Students who progressed to university were taught more than the rudiments of reading and writing: they were given a classical liberal arts education, spending time reading Latin authors and studying math, rhetoric, and grammar. I can’t say your worships have delivered the matter well, when I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables.Įducation, as we mentioned before, was fairly structured in Shakespeare’s day. Thomas Dawson, The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin, 1594
#Zed meaning full
MAKE your tart, and then take Banberie Cheese, and pare away the outside of it, and cut the cleane cheese in small peeces and put them into the Tart, and when your Tart is full of Cheese: then put two handfuls of sugar into your Tart vpon your cheese, and cast in it fiue or sixe spoonfuls of Rosewater, and close it vp with a couer, and with a feather lay sweet molten Butter vpon it, and fine sugar, and bake it in a soft Ouen. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, a minor character calls Abraham Slender a Banbury cheese in mockery of his name (and, one assumes, his slenderness).Įvidently, there was enough call for Banbury cheese that it made it into a 16th century recipe book:
Banbury cheese was very thin-so much so that when eager eaters pared away the rind, there wasn’t much cheese to eat. What is it about Banbury cheese that makes it so objectionable? It’s not what Banbury cheese is, so much as what it isn’t, which is plentiful.īanbury cheese is a strong, yellow cheese that was made (appropriately) in the town of Banbury in Oxfordshire, England. This makes Juliet’s comment even shadier: is she saying that Romeo has studied the arts of l’amour, or is she saying that his kisses aren’t anything special? It’s Shakespeare: it could well be both.
The later meaning was around when Shakespeare was writing (“I will shew you by the Booke how ignoraunt he is,” John Foxe wrote in Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, 1583). Because of this, the phrase by the book came to refer to things that were done as if memorized. Except, that is, for Romeo’s kisses.īy the book is a phrase that has come to mean “conventionally” or “in accordance with tradition or rules,” but when Shakespeare used it here, it also had a much more literal meaning: “by rote.” Education, and particularly formal education, in the 16th and early 17th centuries involved a lot of memorization and recitation of key texts-books belonged to teachers, not to students. Homespun referred to a type of plain weave cloth that was woven using thread spun at home, and because plain weave cloth is plain, the word homespun also came to refer to anything rustic, simple, or unsophisticated.Īh, young love, when everything’s new and fresh. The raw materials used for the cloth were also produced in a parallel fashion to how the cloth was woven: those with money could buy nicer thread made with exotic and expensive materials (like silk) in the market, and those without could spin wool or flax at home. But it didn’t stop and start just at the weaving. The cloth made at home was usually simpler than the cloth made for the marketplace-a loom that was able to weave complicated patterns, for instance, was often larger and much more expensive than a simple frame loom used to make plain weave. It’s true that there were guilds of weavers who turned out different kinds of cloth for those who could afford to buy it, but cloth was also commonly made at home (and particularly by those without the means to buy cloth from the weaving guilds). In Shakespeare’s day, cloth wasn’t just a commercial product. These actors aren’t just unsophisticated, but painfully so. He isn’t just calling the band of actors he’s run into rustic- hempen means “made of hemp,” and hemp was traditionally used to weave coarse cloth (like burlap) and ropes. In this scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck has just happened upon an impromptu play. What hempen home-spuns have we swaggering here.Ĭlothes, they say, make the man-or unmake him, as the case may be.
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