Enter STEPHANO singing.

STEPHANO                            I shall no more to sea, to sea,

Here shall I die ashore.

This is a very scurvy tune to sing at a man’s funeral.

Well, here’s my comfort.                   Drinks [and then] sings.

The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I;

The gunner and his mate,

Loved Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,

But none of us cared for Kate.

For she had a tongue with a tang,

Would cry to a sailor ‘Go hang!’

She loved not the savour of tar nor of pitch,

Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch.

Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang!

This is a scurvy tune too, but here’s my comfort.   Drinks. (2.2.41-54)

Ah, stage drunks and bawdy songs. Not my most favourite things. The presumption is that Stephano is already drunk; he must have the bottle with him. He is maudlin drunk, it seems, beginning with a fragment of a song about death, the sailor no longer going to sea. The funeral he imagines is presumably his own; he is going to die in this place. (Although he is described in the persons of the play as ‘a drunken butler’ he does seem to be a sailor too, or at least to have spent long enough at sea to have learned some sea-songs. He and Trinculo are sometimes played as members of the ship’s crew, accustomed to waiting on passengers, rather than as members of the royal household who have come on the wedding voyage with the Neapolitan court; he’s a purser, rather than a butler.) Scurvy means worthless, nasty, contemptible, as well as scurfy, scabby; it does already have the particular but far from exclusive association with sea-faring life (although not yet known to be caused by a vitamin C deficiency) so Stephano’s repetition of scurvy tune might make him sound particularly nautical here. Whatever’s in the bottle isn’t going to help, although he describes it as his comfort. The second song fragment is livelier, and returns the play, at least momentarily, to the world of the opening scene, with all its various mariner characters, although the master and the boatswain in 1.1 had somewhat more dignity and authority than is implied here, lumped in as they are with the swabber, the lowly sailor whose task it is to mop the deck, and the gunner and his mate. There is scope for comedy in the painstaking drunken enunciation and differentiation (or not) of Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery: Mall is Mary, a common abbreviation. Kate might, just, recall Shakespeare’s shrew of some twenty years before, or Kate Keepdown in Measure for Measure, but the names are all common ones, not specifically associated with prostitutes (although that’s probably the implication here); they seem mostly chosen for alliterative reasons, the run of Ms followed by the alliteration of cared/Kate and, even more, tongue/tang. Kate had a sharp tongue, a stinging tongue (tang has lots of spiky associations, as well as, perhaps, suggesting taste or smell, bad breath, something acidic, whether literally or figuratively) and she doesn’t care for sailors, telling them to go hang, go to the devil, piss off. Building on tang as something to do with taste or smell, she didn’t like the smell or the taste, the savour of tar or pitch, both used to caulk or otherwise waterproof ships and especially their ropes – so presumably smells characteristic of sailors; she didn’t go for sailors, maybe implying she thinks she’s too good for them. Tailors were proverbially effeminate, so perhaps the suggestion is that this apparent fastidiousness is just affectation; she’d even allow a tailor to scratch her itch, such were her appetites. There could be an additional class dimension: she was such a snob that she’d prefer the attentions of a socially superior but sexually inadequate tailor to those of a red-blooded sailor. Whatever, Stephano (in song at least) has expressed a conventional response to sexual rejection: she’s a whore, didn’t want her anyway, let her go hang. And Mall, Meg, Marian, Margery, and Kate, so fleetingly and dismissively summoned, join the play’s ever-growing crowd of named but unseen women.