know

and those who envy us won’t know as well

how many kisses you and I enjoyed.

 

The seventh through the tenth lines simply juggle numbers, indicating the ineffable quality of a necessarily private erotic experience.  Like a jazz singer going into scatting the artist best approximates the joy of love by admitting its inexpressibility.  The two are so confidently in control that they, as though with a wave of a magic wand, can fling the scene into confusion and frustrate the hostile intentions of the envious while enjoying the marvels of each other’s bodies.   

     Catullus’ lyrics portray a range of lovers, some selfish, some selfless.  For him erotic play was could be simple recreation without emotional engagement, but other verses suggest a whole-hearted tumble into total commitment scarcely expressible in words.  Adopting the apparently natural association of love and kisses, he elaborates the imagery of a currency of kisses to signify a passion so great as to require a figure of speech, so great it may provide an apotropaic charm against the invidious. 

     A master of invective and insult and capable of plain-speaking to the point of outright vulgarity, Catullus was at the same time a virtuoso of love poetry whose elegant and original language might be either ardent or nasty.  His range is evident in another poem using the multitude of kisses topos.  In his most notorious poem (XVI) he complains that Aurelius and Furius have mistaken his romantic side for weakness, and the very image under discussion is to blame.   “Because I write of countless kisses, you think me as less a man?” Catullus defends his masculinity with the purest sexual aggression “I will fuck your ass and mouth”. [3]  That this verse is written by the same author who wrote as a devotee of true love only suggests the breadth and variety of the wild territory of eros. 

 

 

 

1.  Among others who use the same image is Baudelaire who in “Le Balcon” exclaims “ô baisers infinis!”

 

2.  Leah O’Hearn demonstrates the details of the implications of honey and of grain, particularly the latter’s association with the emergence of facial hair in Classical love poetry.   See “Title: Juventius and the Summer of Youth in Catullus 48,” Mnemosyne LXXIV, 1.

 

3.  “Vōs, quod mīlia multa bāsiōrum, lēgistis male mē marem putātis?” and (“Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō”. 

 

 

 

 

 

XLVII

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,

siquis me sinat usque basiare,

usque ad milia basiem trecenta,

nec unquam videar satur futurus,

non si densior aridis aristis

sit nostrae seges osculationis.

 

 

VII

Quaeris, quot mihi bāsiātiōnēs

tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.

Quam magnus numerus Libyssae harēnae

lasarpīciferīs iacet Cyrēnīs

ōrāclum Iovis inter aestuōsī

et Battī veteris sacrum sepulcrum;

aut quam sīdera multa, cum tacet nōx,

fūrtīvōs hominum vident amōrēs:

tam tē bāsia multa bāsiāre

vēsānō satis et super Catullō est,

quae nec pernumerāre cūriōsī

possint nec mala fascināre lingua.

 

 

V

Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,

deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;

dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,

aut ne quis malus invidere possit,

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Euphemism as Metaphor

This piece is neither scholarly nor exhaustive. It aims rather to be familiar and recreational after the fashion of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.



