Meaning & Analysis
To engage in playful flirtation or amusement that leads to physical intimacy, typically with minimal resistance or deliberation.
Insights
Sexual Consent and Play
The proverb serves as a euphemism for casual or impulsive sexual relations, particularly emphasizing the ease and amusement with which intimacy is entered into. 'Laugh' conveys flirtation or merriment, while 'lie down' symbolizes surrender to passion.
Pleasure Over Prudence
This expression encapsulates a hedonistic or carefree attitude toward life’s pleasures. It suggests a philosophy in which delight and gratification are prioritized over restraint, moral discipline, or foresight.
Gender Roles and Economic Irony
In early modern usage, particularly in Dekker's satire, the proverb critiques women who 'laugh and lie down'—benefiting from pleasure while others ‘pay for it’. This reflects social anxieties about female sexuality, financial dependency, and transactional relationships, with underlying resentment toward perceived sexual freedom.
Moral Satire in Popular Culture
Writers like Skelton and Breton use the phrase ironically, portraying a society driven by shallow pleasures and fleeting intimacy. Its recurrence in drama and ballads positions it as a folk commentary on moral laxity and social decay, especially in court or city life.
Psychological Escapism
‘Laugh and lie down’ can also be viewed as a coping mechanism—retreating from sorrow or hardship into momentary delight. Rowley’s line, 'Sorrow becomes me best', counters the ‘laugh and lie down’ ethos, underlining its potential superficiality.
Rhetorical Devices
Euphemism
The phrase disguises sexual behavior with light, innocent terms, making it palatable and humorous while conveying socially taboo content.
Alliteration
The repetition of the ‘L’ sound in 'laugh and lie' produces a lilting rhythm that enhances memorability and lends the proverb a playful tone.
Ellipsis
The proverb omits explanatory details, inviting the listener to infer its full implications—especially regarding seduction or moral looseness—thereby increasing its suggestive power.
Transcription
Quotations
Now nothynge but pay, pay, With, laughe and lay downe, Borowgh, cyte, and towne.
T'is faire lie doune and laugh.
Laugh and lay doun again.
As for the women, they may laugh and lye downe, its a merry world with them, but somebody payes for it.
If all your loue bee to laugh and lye downe.. that is none of our loue.
Sorrow becomes me best. —A suit of laugh and lye downe would wear better.
[As in a.1598 Ferg.]
[As in a.1598 Ferg.]
Shakespeare Citations
I am wondrous merry-hearted; I could laugh now. —I could lie down, I am sure.
Annotations
- Spoken when one hath pick'd up any Thing, as if you would say, give it back again, and pretend that you did it in Jest.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.