I may seem to be mixing up my oysters with my conchs, but I remember reading (in Edgar Wind on pagan mysteries? may'be he's too respectable) that the "concha"--which can also be what we would call a scallop, was Roman slang for vulva. I've usually read Denny as making an obscene joke connecting her making herself available in print with making herself available otherwise. I haven't checked with my learned classicist sister on this, but I did check concha (related to our conch shell) on the Perseus on-line database, which put me on to the great Lewis and Short dictionary, which says that "concha" is a whole variety of bivalve shellfish, including the pearl bearing ones, and sure enough cites one Roman writer who uses it as slang for "cunnus," which means . . . well I think it means the part of Mary Wroth that Denny is making a dirty joke about. It also gives a whole new look to Bottecelli's Venus on the shell--she's riding on a symbol of her trade (poor St. James, who carries the scallop shell--at least not an oyster).

     In my youth we didn't discuss such things with professors. What's important is the association of female publishing with sexual looseness, but that's an old story.  Anne.

On Oct 27, 2009, at 7:49 PM, Joel Davis wrote:

I'd like to propose a less learned possibility than either Andrew or Amy, though I'm agnostic about which is the best solution:

Perhaps Denny begins with something like Andrew suggests, comparing Wroth to the inquisitive mouse, but then, realizing he has hit upon an especially nasty slur, he abandons his metaphor.  The pattern seems pretty similar to invectives in Nashe and Shakespeare.  It might be that the decorum for a relatively low form doesn't exclude mixing metaphors...

Whose vaine comparison for want of witt

Takes up the oystershell to play with it

Yet common oysters such as thine gape wide

 And take in pearles or worse at every tide

Joel

Joel B Davis
Associate Professor
Director, MA Program in English
Stetson University
421 N Woodland Blvd Unit 8300
DeLand FL 32721
386.822.7724
________________________________________
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of andrew zurcher [[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 7:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Wroth's "oystershell"

Hi Zack,

I suspect it's a reference to the emblem tradition involving oysters,
which is pretty extensive. I think it began with Alciato (see 'Captivus ob
gulam', which is listed as no 86 from the Emblematum libellus collection,
digitised at Glasgow: http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk).

The basic scenario is this: some stupid mammal, usually a mouse, happens
upon an oyster; he licks the shell, believing it to be a bone; then gets
his head trapped inside when the oyster abruptly clams up. The emblems
seem to focus on the way in which the mouse exposes himself to ridicule,
after trapping and immobilizing himself. The Alciato poem makes much of
the mouse's sensitive whiskers and inquisitive tongue. Ouch.


andrew


Andrew Zurcher
Queens' College
Cambridge CB3 9ET
United Kingdom
+44 1223 335 572

hast hast post hast for lyfe

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Zackariah Long wrote:

Dear colleagues,

I'm teaching Wroth's *Pamphilia to Amphilanthus* for the first time this
week and would like to frame our discussion using Denny's and Wroth's poetic
back-and-forth over *Urania*.  There are some lines in Denny's poem that
have been puzzling me:

Whose vaine comparison for want of witt

Takes up the oystershell to play with it

Yet common oysters such as thine gape wide

 And take in pearles or worse at every tide

Now I'm pretty sure what's going on in the bawdy second two lines but the
first reference to the oystershell--"Takes up the oystershell to play with
it"--gives me pause. I understand that in terms of the metaphor Wroth is
surface without substance, only a "shell" of wit without the "pearl" inside
(which must be, ummm, "deposited" from without), but is there anything else
going on here? Does it mean something particular to "take up" or "play with"
the oystershell?  This sounds like a contemporary expression whose meaning
is lost for me. I've searched the OED, but nothing seems definitive.

Any assistance would be appreciated.  Many thanks in advance...

Best,
Zack Long

--
Zackariah Long
211 Sturges Hall
Department of English
Ohio Wesleyan University
61 S. Sandusky St.
Delaware, OH 43015
Office phone: (740) 368-3596
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