Thereby Hangs a Bawdy Tale: Three Shakespearean Ribald Puns on ‘Tale/Tail’ and Their Romanian Translations
Thereby Hangs a Bawdy Tale: Three Shakespearean Ribald Puns on ‘Tale/Tail’ and Their Romanian Translations

Summary/Abstract: The homophony between the words ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ has served as an ever-bountiful source of punning material for many a century, with some writers as spatially and temporally diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margaret Atwood exploiting their sexually charged punning potential, while others, the likes of Lewis Carroll, harnessing the latent jocular and visual qualities of this particular homophonic pair. It was in William Shakespeare’s works, however, that this punning pair has found the representational plenitude of its vast array of connotations. In Othello, for example, it is a source of toilet humour, in As You Like It, the wordplay on ‘tail/tale’ is part of an extended metaphor of a sexually transmitted disease, while in other plays, such as The Tempest, its punningness is stretched to include words like ‘tailor,’ which, in turn, are imbued with ribald connotations. By comparing three such bawdy instances of wordplay on ‘tail’ and ‘tale’ with three Romanian renderings, this article aims to assess the level of translatability of this ribald punning doublet.

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