There are few things as impenetrable as an old joke. Look at the confusion caused by one of Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s exchanges with Feste in Twelfth Night. The feeble-witted Sir Andrew tells the fool, Feste, ‘In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, which thou spok’st of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus. ’Twas very good, i’faith. I sent thee sixpence for thy lemen, hadst it?’ And Feste replies, ‘I did impeticos thy gratility; for Malvolio’s nose is no whipstock. My lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses.’ (2.3.20-7). So – incomprehensible jargon, deeply obscure classical references, and a frankly impenetrable punchline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the line quite often drops out in performance. This 1969 version, with Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby, John Moffatt as Sir Andrew, and the chirpy and rather alarmingly bug-eyed Tommy Steele as Feste, cuts it altogether.
The 1996 Trevor Nunn film fades in the very tail end, with Richard E. Grant’s Sir Andrew falling about at Ben Kingsley’s Feste.
[In both videos, you need to scroll along a bit... Apologies...]
Faced with the task of explaining all of this, what’s an editor to do? Stanley Wells and Roger Warren in the Oxford edition of Shakespeare’s plays make a number of valiant attempts to gloss Sir Andrew’s statement, before confessing, ‘perhaps the joke is simply that Sir Andrew is solemnly repeating Feste’s gibberish as if it had meaning; or perhaps he is distorting, through drunkenness or ignorance, what Feste said’. Similarly, David Bevington writes that ‘whipstock’ ‘possibly suggests that Malvolio can’t be led by the nose’ or that it may be ‘just nonsense’, and glosses ‘has a white hand’ as ‘is ladylike’, before admitting, again, ‘But Feste’s speech may be mere nonsense’. In the Cambridge Schools edition of Twelfth Night, Rex Gibson invites school kids to discuss what the lines could mean: ‘Your guess is as good as anyone’s!’
Despite – or perhaps because of – editors’ attempts to explain it, this joke is often selected as an example of the obscure and unfunny in Shakespearean comedy. For example, in an episode of the late 60s/early 70s BBC radio comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, midway through an Othello parody a series of puns [check context] fail to find favour with the audience, and John Cleese’s character explodes:
[JOHN] CLEESE: Look – now look, if you don’t think that’s funny, how about this one?
[BILL] ODDIE: I say, I say, I say, – ‘I sent thee sixpence for thy lemen. Hadst it?’
[TIM] B[ROOKE]-TAYLOR: ‘I did impeticos thy gratility; for Malvolio’s nose is no whipstock. My lady has a white hand, and the Myrimidons are no bottle-ale houses’.
ODDIE [AND] B[ROOKE]-TAYLOR: Oi!
CLEESE: Yes, that’s real Shakespeare. Twelfth Night, actually. So just be thankful for our jokes, or else we shall do all the Shakespearean comedies, one by one, very slowly, twice. Right, carry on.
(From Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus [London: Eyre Methuen, 1980], 127. You can download to it here. Again you have to scroll along a bit. Sorry again.)
