Past Productions: A Brief History of Little Words

When Alfred Jarry set off a riot in the first-night audience of Ubu Roi, he made a big point about the power of little words. Like Jarry’s “merdre,” other single words — including ‘”God,” “damn,” “bloody,” “arse,” “bitch” (as in “son of a . . . “), and “whore,” — each have an explosive theatrical history of their own. The shock of Jarry’s vulgarity is easy to understand against the backdrop of 19th-century theatrical politesse; in some cases, though, it’s hard to tell what all the fuss was about.

Clyde Fitch’s play, The City (1909), for instance, startled American theatergoers with the line “God Damn you!” Why should this have shocked anyone? The expression was in current use at the time. Everyone knew what it meant. It had never, though, been spoken on the American stage. Breaking convention, it ruffled Broadway’s conventional audiences.

Another seemingly tame word that caused a rumpus is “bloody,” first uttered with astonishing effect in Shaw’s Pygmalion (1926). British audiences were aghast. The usage became celebrated a cause of artistic freedom. But times definitely change. In 1957, the play Billy Liar contained the word 249 times, shocking almost no one. What’s astonishing in London may not raise an eyebrow in America.

Then again, take the word “whore.” If you looked, you might find that it was used seventy-five times by Shakespeare, or close to a hundred times in the Bible. But can you use it on stage? As critic and scholar Barrett Clark jokingly writes in 1955, “When I went to college, I took a course in Elizabethan Drama, but since ‘ladies’ were present the fastidious instructor self-consciously spoke of the famous Ford play as ‘Tis Pity She’s Wanton.” When Robert Brustein’s Yale Repertory Theatre produced the play in the late ’60s, a squeamish New Haven paper publicized it as ‘Tis Pity She’s Bad. Nowadays, it would surprise no one to see the correct title ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) emblazoned in a garish colors on a larger-than-life poster.

Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, such as “shit,” “turd,” “fuck,” “fart,” and “cock” almost always create trouble when used on the stage. The monosyllable “arse” used to do the same. While it was used without incident in the musical My Fair Lady (1959), it was censored from Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960). “Ah, but in My Fair Lady,” explained the censors, “there was a lot of noise on stage at the same time,” and, besides, that was a musical. As if capitalizing on and challenging this musical comedy privilege, the 1968 musical Hair made a whole song of “unspeakable” sex acts: “Sodomy, Fellatio, Cunnilingus, Pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty?”

Needless to say, many words “of fashion” move in and out of circulation as the borderline between the permissible and the forbidden moves. In the words of Hough’s comic opera, Second Thought is Best (1778), “Fashion, Sir, justifies the propriety of actions, and reconciles them to reason.” But lamentably “reason,” too often, is just a cover for the trite, the safe, and the decidedly un-theatrical.

For instance, Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) and Farquhar’s The Beaux’s Stratagem (1706) were either condemned for making “vice and villainy so playful and amusing” through the use of double entendres or else championed for exposing social hypocrisy in a witty and clever manner. Such is the dilemma of fashion. Equally, Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) was considered either “an unmitigated affront to popular morality,” solely for using words such as “ravish” or “labour” too frequently in reference to women or else celebrated for holding the line against prudish intolerance. Sometimes, fashion doesn’t know how to make up its mind.

Notably, it was the British who tried to put a stop to all the trouble. With the passage of the much celebrated British Stage Licensing Act of 1737, theater owners were required to present their playscripts for examination in order to obtain a license to perform them. Little words could now be excised. The Lord Chamberlain’s blue pen began to rule with impunity.

Substitute expressions have been the fashion must among the censorious. In Shakespeare’s time the word “God” got very high-handed treatment. An English statute in 1606 forbade the use of God’s name on stage. Suddenly “God” became “Jove,” in all of Shakespeare’s manuscripts. Conversely, the evolution of forbidden phrases creates an interesting legacy of its own. Start with the unexceptional Gee. A few years pass and you find the hardened playwright risking Geez, then Jesus, and Jesus H. Christ, until finally Jesus Christ Almighty! A deity has been transformed by the blasphemous stage into an expletive.

Little words make such large ripples.

By Thomas Keydel