(Peter) Quince: Love Potions, Carpenter’s Coigns and Athenian Weddings

Summary

We are used to telling our students that the name of Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream comes from carpenters' quoins or coigns, 'wedge-shaped blocks used for building purposes', at the 'corners' of houses or walls, appropriate for the carpenter who appears in a 'marriage play' concerned with constructing 'houses' of another kind. But rarely is anything said of the quince itself, though it was part of a rich network of associations with marriage, sexuality, and fruitful 'issue' in the period, as well as of multi-lingual connections and metamorphic spellings that conflated it with coigns, quoyns, sexual corners or coining, and the cunnus or 'queynte' its sound suggests.

Minsheu's Guide unto the Tongues (1617) situates the English 'Quince' within this suggestive interlingual network:

Quince, a kind of fruit, from French Coing . . . Italian Mela cotogna, pomo cotogno. Latin Malum cotoneum, cydonium, Malum canum . . . Malum Lanatum ['cottony' and 'wooly' apple], because of its wooly or downy covering. Greek melon kudonion, from Cydonia (a city in Crete), and lasiomelon ('wooly apple'), from lasios or hirsutus ('hairy' or 'rough with down') and melon, or Latin pomum ('apple'). Portuguese Marmelo. Spanish Membrillo, from membrum , . . . because of a certain similarity with the first pubic hairs of men and women.