     As the name suggests, the point of a euphemism to substitute a more safe or decorous word for one too charged with anxiety or desire. Inevitably, every euphemism is a sort of figure of speech, a variety of allegory in the broader etymological sense of “saying something other” than what is meant. Thus euphemisms share with other figures the pleasure of wit and surprise that accompanies all such doublings as well as their semantic extension. The euphemistic expression does not merely occlude or replace the avoided one; it adds new elements of meaning as well, beginning with the charge of energy that accompanies entering a restricted zone of language or approaching taboos. Each example provides a model, often simple, of how poetic language in colloquial usage enriches and condenses meaning.
     Euphemisms, like jokes, collect about nodes of human insecurity such as the divine, the ego, death, intoxication, sex, and scatology. Every euphemism by its very nature bears the nervous energy of treading in a no man’s land in inadequate disguise. Even empty sounds like “blankety-blank” or television’s bleep that masks improper language make all listeners ears prick up the with the conviction that what is being said must be of unusual interest. The visual cue of a series of symbols in a comic strip indicating profanity (called a grawlix [1]) draws attention to the utterance and intensifies it. The effect of substituting a harmless term for one in some way emotionally charged is, in fact, always paradoxical. While avoiding a tabooed usage the euphemism inevitably draws attention to the altered word, introducing a tone suggesting nervousness or a wink and a nod which in fact highlights the usage dramatically. [2]
     The most ancient use of euphemisms may have arisen from wariness over using god’s name or the names of dead ancestors, or, indeed, one’s own name. The archaic identification of signifier and signified suggested that naming the supernatural might attract unwelcome attention from the divine and the deceased, unless strict ritual rules were observed. In many cultures a conjuring may be regarded as effective if the magician knows the name of person at whom a charm is directed.
     The Cretan king Rhadamanthus was said to have forbidden swearing by the gods, mandating that people swear instead by animals. [3] To avoid exciting their unwanted attention, the chthonic deities governing vengeance retribution, the Erinyes (Furies) were called Eumenides (or the Benevolent Ones). They often were invoked in association with oath-taking, for they punished those who swore to a lie. Aeschylus tells in The Eumenides how they were tamed by Athena and called thereafter the Venerable Ones or Semnai.
      Jews, Muslims, and Christians are well aware of the ancient Hebrew use of bynames to substitute for the deity’s name. Thus in the secular love poetry of the Song of Songs the repeated phrases by the roes, and by the hinds of the field are euphemistic forms of Hebrew oaths. God’s bynames are chosen with the greatest care. Phonically each resembles a conventional divine appellation. [4] Further, worship of animals (such as the golden calf) was common in the ancient Near East. One scholar at least thinks that these expressions are genuine pagan oaths to nature deities. [5]
     The Orthodox today avoid writing or saying God’s proper name, the tetragrammaton, using a wide variety of euphemisms, most of which specify god’s nature, such as Almighty (El Shaddai) or Lord of Hosts (Adonai Tzva'ot, suggesting military leadership). At times they simply write G-d, a curious example of writing a word while simultaneously canceling it.
     Of course, the most common euphemisms for God today, called minced oaths, arise from phonetic similarity and contribute no semantic information: gee, gosh, and the like. Even in the twenty-first century the magical belief that hearing oaths is somehow deleterious to children remains all but universal. Vestiges linger of the notion that women, too, must never hear such expressions.
     The anxiety produced by thoughts of mortality is ameliorated sometimes by euphemisms expressing religious faith and the confident expectation of an afterlife: meeting one’s maker, to go to one’s reward. Some churches call funerals a homecoming. Other expressions by their levity represent a kind of whistling in the dark: kick the bucket, bite the dust, [6], buy the farm, and the like. Cockney rhyming slang is, as usual, more oblique, offering the mildly comforting brown bread for dead.
     In modern times we associate euphemisms with sexual and excretory activities. A word directly naming the place we excrete (such as defecation room) almost never appears, nor does the term describing the apparatus most commonly used today, the water closet. Though today it may seem an unpleasant word because of its association, the word toilet was in origin a diminutive of toile and referred to a small cloth on which grooming tools were laid out. Powder room likewise suggests primping rather than peeing. [7] Similarly, latrine may bring to mind a reeking hole in the dirt, but it at first (like lavatory or, of course, washroom or bathroom) signified a place to clean oneself. Such terms reinforce the sense of purgation and purity that may follow excretion. In rest room the semantic element of relaxation following what might be called doing one’s business has become so generalized as to retain little force. Others, such as privy and the Spanish necessario, are even more oblique. More concrete are the associations of the British term bog referring at first to an open cess-pit.
     The delicate education of children about reproductive activities may be simply called the facts of life, which washes the topic of social hazard, or the birds and the bees, suggesting the continuity of all life. Since France is considered sexually naughty, saying au naturel clothes nakedness in the discreet tones of another language while genteelly retaining its sauciness.
     Vague words such as thing, stuff, or it and nonsense words can serve as general, all-purpose euphemisms. In a curious example of a euphemism recrossing into proscribed language a drug user who might refer to his stash as his shit, while an artist might use the same term to refer to his recent works. Presumably the high, whether aesthetically or chemically induced, is particularly charged for the junkie or the painter, both of whom are likely to be contemptuous of bourgeois standards. A bumper sticker reading stuff happens is understood as meaning shit happens, in which shit represents all possible undesirable events. Clara Bow was the It Girl whose film It appeared in 1927, and a teenager today might ask a friend, “Did you do it?” The 1928 song “Makin’ Whoopee” popularized by Eddie Cantor and “My Dingaling,” a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972 are examples of the use of neologisms to suggest sexual meanings, though they are not quite arbitrary. Whoopee with its insistent doubled vowels, certainly suggests the rush of joy that might accompany sex, while the jocular dingaling is comically associated with the dangling male genitalia.
     The socially dangerous condition of intoxication is likewise hedged about by a rich growth of euphemism. Blasted and bombed acknowledge the destructive loss of function that accompanies drunkenness, while buzzed suggests the quickened hum in the inner ear associated with a lesser chemical alteration of consciousness. Cockneys nod ironically to high culture with Brahms and Liszt, which rhymes with pissed. Many other areas of life, money, for instance, disability, and aging, also attract euphemistic usages.
     Steven Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill [8] to describe the succession of terms that result when a once proper term has come to seem inadequate or offensive. Americans of a certain age saw the polite usage turn from colored to Negro, and then to black (sometimes Black), and finally African-American. Notoriously, terms like idiot, moron, and imbecile were once clinical terms designating degrees of cognitive limitation more scientifically (it seemed) than the generic feeble-minded of an earlier era only to be replaced in the middle of the twentieth century by retarded, then developmentally disabled. The DSM-5 uses intellectual disability. The hospital psychiatric department where my wife worked changed from Mental Health Unit to Behavioral Health Unit as though behavior defined the problem for depressive and psychotic alike. It must have sounded more polite to somebody.
     In their most efficient uses, euphemisms have a spark of wit and a flowering of suggestive imagery. For instance, an American might tell a man whose trouser fly is unzipped, “Uh-oh, the barn door is open.” This form communicates the information while adding the amusement of a sort of riddle, the levity of humor, to defuse the topic’s awkwardness while retaining an implication of the power of Eros which, it suggests, is bestial and only in part controllable.
     It may seem a rebuke to the pretentions of language itself that among the ancient Greek meanings of the word euphemism, along with the use of words of good omen and abstention from those of bad and praise-singing, is the solemn silence during religious rites, as though stillness might well displace our endless flow of verbiage. Euphemism, though, far from simply blocking verbal signification, heightens meaning and increases semantic precision, transmitting values and entertaining at the same time.



