2115 the puppets dallying] Seymour (apud ed. 1819): “The agitations of your bosom. SEYMOUR.”

2115 puppets dallying] Keightley (1867, Index): “seems to mean the apparent motion of the babies in the eyes, i.e. the reflections of objects on the outer part of the pupil.”

2115 puppets dallying] Furness (ed. 1877): “Seymour (2: 179): If I could observe the agitations of your bosom. Nares: Synonymous with the babies in the eyes.”

2115 Elze (ed. 1882): “Hamlet means to say, that Ophelia’s love is no better than a puppet-show and that he should be able to act as its interpreter, if he could see the puppets, i.e. Ophelia and her lover, dallying or making love. ‘To interpret’ is the technical term for the dialogue of the puppets as delivered by the ‘puppetmaster’ or show-man. See B. Jonson, Bartholomew-Fair, V, 3 (Works, ed. Gifford, in I vol., p. 338 a): Come, sit down, Numps: I’ll interpret to thee. Nashe, Pierce Pennilisee, ed. Collier, p. 21: the puling accent of her voyce is like a fained treble, or ones voyce that interprets to the puppets. From Ophelia’s answer (You are keen &c.; Q1: Y’are very pleasant my lord) and from the whole tenor of Hamlet’s conversation with her, it is to be gathered, that there must be some indecent double-entendre in the expression the puppets dallying which is still unexplained, and which, in my opinion, is not equivalent to the babies in the eyes. Compare the passage from Duffet’s poems (1676) quoted by R. Gr. White ad loc. Steevens justly remarks, that this conversation ‘is probably such as was peculiar to the young fashionable of the age of Shakespeare, which was, by no means, an age of delicacy’. It seems indeed to be beyond a doubt, that even in this conversation Shakespeare shows ‘the very age and body of the time his forme and pressure’. Numerous passages concur in bearing witness to the fact, that the ladies of the Elizabethan age were given to bawdy talk, not only when among themselves, but no less so when in company with gentlemen. Room must be made for some instances, the more so, as they will serve as so many arguments against Dr. Rümelin and his followers, who persist in asserting that by the vulgarity of the audience on the one hand and the objectionable language of the plays on the other, ladies and honest women in general were prevented from frequenting playhouses. It seems plain that ladies who were used to, not to say fond of, bawdy talk, would not be deterred from enjoying the favourite pastime of the metropolis even by the broadcast jests and the most outspoken obscenities of Shakespeare’s clowns; nay, Shakespeare would not have introduced such grossness and ribaldry, if it had not corresponded to the taste of his audience, female as well as male. Ophelia excels the majority of Elizabethan ladies in modesty in so far as she does not join in Hamlet’s bawdy talk, though she thinks it pleasant and is not ignorant of its import. It is true that in her alienation of mind she sings immodest songs, this, however, does not proceed from a want of chastity, but agrees with ‘the notorious fact that, in the dreadful visitation of mental derangement, delicate and refined women will use language so coarse that it is difficult to guess where they can ever have even heard such words’ (Strachey, quoted by Furness). Now for our quotations. A lively description of a citizen’s supper is given by Engine (the Broker) in B. Jonson’s The Devil is and Ass, II, 8:-’There be some of ‘hem [viz. the players] A very pretty fellow, and comes often To a Gentlemans chamber, a friends of mine. We had The merriest supper of it there, one night, The Gentlemans Land-lady invited him To a Gossips feast, Now, he Sir brought Dick Robinson, Drest like a Lawyers wife, amongst ‘hem all; (I lent him cloathes) but, to see him begave it; And lay the law; and carve; and drinke unto ‘hem; And then talk baudy: and send frolicks! o! It would have burst your bottons, or not left you A seame.

“B. Jonson, Catiline, II, I: —‘Fvl[via]. She has a wit, too? Gal[la]. A very masculine one. Fvl. A shee-Critick, Galla? And can compose, in verse, and make quick iests, Modest, or otherwise? Gal. Yes, madame.’

“In Ram-Ally (Dodsley, ed. Hazlitt, X, 322) Mrs Taffata desires to have a coach ‘of the last edition’, in which ‘the coachman’s seat [is] a good way from the coach’ ‘That, if some other ladies and myself Chance to talk bawdy, he may not o’erhear us.’

“Greene, Dorastus and Fawnia (Shakespeare’s Library, ed. Hazlitt, I, IV, 58): delighting as much to talke of Pan and his countrey pranks as Ladies to tell of Venus and her wanton toyes. See note on § 121 (country matters). Nat. Field in his Amends for Ladies (Dodsley, ed. Hazlitt, XI, 131 seq.) introduces the widowed Lady Bright, who proves chaste in good earnest, ‘talking bawdy’ with her gentlewoman Princox, i.e. her disguised lover Bold. When Princox beseeches her ladyship to change the tone of her conversation and ‘let the bridle of judgment be always in the chaps of wit’, she is sneered at as a precisian and asked, if she does not go to Blackfriars. ‘I tell thee, continues Lady Bright, there’s nothing uttered but carries a double sense, one good, one bad; but if the hearer apply it to the worst, the fault lies in his or her corrupt understanding, not in the speaker; for to answer your Latin, pravis omnia prava. Believe me, wench, if ill come into my fancy, I will purge it by speech: the less will remain within. A pox of these nicemouthed creatures! I have seen a narrow pair of lips utter as broad a tale as can be bought for money. Indeed, an ill tale is like a maggot in a nut, it spoils the whitest kernal.’ This is, what might be called the philosophy of ribaldry.”

2115 puppets dallying] Dowden (ed. 1899): See n. 2114.

2115 Harrison (ed. 1937): “Puppet shows were a primitive form of marionette which were popular in fairs and other gatherings. Whilst the puppet-master moved the strings he explained what was happening.”

2115 Kittredge (ed. 1939): “If I could look on at a scene of dalliance between your lover and you, I could tell what it meant. By the puppets Hamlet means Ophelia and her imagined lover. Puppet shows, which were very common, regularly had an interpreter, who sometimes sat on the stage.”

2115 dallying] Spencer (ed. 1980): “indulging in dalliance (that is love-play).”

2115 I could . . . dallying] Edwards (ed. 1985): “I could act as a chorus in explaining what goes on between you and your lover if I could see that dalliance or flirting in the form of a puppet show. Many commentators, surely correctly, suspect some indecent secondary meaning in ‘puppets’. The explanation may well lie in Q1’s ‘poopies’. It has been shown by H. Hulme that ‘poop’ meant the female genitals (Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language, p. 114; see also Massinger, Parliament of Love 4.5.73). That the word could mean ‘rump’ (from ‘poop’ = stern of a ship) is clear from OED, and the obscene use is probably only an extension of that meaning, probably to the genital organs of either sex, as I think is intended by Hamlet.”

2115 puppets dallying] Bevington (ed. 1988): “(With sexual suggestion, continued in keen [2116], i.e., sexually aroused, groaning, i.e., moaning in pregnancy, and edge, i.e., sexual desire or impetuosity.).”