Some Richard Research

Ok, ok, I couldn’t bring myself to title this post Some Dick Research, but that’s what I want to talk about. This post is going to be PG-13, fair warning.

I found an article about this new teenage adaptation of Richard III (kinda sorta) that chose to call itself Teenage Dick.  (Clicked that link, did you?  Now you’re on a list.  Have a seat over there… )

Not being familiar with Richard III cover to cover (and wanting to change that because I’ll be going to see it at the end of this week), I wondered, “Did Shakespeare ever make the obvious joke there?”  We often talk about how he wasn’t afraid to make a dick joke, so when his main character is named Richard, did he go for it?

The best I can tell (and by that, I mean searching the open-source Shakespeare for the obvious), he did not. The only reference I see is here:

‘Jockey of Norfolk, be not too bold,
For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.’

But then I thought, “Well, was it common to abbreviate the name Richard as Dick back then?  Maybe it came later.”  But that’s not accurate because I knew that Henry VI Part 2 has a character, Dick the Butcher (most famous for his “First thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers” quote).

I also noticed something interesting in Henry IV Part 1:

Sirrah, I am sworn brother
to a leash of drawers; and can call them all by
their christen names, as Tom, Dick, and Francis.

I’ve always heard the expression as “Every Tom, Dick and Harry,” but… is that where that comes from?  Does Shakespeare get credit for that?

I could google all these things, but it’s more fun to have a discussion.  Was Dick a common nickname for Richard during Shakespeare’s time, and was it also a euphemism for other things?  I’m leaning toward some combination of no because you’d think there’d be more such puns in the works, and I just can’t find them.

On a related but different note, is he the first to use that Tom, Dick, and Francis/Harry thing?  When did it turn into Harry?