Meaning & Analysis
People often show outward respect to a person’s hand (as a token of their power or status) while secretly desiring that hand—and its power—be destroyed.
Insights
Hypocritical Flattery
The kiss is deference performed for advantage; the heart harbors malice. The proverb exposes courtesy as a mask for envy, fear, or hatred when power dynamics punish candor.
Survival Under Power
Subjects flatter the strong because open opposition is dangerous. The ritualized kiss functions as appeasement—compliance staged to avoid retaliation until circumstances change.
Instrumental Relationships
‘Hand’ stands for the patron’s capacity to grant or withhold favors. Those who need access will praise the gatekeeper even while resenting the dependency that hand enforces.
Moral Corrosion
Habitual dissembling breeds cynicism. Repeatedly honoring what one despises erodes integrity, normalizing duplicity as a social lubricant.
Resentment and Rivalry
The wish to ‘cut off’ the hand encodes rivalry for power: remove the other’s agency so one’s own might rise. The proverb reads the smile as a battleground of status.
Rituals of Deference
Hand-kissing in early modern Spain and Italy signaled hierarchy—vassal to lord, client to patron, faithful to cleric (ring-kissing). The proverb thrives in these courts, where ceremony could conceal coercion and calculation.
Metonymy of Power
The ‘hand’ embodies capacity to act—signing writs, dispensing gifts, striking blows. To desire its amputation is to dream of disabling the person’s reach, not merely their flesh.
Literary Resonance
Machiavellian courtcraft and Castiglione’s ‘sprezzatura’ frame elegant surfaces over raw motives; La Rochefoucauld’s maxims on hypocrisy echo the same insight that virtue-talk often disguises interest.
Psychology of Envy
Envy both admires and resents; it draws near to what it covets while seeking its downfall. The kiss dramatizes ambivalence—attraction to power coupled with fantasies of its removal.
Public Calm, Private Violence
The antithesis of ‘kiss’ and ‘cut off’ compresses a politics of the face and the fist: societies demand smooth manners even as they incubate ruthless contests beneath them.
Rhetorical Devices
Irony
A gesture of reverence doubles as a sign of concealed hostility; the surface meaning contradicts the intention.
Metonymy
‘Hand’ stands for authority and agency—gifts, punishments, signatures—concentrating the whole power relation in a body part.
Antithesis
‘Kiss’ versus ‘cut off’ juxtaposes tenderness with violence, heightening the moral shock and memorability.
Hyperbole
Wishing a hand severed exaggerates hostility to expose the extremity of feeling that polite forms conceal.
Alliteration
The hard ‘k’ in ‘kiss’ and ‘cut’ gives the line percussive bite, underscoring its caustic wit.
Transcription
Quotations
The prouerbe saith, A man kisseth those hands that he would see cut off.
An Italian.. will tell you that he kisseth your hand a thousand times over, when he wisheth them both cut off.
A hand is sometimes wash'd, that one would see rotted.
Many do kiss Hands which they would wish to see cut off.
There's many a hand kiss'd, that they who kiss it, could wish it were cut off.
Many do kiss the hands they wish to see cut off.
[As in 1670 Ray].
Many kiss the Hands they wish to see cut off.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.