Falstaff dismisses the shirts Mistress Quickly gave him as "filthy dowlas" that he gave to "bakers' wives" (1H4 3.3.70). Ophelia says that the "owl was the baker's daughter" (Ham.4.5.43). The morphological and semantic context restrictions are quite precise: Shakespearean bakers appears only in the Germanic genitive as appendages of their women folk.
18 September 1999