"Fool" meaning "baby"

Question

The word is "fool."

The OED has been no help on this, but my copy of Hamlet makes reference to its having the meaning "baby" so when Polonius says "You'll tender me a fool" he is cautioning Ophelia that she might end up getting pregnant. But the book dismisses this reading.

I would think, though, that if the book has an a priori assumption that this reading COULD exist (before it dismisses it) there must be some history of the word's having that meaning.

Does anyone have any scholarly resources which substantiate the presumption that "fool" is used to mean "baby"?

Answer 1

This conjecture was advanced by Dowden in his edition of Hamlet for the Arden Shakespeare, 1899, p. 34, note to l. 109:

Does this mean, You will present yourself to me as a fool? or, You will present me (to the public) as a fool? or, can “fool” mean an innocent, a baby?—for Polonius is not over-delicate in his warnings. See Romeo and Juliet, i.iii.31 and 48.

Here's the passage he cites in support of this conjecture:

When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!
Shake quoth the dove-house: ‘twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge:
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow:
And then my husband—God be with his soul!
A’ was a merry man—took up the child:
‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not, Jule?’ and, by my holidame,
The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay.’
To see, now, how a jest shall come about!
I warrant, an I should live a thousand years,
I never should forget it: ‘Wilt thou not, Jule?’ quoth he;
And, pretty fool, it stinted and said ‘Ay.’

But fool does not mean ‘innocent, baby’ here—it is an epithet applied to an innocent. One might as well argue that silly means ‘baby’ because mothers occasionally call their children ‘little silly’.

As Dowden says, the pun would be in character; and certainly both Shakespeare and Polonius are capable of layering their puns three deep; but I have difficulty conceiving that this meaning would ever occur to an auditor without prompting by an editor. The best that can be said of this conjecture is that it is ingenious, but unsupported by any real evidence—and I doubt Dowden himself would have claimed more than that for it.

Answer 2

I don't believe that fool can mean baby. But in this context, one interpretation is:

You'll have a baby by Hamlet, and it will grow up to be a fool (because its father is a fool).

Answer 3

I couldn't find any archaic usage of fool meaning baby. As suggested in the following comment the term may suggest a pun but it is doesn't mean "baby".

• His last use of the word “tender” is in line 108 where he says, “you’ll tender me a fool,” this time using the verb tender in an offering sense, as in the OED definition, but his word can also be a pun, for someone who is a fool could be called “tender-witted” or maybe “tender-brained” (I.iii. 108).

• In the whole of the sentence, Polonius is warning against Ophelia taking Hamlet’s affections too seriously, not actually for her own sake, but because her gullibility makes him look like a fool.

(shakespeareatchicago.uchicago.edu)

Answer 4

What about another version:

"You'll render me a fool" ?

he is threatening Ophelia that getting involved with Hamlet will make people say he, Polonius, is not a proper father and head of family.

Answer 5

Without aware of scholarly precedent, synonyms can be a good way to understand this by replacing fool with baby and see if the same makes sense in a context. So, here I try:

If a gentleman shows in an open crowd that he is in possession of a bundle of currency notes, it is overwhelming to label that gentleman acting like a child or fool for the time being.

Answer 6

I have no idea if this is related to this situation, but it is correct that the words "fool" and "baby" have the same root meaning:
In the Bible, there has been the murder of the babies around the time that Jezus was born, this event is currently still remembered as the day of the innocent children. The word "innocent" however seems to be a quite recent word, in earlier days (in other languages, like Dutch), another word was used ("onnozel" in Dutch), which at the beginning meant innocent, but the meaning of this word has changed into "fool".

So, as in other languages there was a word, which previously meant "innocent" (like a baby) but has a different meaning now (being "fool"), I can very well imagine a similar evolution in the English language.