creature

   In vocative use ‘creature’ is usually qualified by other words which show whether the term is being used positively or negatively. The word does not necessarily mean an animal, though that is the most obvious modern sense of the word. It has long been applied to human beings, our fellow creatures who like their creature comforts. Originally the word refers to any created being. The term of address was in use long before Shakespeare’s time and was used by him as both an admiring and contemptuous expression. ‘Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak’ says Antipholus of Syracuse to Luciana in The Comedy of Errors. Julius Caesar begins with Flavius telling the commoners: ‘Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home.’ Many of the vocative instances in Shakespeare, and perhaps elsewhere in literature, are to women rather than men. Shakespeare’s ladies are addressed as ‘fair creature’, ‘sweet creature’. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey the heroine is ‘my dearest creature’ when addressed by a rather insincere young lady. Tom Jones, in Fielding’s novel of that name, calls his Sophia ‘divine creature’. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch, has ‘dearest creature’ used between intimates, and there is a similar intimate use in Funeral in Berlin, by Len Deighton, of ‘you wonderful creature’. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette a woman calls another ‘scornful, sneering creature’, while Liza, in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, is ‘you infamous creature’ according to Professor Higgins. ‘Creature’ addressed to a man occurs in, e.g., Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. Mr Smangle addresses Mr Pickwick as ‘my dear creature’, and Sam Weller and his father are constantly referring to other men as ‘creeturs’. Mrs Raddle also calls her husband ‘you perwerse creetur’ and ‘you creetur’.