Meaning & Analysis
If you scratch my backside, I’ll scratch your elbow—i.e., do me a (crude) favor and I’ll return one.
Insights
Quid pro quo
Frames help as transactional: a small service buys another, not out of goodwill but because favors are bartered like petty scratches.
Mutual flattery
Targets cliques that exchange praise and protection—‘you laud me, I’ll laud you’—inflating reputations without merit.
Collusive reciprocity
Signals corrupt cooperation: parties prop each other up to advance private interests, treating obligations as a closed loop.
Contemptuous refusal
In ribald variants it can function as a sneer at unreasonable requests: ‘scratch my breech’ = ‘shove off,’ turning reciprocity into mockery.
Breech and elbow
‘Breech’ (buttocks) and ‘elbow’ yoke low and middling body parts for comic effect; the coarse locus underscores how base the exchange is—mere itching and clawing rather than honor or justice.
Two registers
Collections gloss it both as a proverb of reciprocity (‘one good turn…’) and as satire of unmerited commendation; the same form covers neighborly exchange and cronyism, with context deciding the moral color.
Guilds and courts
Apt in settings where favors circulate—offices, guilds, patronage—creating reputational cartels in which insiders mutually ‘claw’ to keep advantage.
Moral economy critique
By casting aid as scratching, the line demotes virtue to itch-relief: kindness becomes self-interested stimulus, curbing ideals of disinterested generosity.
Rabelaisian tone
The earthy diction aligns with popular theater’s bawdy register, using body humor to puncture pretension and expose the grubby mechanics of exchange.
Rhetorical Devices
Vulgar imagery
Bodily ‘breech’ and ‘elbow’ provide slapstick concreteness that fixes the lesson in memory and signals cynicism about motives.
Parallelism
Balanced clauses (‘scratch my… / I will claw your…’) stage a neat barter, mimicking tit-for-tat symmetry.
Alliteration & assonance
S-/cl- sounds and the ch/k of ‘scratch… breech’/‘claw’ give percussive rhythm suited to a jeering retort.
Metonymy
‘Scratch’/‘claw’ stand for favors; body parts stand for persons and positions within a cozy network.
Irony
A proverb of ‘help’ that actually lampoons self-serving exchanges, exposing the smallness of the favors and the motives.
Transcription
Quotations
Stope downe a low And kisse my round rivette while I clawe thine ellbowe.
(Kiss my ars and I shall).
To scratch the backe of one who hath already clawed his elbowe.
For one good turn another will itch, Claw my elbow and Ile scratch your brich.
*When undeserving persons commend one another.
*One good turn requires another.
(Scratch my Back, and).
(Scart [scratch] ye my Arse, and).
*Sometimes it signifies doing a piece of Service, and I'll do you another: But oftner it is used as a contemptuous By-word, when an unreasonable Thing is propos'd.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.