I mentioned this interesting word, bodkin, in my post of
12/11/2006:
The most famous soliloquy in Northern literature is
usually interpreted as solely a meditation on suicide. However, also
present in Hamlet's troubled mind are thoughts of revenge by murder, as well as
his sense of sexual frustration and/or disgust. Is the passage
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare
bodkin?
(or botkin, to adopt Kinbote's improved spelling,
p 175) supposed to signal to us that "bodkin" was also common
Elizabethan slang for "penis" ?
I'd always simply assumed that the primary meaning of "bodkin" was that
given in my handy dictionary (Cassell, 1989, 160,000 definitions +), viz "an
instrument for piercing holes, a large-eyed and blunt-pointed needle for leading
a tape or cord through a hem, loop etc; a pin; an awl-like tool"; but I see it
also, to my surprise, gives "a small dagger", to which definition an
inscrutable small dagger is prefixed. In spite of combing the book from end to
end I can find no clear explanation of the small dagger symbol, but I suspect it
indicates "poetic" or "rare" or "obsolete" or "archaic" or something of the
sort. "Bodikin" is also so distinguished, and means "a little body". The
etymology of the word is given as unknown. I'd always thus assumed it was a
uniquely English word meaning blunt needle, and that Shakespeare was employing
it with two basic, rather specialized, metaphorical senses: (1) as a tool
either to kill himself or King Claudius with, or (2) to satisfy his suppressed
and jealous Oedipal lust for his own mother, as well as similar feelings for
Ophelia. The speech, throughout, imho, admits of all these readings, although
I've never known anyone else make this observation.
In any case, "stiletto" seems to me to set up all sorts of elegant
Italianate resonances, off-key for such a simple, bluntish northern
awl, and the dictionary provides no indication at all of its nationality,
which I take to be fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. I can't really accept "Danish
stiletto" as anything other than a mischievously misleading
Kinbotean kind of definition, but I must pursue its etymology. I must
also check my Arden "Hamlet".
Charles