© 2003 by Oxford University Press
The Bawdy ‘Talent’ to ‘Occupy’ in Cymbeline, the Complaint of Rosamond, and the Elizabethan Homily for Rogation Week
1 Teikyo University, Japan
Recently Gordon Williams has uncovered the ‘widespread’ bawdy usage of the word ‘talent’ in seventeenth-century literary texts. This article first discusses an intriguing use of the word in Cymbeline and then examines its earlier instance in Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) within the original socioreligious context where every reader was familiar with Anglican liturgical discourse. It demonstrates that the Anglican homily for the days of Rogation week provides a fortuitous and yet potentially irresistible ground for Daniel's contemporaries to associate the ‘talent’ in the parable of the talents with the human procreative organ, showing how the matron in the poem cunningly appropriates the voice of an Anglican preacher and presents an ingenious parody of this homily and suggesting that her cryptic use of the word ‘talent’ uttered in this context is very likely to have been understood by early readers as a double entendre for Rosamond's pudenda. Finally, a telling piece of circumstantial evidence found in contemporary English bibles is presented to corroborate the view that the bawdy sense of ‘talent’ as the sexual organ of either sex was already widely known in literary circles by the time the Authorized Version was being prepared for publication in 1611.