Fair Hermia, question your desires, Know of your youth, examine well your blood, Whether, if you yield not to your father’s choice, You can endure the livery of a nun; For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d To live a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. Thrice blessed they that master so their blood, To undergo such maiden pilgrimage; But earthly happier is the rose distill’d, Than that, which, withering on the virgin thorn, Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I., Sc. I.
Fecundation is not overlooked, and Shakespeare shows his knowledge of the fact that the penis is merely the spout or funnel by which the semen is conveyed to the uterus, and aptly compares the womb to a bottle, which in his time gradually tapered toward the neck. The word tundish is an old Warwickshire name for a funnel.
Duke. Why should he die, sir? Lucio. Why? For filling a bottle with a tundish. Measure for Measure, Act III., Sc. II.
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to ’t, and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive for Gloster’s bastard son Was kinder to his father than my daughters Got ’tween lawful sheets. King Lear, Act IV., Sc. VI.
Hymen hath brought the bride to bed, Where, by the loss of maidenhead, A babe is moulded. Pericles, Gow to Act III.
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once, That make ungrateful man. King Lear, Act III., Sc. II.
Q. Eliz. But thou didst kill my children. K. Rich. But in your daughter’s womb I’ll bury them; Where, in that nest of spicery, they shall breed Selves of themselves, to your recomforture. Richard III., Act IV., Sc. IV.
Your brother and his lover have embrac’d: As those that feed grow full; as blossoming time, That from the seedness the bare fallow brings To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry. Measure for Measure, Act I., Sc. IV.
Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks; Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits To laughter and contempt: that she may feel How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child! King Lear, Act I., Sc. IV.
The production of either sex at will agitated the minds of physiologists to a considerable extent during Shakespeare’s time. Indeed he seems to have held an ancient theory that the more vigorous of the parents produced the opposite sex. Dr. Robert, of Paris, in his paper entitled Megalanthropogenesis, somewhat followed up this theory and maintained that “the race of men of genius might be perpetuated by uniting them to better physically developed women having clever minds,” which, according to his theory, would, of course, result in nothing but male children.