fulsome, ram, and woolly

 

 

'Fulsome', 'ram', and 'woolly' make up an unpleasant chain of associations that amount to a set of cacophonous variations on the theme of    "Ba, ba, black sheep."

 

Othello uses the word 'fulsome' at the point of his linguistic collapse:

 

35  Lie with her? lie on her? We say lie on her,
36  when they belie her. Lie with her! ['Zounds,] that's
37  fulsome! Handkerchief -- confessions -- handkerchief!
                                                                              (Oth. 4.1.35-37)

The word occurs on four other occasions in the collocations 'fulsome wine' (Ri3 5.3.132), 'fulsome dust'( KiJ. 3.4.32), 'fulsome ewes' (MeV 1.3.86),    and 'fat and fulsome' (TwN. 5.1.109).    The phrase 'fulsome ewes' in The Merchant of Venice    occurs in Shylock's justification of taking interest on the basis of Jacob's practice with Laban's sheep:

 

78  When Laban and himself were compremis'd
  79     That all the eanlings which were streak'd and pied
  80     Should fall as Jacob's hire, the ewes being rank
  81     In end of autumn turned to the rams,
  82     And when the work of generation was
  83     Between these woolly breeders in the act,
  84     The skillful shepherd pill'd me certain wands,
  85     And in the doing of the deed of kind,
86  He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes,
  87     Who then conceiving did in eaning time
  88     Fall parti-color'd lambs, and those were Jacob's.
  89     This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;
  90     And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not. (MeV. 1.3.78-90)

The passage rests on a deep resistance to tampering with whatever counts as "natural" reproduction. Jacob uses artificial means to produce a kind of hybrid ("streak'd and pied"), and from this it is only one step to the entirely artificial generation of money from money.

'Fulsome' in this passage seems to refer quite literally to the ewes at the point of being mounted or "rammed"--an image Shakespeare also uses in The Rape of Lucrece: "Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!"(464). And that appears to be precisely the meaning Othello intends as he envisages Desdemona's infidelity. The connection is strengthened by looking at 'woolly'.    The only other occurrence of this word comes in Titus Andronicus,  when Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, invites Aaron the Moor to make love to her.    This is a crossing of racial boundaries, seen here as the encounter of barbarians from the North (Goth) and the South (Moor):

 

30  Madam, though Venus govern your desires,
31  Saturn is dominator over mine:
32  What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
33  My silence, an' my cloudy melancholy,
34  My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls,
35  Even as an adder when she doth unroll
36  To do some fatal execution?
37  No, madam, these are no venereal signs.
38  Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
39  Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
                                                              ( Tit. 2.3.30-39)

The comparison of the hair of Africans to wool is as old as Herodotus. Shakespeare draws on it here, but he also sees woolly hair as "venereal sign": as Aaron turns from love to revenge, his hair "uncurls". So the association of Africans with sexual passion is not far from this image, and Aaron is a "woolly breeder." This chain of association erupts most spectacularly in Iago's  obscene shout to Brabantio:     "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram  / Is tupping your white ewe" (Oth. 1.1.88-89). But something very much like this image also seems to underlie Othello's use of 'fulsome.'

 

A scene in As You Like It  provides a bridge between the passages discussed so far. The shepherd Corin and the fool Touchstone discuss the relative merits of court and country. Corin speaks for the country and says that  "the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck." But Touchstone turns this scene of innocence into a scene of sexual disgust:

 

78  That is another simple sin in you, to bring
79  the ewes and the rams together, and to offer to get
80  your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a
81  bell-wether, and to betray a she-lamb of a twelvemonth
82  to a crooked-pated old cuckoldly ram, out of
83  all reasonable match. (AYL    3.2.78-83)

This is certainly close to Iago's "old black ram." It is also worth noting that Touchstone thinks of the union of ram and she-lamb as an "unreasonable match" or mésalliance--precisely the theme that is so prominent in Othello.[1]