Love's Labor's Lost excerpted: The optick glasse of humors

Thomas Walkington’s The Optick Glasse of Humors (1607) popularized one of Shakespeare’s most-quoted lines in the seventeenth century: “Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs but bankrupt quite the wits,” from Love’s Labor’s Lost (1.1.27-28). In the play, Longaville says this to praise his upcoming fast: he suggests that a fat belly indicates a small brain and that eating too much makes people think more slowly.

Walkington’s book about the four humors, the elements that were thought to govern a person’s body and temperament in Shakespeare’s day, was republished multiple times (1631?, 1639, and twice in 1664). Walkington quotes Shakespeare as an example of physiognomy, the pseudo-scientific belief that physical attributes describe personality. He introduces the quotation with a paraphrase: “much meat affects the subtile spirits with grosse, and turbulent fumes which doe darken the vnderstanding” and a nod to Shakespeare’s authorship, “and this is sett downe by a moderne english poet of good note pithyly in two verses” (sig. D5v).

Versions of Shakespeare’s couplet circulated both in print and handwritten documents over the course of the seventeenth century. “Fat paunches” also appears in Robert Allott’s Englands Parnassus (1600); Christopher Newstead’s An Apology for Women (1620); A Helpe to Discourse (1623 and later editions); John Clarke’s Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639 and reprints); John Norton’s The Scholar’s Vade Mecum (1675); Richard Head’s Proteus Redivivus (1675); Poor Robin’s Almanack (1697), and manuscripts at the Bodleian and British Library (Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 117; Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 954; BL Add. MS 18044). Two reference books, John Ray’s A Collection of English Proverbs (1670) and William Robertson’s Phraseologia Generalis (1681), include only the first line of Shakespeare’s couplet. We know that Shakespeare’s couplet was copied from The Optick Glasse and not from early print sources of Love’s Labour’s Lost because Walkington changed the wording to “Fat paunches make lean pates, and grosser bits / enrich the ribs” (altered words indicated with italics): it is this wording that is found in most later sources that use Shakespeare’s couplet.

Shakespeare borrowed the notion of “fat paunches hav[ing] lean pates” from a Greek proverb by St. Jerome. Walkington, in turn, quoted Shakespeare’s couplet from Love’s Labor’s Lost—and from Walkington’s text, these lines were recopied multiple times, sometimes with and sometimes without reference to the Bard, whom Walkington describes as a “moderne english poet of good note.”