ANTONIO Which, of he or Adrian, for a good wager, first begins to crow?
SEBASTIAN The old cock.
ANTONIO The cockerel.
SEBASTIAN Done! The wager?
ANTONIO A laughter.
SEBASTIAN A match!
ADRIAN Though this island seem to be desert—
ANTONIO Ha, ha, ha.
SEBASTIAN So, you’re paid.
ADRIAN Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible—
SEBASTIAN Yet—
ADRIAN Yet—
ANTONIO He could not miss’t.
ADRIAN It must needs be of a subtle, tender and delicate temperance.
ANTONIO Temperance was a delicate wench.
SEBASTIAN Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered. (2.1.30-48)
Adrian is a younger version of Gonzalo, the cockerel to the old cock – but, with a few tweaks and cuts, his lines here could be reallocated to Gonzalo, if the company were smaller (it would be easy enough to cut the chicken jokes, and the wager). It’s a pretty slight joke: who’s going to be the next to speak, the old predictable bore or the young predictable bore? (And there’s a slight continuity with the idea in the previous exchange of the watch striking– the sounds made by both clocks and roosters are predictable, routine, not meaningful of themselves.) Courtiers were inveterate gamblers, betting on anything – especially dice and card games – to relieve the tedium of court life (a lot of waiting around), and gambling was one of the reasons why so many courtiers got into catastrophic levels of debt. (That and the constant pressure to have new clothes.) Here the stake is notional, however and – extended chicken joke! – a laughter is (apparently) a word that can be used for a clutch of eggs, as sat on by an actual hen. So there’s nothing being wagered here, because these are cockerels, not hens, and there are no eggs anyway. (Is this a niche reference back to King Lear, and the fool’s egg and nothings and zeros, please no…) In the absence of eggs, or hens, Antonio just laughs, sarcastically, ha, ha, ha; he’s actually lost the bet (because he wagered that Gonzalo, the old cock, would speak first).
Enough of the poultry jokes. Adrian is describing the island. It seems to be desert, which doesn’t mean that it’s a desert island, or that it’s bare of trees and plants, but rather that it’s uncultivated, and probably uninhabited. Elsewhere, Shakespeare uses desert to describe forests, and some of those have people living in them (As You Like It, for instance). Adrian is trying to make the best of things: there’s no signs of civilisation, it seems as though no one could live here, and it’s really remote. But – yet, as Sebastian anticipates – he is going to make a case for it, joining Gonzalo in the, let’s make the best of things game, although from a different angle. He’s going to argue that the island must needs be of a subtle, tender and delicate temperance, that is, that it’s fundamentally a good, benign place, with a nice climate. He’s describing the island as if it were a body or a person; it’s balanced, harmonious, not extreme. Temperate, meaning even, balanced, is still applied to climate. Antonio’s joke – that Temperance was a delicate wench – picks up on this anthropomorphism, suggesting that Adrian is describing a woman, but he makes it more vulgar (Adrian is apparently very refined), as does Sebastian, using subtle to mean cunning, crafty – as if Temperance is in fact a whore. There might be a dig at the naming practices of some Protestants in the early seventeenth century: Temperance wouldn’t be unheard of as a name for a child.
Perhaps the chicken jokes were preferable.
