Mamma Mia! Keeping abreast with Shakespeare

Mamillius, the little boy of Leontes and Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, abruptly and prematurely dies. His death is a seeming result of his father’s hubristic defiance of the Oracle’s exculpation of Hermione, the loyal wife whom the jealousy-maddened Leontes accused of adultery. The servant who delivers the news says:

SERVANT: O sir, I shall be hated to report it!
The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear
Of the queen’s speed, is gone. [III. ii. 41-43]

Poetically, we can readily discern the rhymes "son/gone," "mere/fear," and "conceit/ speed," as well as the long "e" assonance in "mere/conceit/fear/queen/speed." But there is something more at work here than the homophonic sounds and words (and even more than the ever-plurisignificant immanence) characterizing Shakespeare’s workings. The very concept of "Mamillius" is at play – not only in the drama of The Winter’s Tale – but as an elemental symbol throughout Shakespeare’s works. Little "Mamillius," derived from the Latin, mamillia, for "nipple," – vulnerable in his pre-pubescence – cannot sustain the moral and familial desiccation brought on by the jealousy of his father, Leontes. The boy’s demise was adumbrated by Leontes’ vicious snipe at Hermione: "I am glad you did not nurse him" [II. i. 56]. Deprived of an emotionally nurturing affection between and from his parents, Mamillius, like a sagging teat, "straight declin’d, droop’d" and simply withered away. [II. iii. 14]

Female breasts provide a wide range of symbols in Shakespeare’s works. The Duchess of York in King Richard III disowns her nefarious son, Richard, and disclaims that he is the product of her milk: "Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit," [II. ii. 30] lending credence to the notion of Richard’s bestiality – seemingly a creature of canine origin ("carnal cur"[IV. iv. 56]) that – like an alpha-male – "Preys on the issue of his mother’s body" [IV. iv. 57]: a veritable "hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death." [IV. iv. 48]

In King Henry VI, Part 2, the banished Suffolk invokes a nipple to extend and explicate his sexual passion and angst for Queen Margaret:

SUFFOLK: If I depart from thee, I cannot live;
And in thy sight to die, what were it else
But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?
Here could I breathe my soul into the air,
As mild and gentle as the cradle babe
Dying with mother’s dug between his lips... [III. ii. 387-392]

The imagery here, "to die...in thy lap," in Elizabethan terms, strongly suggests orgasm. When coupled with an allusion to a nipple between the lips of a moribund baby, the orgasmic reference hurls shards of a psycho-sexual prism: the dug in the mouth evokes a penis in a vagina; the nursing allusion signals a reversion by Suffolk to the dependent helplessness of infancy (and sexual infantilism); the expiring child evinces lingering post-coital detumescence; the unnatural coupling of a dying baby and its mother mirrors the illicit coupling of Suffolk and the Queen; the "mild and gentle" ambience of a mother/child death tableaux reflects the agonizing resignation of the Queen in the face of a lover’s perpetual banishment. As in Romeo and Juliet, the eroticism of the lines draws its essence from thoughts and images of premature death and forced separation.

In contrast, Shakespeare in Cymbeline has Giacomo ingeniously employ his observation of a mole as a mini-nipple to disingenuously satisfy Posthumus that, upon a wager, Giacomo satisfied himself with the bodily treasures of Postumus’ wife:

GIACOMO: If you seek
For further satisfying, under her breast –
Worthy the pressing – lies a mole, right proud
Of that most delicate lodging. By my life,
I kissed it, and it gave me present hunger
To feed again, though full. You do remember
This stain upon her? [II. v. 133-139]

Immediately preceding these lines, Giacomo has described for Postumus the bedchamber of Immogen, Postumus’ wife. Thus, the exquisite reference to Immogen’s body/breast as the mole’s "most delicate lodging" persuasively signifies that – as with her bedroom – Giacomo has been invited into, and entered, such "lodging." The mole, protruding "right proud" as a nipple, is claimed to have been kissed by Giacomo and leads to a reference ("hunger/To feed again, though full") of sating one’s appetite and to a breast’s dual role as both sexual object and source of nurture.

But it is not only human female nipples that provide Shakespeare fodder for sensual fantasy. In As You Like It, Touchstone traipses into a thicket of nonsensical sexual metaphors when he weighs in on the subject (and objects) of love:

TOUCHSTONE: ...I remember when I was in
love I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him take
that for coming a-night to Jane Smile, and I remember
the kissing of her batler, and the cow’s dugs that her
pretty chapped hands had milked; and I remember the
wooing of a peascod instead of her, from whom I took
two cods, and giving her them again, said with
weeping tears, "Wear these for my sake." We that are
true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal
in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. [II. iv. 44-53]

Slang references to male genitalia abound in the passage ("sword," "stone," "peascod," "cods"), all directed toward the prostitute commonly (and descriptively) named "Jane Smile." Thus, the "pretty chapped hands" kneading a cow’s udders plainly evoke phallic implications. It is the brilliance of Shakespeare to throw this blotch of obfuscatory, obscene prose onto the canvas of As You Like It so as to brighten and deepen by contrast the evolving romantic relationship between Rosalind and Orlando. But it is not the only reference to animal teats in the play. Orlando rescues his brother from a crouching "lioness, with udders all drawn dry" [IV. iii. 114] – imagery that underscores the danger of a hungry, unsatisfied female (that plays on the supposed sexual vulnerability of men addressed thematically in the work).

In Macbeth, we see, too, the concept of breastfeeding employed by Shakespeare to portray the unnatural lust for power of Lady Macbeth:

LADY MACBETH: ...I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this. [I. vii. 54-59]

The shocking brutishness of her declaration is enhanced by the ambiguity of the phrase "milks me," suggesting dairy husbandry as well as the act of nursing. (In a kind of parallel attribution, Shakespeare has Macbeth declare at the end of the play that he has become "cowed" by the revelations of MacDuff [V. viii. 18].) Lady Macbeth’s maternal perversity is furthered by her motherly dominance over her husband and by her symbolic allusions to lactation to criticize him: Macbeth, she says, "is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness" [I. v. 16].

As can be discerned from these examples (among many references throughout the plays), the extraordinary richness that Shakespeare derives from the female breast aids his artistic endeavor to flesh out our consciousness of human drama, while simultaneously fleshing out the drama of our human consciousness.