Proverbial Shakespeare: The print and manuscript circulation of extracts from Love's Labour's Lost

Abstract

Shakespeare's work has been described as proverbial in two main ways: his works both used existing proverbs and created new ones. This analysis combines these two approaches by focusing on a classical proverb that Shakespeare re-phrased and that continued to circulate in Shakespeare's phrasing. This particular proverb from Love's Labour's Lost, “Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits” (1.1.26–27), is found in multiple seventeenth-century print and manuscript sources. This paper traces the inter-related oral, print and manuscript transmission of the “fat paunches” proverb in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare's phrase was popularized by early print dramatic extracts. Manuscript compilers were not reading Shakespeare's play, but were instead reading treatises on physiognomy and guides to improve their speaking and writing skills. The “fat paunches” couplet from Love's Labour's Lost did not circulate in manuscript because of the popularity of the play, but rather because of the dramatic excerpting that led this couplet to become proverbial.