As flies to wanton boys

In the last post on autumn, Shakespeare speaks of the season ‘bearing the wanton burthen of the prime’.

By ‘wanton’ he means here unrestrained, and he often uses the word in this sense. It also has other, later meanings.

It exists in verb form, ‘to wanton’, meaning ‘to revel, frolic unrestrainedly’.

The Old English prefix ‘wan-’ means wanting, lacking, deficient.

‘-ton’ comes from the Middle English ‘towen’, from Old English ‘togen’, past participle of ‘teon’, meaning to train, discipline, literally to pull or draw, as in today's verb ‘to tow’.

So ‘wanton’ can also mean ill-bred, naughty, rude, badly brought up, ill-disciplined, as in the line from King Lear about our relationship to the gods :

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport.’

 

From the late 14th century ‘wanton’ began to be used to refer to sexual indulgence. Shakespeare also uses ‘wanton’ in this sense, even as a noun, as when the tormented Othello starts to believe Iago telling him that his wife is in fact unfaithful :

‘Oh, ’tis the spite of hell, the fiend’s arch-mock,

To lip a wanton in a secure couch,

And to suppose her chaste.’

To make the terrible image more powerful and off-handedly physical and revolting, Shakespeare inventively turns the noun ‘a lip’ into a verb for ‘to kiss’ : ‘to lip’. This is most probably another of his inventions.