I remember seeing somewhere a volume entitled – and gathering – Shakespeare’s Rudest Insults, a handy compendium if you ever wanted to overwhelm an opponent with colourful Elizabethan invective – ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’, from Macbeth, being a relatively modest example. Try using that as a greeting next time someone knocks on your office door at work!
Could such a volume be compiled from Morris’s works, and if so, what might it include? One obvious candidate would be Jack Straw’s contemptuous call to the spokesperson of the lords, knights, bailiffs and lawyers in the opening battle of A Dream of John Ball: ‘hearken, thou bastard of an inky sheep-skin!’ (ch.VI) – which would certainly have been a satisfying formulation to throw at Chancellor George Osborne after his Comprehensive Spending Review speech in the House of Commons (or Dung-Market) the other day.
But there must be many others (from both life and works), so could we between us come up with a full list of Morris’s Rudest Insults to match Shakespeare’s?
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I'm not sure that I would want to be called a 'fool cow-crammer' or 'worker of dirty fleeces' (as Kormak says of Narfi in 'The Story of Kormak' whilst smiting him with the hammer of his axe).
I suppose it was quite cutting when Morris called Millais a 'picture dealer'; he called Aveling a 'disreputable dog'; from (if I remember rightly) Novel on Blue Paper, that damned thief Jenkins was 'a porridge-faced Welshman'.
I'm not sure what a gilt gibbie-stick is, but Morris uses it as an insult in Commonweal in 1887; Morris accused himself (to Burne-Jones, I think) as being 'a hedgehog for nastiness'; he writes of the 'scabby oppression of cowardly shopkeepers' (Lemire --will produce exact reference soon).
Dear David and Linda, Thanks for the additional suggestions, we should end up with a colourful anthology! In Morris's translation of the Grettir Saga, the hero finds himself called "mermaid's son, and many other ill names". Mermaid's son sounds cute to me, but Grettir finds it mightily offensive.
Morris uses the term 'hen-headed idiot' (May Morris, Introductions II p426)
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