1. The term was coined by Beetle Bailey artist Mort Walker in 1964. They are also called jams and nittles. Such symbols had been used, however, at least since December 14, 1902 in Rudolf Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids strip. In the grawlixes of sailors Uncle Heinle and John Silver, anchors are featured.
Walker named a number of other comic conventions as well in his book Lexicon of Comicana (1980). For instance, he called the visible cloud of dust generated by a character’s departure a briffit and plewds for the nimbus of sweat around an anxious character.

2. Words that do bear specific meanings may be eroded through vulgar usage to the same status or even less. With occasional use the word “fucking” may function as an intensifier, but in the discourse of a person whose every sentence includes several uses of the word even that is lost and the word, originally so potent, comes to mean nothing more than a pause during which “uh” escapes from the throat.

3. Porphyry, De Abstinentia III.16. For Porphyry this law suggests arguments in favor of vegetarianism. Divine animals and semi-bestial deities are, of course, common in archaic times. Rhadamanthus became proverbial for wisdom and later was described as one of the judges of the dead.

4. This occurs first in verses 2.7 and 3.5. The sound of the Hebrew for “roes” is similar to either (’elohey) ṣᵉba’ot '(God of) Hosts' or (YHWH) ṣᵉba’ot '(Jehovah is) Armies' and that for “hinds” to ’el šadday 'El Shaddai'. The association is explicit in the Targum.

5. See David McLain Carr’s “Rethinking Sex and Spirituality: The Song of Songs and Its Readings,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 81, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998), pp. 413-435.

6. This idiom, with its American Old West associations, is curiously similar to the Homeric expression that might be translated as “bite the earth.”

7. Pee itself is a euphemism to avoid saying piss.

8. “The Name of the Game,” in the New York Times for April 4, 2005.