What are some swear words in shakespeare?

Answer 1

Swear words are different in different times and places. In most places and at most times the most offensive language was blasphemy, the profane use of the names of sacred things. We can tell that it was usually like this with English because of the words we have for offensive language: "swear" (call upon God as your witness), "curse" (call upon God to bring evil on someone) and "profanity" (treating the sacred as profane). A certain amount of censorship was exercised on the First Folio, and it all had to do with taking the name of God or his associates in vain.

Most swearing was using the name of God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary in the forms "God", "Jesu", "Chrish" (Macmorris in Henry V uses this a lot), or the ubiquitous "Marry". Sometimes people would swear "by the Mass", or by "God's bread". But the favourite was to swear by God's body or bits of it. At various times we hear about God's body, heart, eyelid, wounds and blood. There are also milder oaths on God's attributes: his will and pity for example. The body part oaths could be made a little milder by adding "-ikins" or "-lings" at the end of the word, or by reducing the word "God's" to "Od's" or even the letter s. The famous and popular (and extremely offensive) oath "Zounds" is "God's wounds" with the God pared away. Thus the oath "God's nose" (I made that up; Shakespeare doesn't use it) could end up being "Od's nosikins", or even "Snoselings".