Shakespeare made many gifts to the English language, but his most memorable gift in the particularly rich and rarefied area of euphemisms for sexual intercourse comes in the opening scene of Othello, when Iago strives to provoke Desdemona’s father Brabantio to outrage with the news that “your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.” Shakespeare seems to have borrowed the phrase from the French writer Francois Rabelais, who refers to “la bête à deux dos“. Thomas Urquhart memorably translated Rabelais’s account of the characters Grangousier and Gargamelle towards the end of the seventeenth century as “These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon ‘gainst one another.” It is easy to see what drew Shakespeare, like Rabelais before him, to the fine mixture of the monstrous and the silly that this phrase contains. Though it has passed into common parlance, it is still prone to prompt a ripple of laughter or an outright snicker from a modern audience.

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