A Juicy Footnote; or, "Dang, Son"

A Juicy Footnote; or, “Dang, Son”

_{[4] Hawthorne probably took the name “Prynne” from William Prynne (1600-1669), a vehement anti-Catholic Puritan, who devoted a lengthy book, Histriomastix; A Scourge of Stage Players (1632), to castigating Englishmen (and implicitly King Charles) for attending plays. When he published diatribes against Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who he considered a Catholic in disguise, he was punished by having his ears cut off and the letters “SL” (for “Seditious Libeler”) burnt into his cheeks. Uncannily anticipating Hester’s alteration of the scarlet letter and its meaning, William Prynne responded to his branding by composing a Latin distich, “in which he interpreted the S L which he now bore indelibly on his cheeks as Stigmata Laudis, the Scars of Laud.”}