If I have a guilty pleasure (I don’t, since I generally feel no guilt over anything that makes me happy), it is the regency romance. Since I picked up my fi rst Georgette Heyer book – probably thrust into my hands by an enthusiastic mother – I’ve loved this period in British history. Particularly where romance novels are concerned, I’ll read anything set in this historical period, regardless of quality.
So it’s not surprising that I should have picked up a certain amount of regency slang, which I’m sadly unlikely to get the chance to use in real life. While some of the words are reasonable and self-explanatory (it is immediately obvious that “Zounds!” is an ejaculatory expression, though it’s less obvious that it's a contraction of “God's wounds”). But were I to start referring to gin as 'Blue Ruin' I might receive a few confused looks. And were I to refer to a friend’s diet as ‘banting’, he’d be likely to think that I was insulting him in some obscure way.
I found one expression from the Heyer books completely baffling. Since these are romance novels, they are chiefly concerned with the pairing off of attractive, intelligent heroines with suitable men. Frequently these heroines have been hanging around Regency London unmarried for a few years. In these books one starts looking for husbands at around 17, so that girls in their mid-20s are considered hopeless cases. And it was in connection with these women that I fi rst heard the phrase ‘ape-leader’.
The phrase pops up occasionally in these books, and is usually employed to describe unmarried women who have reached the age when marriage is no longer a realistic possibility (in the world of the books this is a dreadful thing). It’s clear that it’s not a compliment, but the actual meaning of the phrase escaped me completely for a long time. It turns out, as with most odd language things, that the answer lies with Shakespeare. Shakespeare uses variants of the phrase ‘ape-leader’ in a couple of his plays (including The Taming of the Shrew where it’s a relevant part of the plot) to refer to women who choose not to marry. Apparently he is referring to a superstition prevalent during his own times that such a woman would lead a band of monkeys in hell. Not that this explanation illuminates the matter in any meaningful way.
Why monkeys, of all things? Is this referred to in any religious text, and if so, which? Does the spinster in question turn into a monkey herself or does she retain human form? Why should this term suddenly resurface in the 19th century? It’s all very odd, and all I can picture for myself is the image of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz cackling “fl y, my pretties” as she unleashed her army of trained fl ying monkeys. Come to think of it, she didn't seem to have a husband either.