Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Looking Like a Child – or – Titus: The Comedy
- Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England
- (Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings
- ‘When Everything Seems Double’: Peter Quince, the other Playwright in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen
- As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness
- Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- Othello and the End of Comedy
- Shakespeare as a Joke: The English Comic Tradition, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Amateur Performance
- Falstaff’s Belly, Bertie’s Kilt, Rosalind’s Legs: Shakespeare and the Victorian Prince
- The Sixth Act: Shakespeare after Joyce
- The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife
- Directing Shakespeare’s Comedies: In Conversation with Peter Holland
- ‘To Show our Simple Skill’: Scripts and Performances in Shakespearian Comedy
- John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal
- Shakespeare as a Force for Good
- Timon of Athens and Jacobean Politics
- Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens
- Rough Magic: Northern Broadsides at Work at Play
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2002
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2001
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
(Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Looking Like a Child – or – Titus: The Comedy
- Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England
- (Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings
- ‘When Everything Seems Double’: Peter Quince, the other Playwright in A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Cultural Materialism and Intertextuality: The Limits of Queer Reading in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Two Noble Kinsmen
- As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness
- Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- Othello and the End of Comedy
- Shakespeare as a Joke: The English Comic Tradition, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Amateur Performance
- Falstaff’s Belly, Bertie’s Kilt, Rosalind’s Legs: Shakespeare and the Victorian Prince
- The Sixth Act: Shakespeare after Joyce
- The Return of Prospero’s Wife: Mother Figures in The Tempest’s Afterlife
- Directing Shakespeare’s Comedies: In Conversation with Peter Holland
- ‘To Show our Simple Skill’: Scripts and Performances in Shakespearian Comedy
- John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal
- Shakespeare as a Force for Good
- Timon of Athens and Jacobean Politics
- Man, Woman and Beast in Timon’s Athens
- Rough Magic: Northern Broadsides at Work at Play
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2002
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2001
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
We are used to telling our students that the name of Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes from carpenters' quoins or coigns, 'wedge-shaped blocks used for building purposes', at the 'corners' of houses or walls, appropriate for the carpenter who appears in a 'marriage play' concerned with constructing 'houses' of another kind. But rarely is anything said of the quince itself, though it was part of a rich network of associations with marriage, sexuality, and fruitful 'issue' in the period, as well as of multi-lingual connections and metamorphic spellings that conflated it with coigns, quoyns, sexual corners or coining, and the cunnus or 'queynte' its sound suggests.
Minsheu's Guide unto the Tongues (1617) situates the English 'Quince' within this suggestive interlingual network:
Quince, a kind of fruit, from French Coing . . . Italian Mela cotogna, pomo cotogno. Latin Malum cotoneum, cydonium, Malum canum . . . Malum Lanatum ['cottony' and 'wooly' apple], because of its wooly or downy covering. Greek melon kudonion, from Cydonia (a city in Crete), and lasiomelon ('wooly apple'), from lasios or hirsutus ('hairy' or 'rough with down') and melon, or Latin pomum ('apple'). Portuguese Marmelo. Spanish Membrillo, from membrum , . . . because of a certain similarity with the first pubic hairs of men and women.
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- Shakespeare SurveyAn Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, pp. 39 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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