"Vaulting Variable Ramps"

Let me guess that a modern reader coming upon Shakespeare's euphonious phrase "vaulting variable ramps" would be baffled as to its sense. Just WS being willfully obscure, one might complain. But it's not so; it's just that the language keeps on changing, making things difficult for audiences and readers.

The most obvious meaning  of "vaulting various ramps" -- hurdling a miscellaneous series of inclined planes, as in a steeplechase -- won't fly. "Ramps" takes us down a wrong path, because its modern meaning (a wood or concrete construction leading from one level to another) was unknown in 1611. It didn't enter the English language until 1778 -- as a borrowing from French rampe. (The entrance to a highway, as in "take the ramp on the right" is an Americanism dating only to the 1950s.)

A "ramp" is also a vegetable. It's an uncultivated, wild member of the onion family lately celebrated by fad foodies (or food faddies) as a great delicacy. But why Shakespeare would want someone to hurdle an individual ramp or even a field of ramps is less than obvious. Another false start.

Let us therefore examine the context of the phrase "vaulting variable ramps."

It occurs in Cymbeline, the most magical of Shakespeare's last plays. Nasty Iachimo ("little Iago") tries to persuade Innogen that her virtuous husband Postumus has been unfaithful -- that he has, in another splendid Shakespearean phrase, "partner'd with tomboys." The situation excites Shakespeare's exuberant pen. Iachimo embroiders "tomboys" and claims that Postumus has consorted with "with diseased ventures/ That play with all infirmities for gold/ Which rottenness can lend nature; such boil'd stuff/ As well might poison poison." Should she, that is, Innogen (and here Iachimo's rhetoric soars)

         Live, like Diana's priest, betwixt cold sheets,

         While he [Postumus] is vaulting variable ramps,

         In your despite.  

"Ramps," therefore, are the opposite of Diana's priestesses, who live chastely; they are in fact loose women. Ramps who are neither architectural nor vegetable, but sexual and promiscuous. At least, they are so in this instance, because otherwise "ramp" carried a meaning closer to "virago" -- in 1611 an overbearing woman but not necessarily an unchaste one. The word "ramp" in this signification has disappeared but has bequeathed us "rapscallion" (which was earlier spelled both "ramscallion" or "rampscallion.") There is no evidence to support the easy inference that rapscallion combines "ramp" and "scallion."

"Vaulting variable ramps" means "to engage in a series of athletic sexual encounters." 

To vault into a lover's bed might seem to border on the comic but I don't think that it does so in this case. Shakespeare elsewhere seems to imagine intercourse as a vigorous event. A brothel is in his language a "leaping house." And surely it's not comic when Juliet hopes that Romeo will "leap to [her] arms."

The conception behind "vault" and "leap" reappears in the contemporary demotic phrase "jump his/her bones."

Ramps:

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