a question occasioned by reading Thomas Nashe

[tempestsarekind]

Why did the Elizabethans think that mustard was so funny?

I'm reading Summer's Last Will and Testament, don't ask me why but it's on my fields list, and it's sort of an allegorical pageant--I guess?--in which Summer calls the various seasons and personifcations (Harvest, Bacchus) to account for what they've been doing, except that an actor

Comments

[saestina]

Wasn't mustard used to treat venereal disease? I know "mustard pot" was slang for vagina, so that follows. Those crazy Elizabethans and their VD jokes.

[tempestsarekind]

You know, that would actually make the jokes make more sense! Because Elizabethan jokes about venereal disease I totally take as a matter of course, these days (anything having to do with baldness or being French is automatically suspect), but the mustard thing kept stopping me in my tracks.

[angevin2]

There's also Bottom's comic sympathy for Mustardseed: "your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now" or whatever the line is. And I think it also figures in the starvation scene in Taming of the Shrew, but in that case (and also the Jonson one) it has a lot to do as well with the proverbial sharpness of mustard (I can't believe I just said "the proverbial sharpness of mustard").

Other than that, I've got nothing, except, I guess, what saestina said, though I hadn't thought of that, since nobody in chronicle history plays gets VD (except, I guess, the patrons of the Boar's Head Tavern).

Mostly, though, I just wanted to use this icon.

[tempestsarekind]

See? They were obsessed!

Hee. "The proverbial sharpness of mustard" makes me giggle. And I love the icon.