What does shakespeare mean by a quick venue of wit?

Answer 1

The quotation comes from Shakespeare's early play Love's Labour's Lost, which gets a lot of its humour from wordplay and exploring different kinds of speech. The particular scene from which the quotation comes is Act 5 Scene 1, in which the pompous curate Nathaniel and the pedantic Holofernes are joined by the clown Costard, the snarky servant Moth and the Spaniard Don Armado. Moth is exhibiting the kind of humour the Elizabethans loved--making puns and finding double meanings--at the expense of Holofernes who is an easy target. Costard and Armado are much amused, and after one sally in which Moth gets Holofernes to name the vowels and then interprets "o, u" as "Oh, you!", Armado says:

Now, by the salt wave of the Mediterraneum, a sweet touch, a quick venue of wit! snip, snap, quick and home! it rejoiceth my intellect: true wit!

Bear in mind that Armado is Spanish, and the jokes surrounding him are based often on his imperfect command of English. Shakespeare has intentionally given him strange lines to say and this is no exception. From "a sweet touch, a quick venue of wit . . . true wit!" we know that he is praising Moth on his witticism. "Snip, snap, quick and home" suggests that Armado admires how quickly Moth is able to devise the witticisms, which is probably what the "quick" is doing in "quick venue of wit". "Venue" at that time was a French Fencing term meaning a quick thrust--its application here is obvious.