Sexing up Shakespeare is a handy trick for directors seeking to exploit the Bard's bawdy humor to put bums on seats. Now one woman has gone further with the most intensive search ever for sexual innuendo, toilet humor and smut buried deep in the great poet's oeuvre.
"The plays are absolutely packed with filth," said academic Heloise Senechal. "I've found more than a hundred terms for vagina alone."
Senechal's research for the footnotes of a new Royal Shakespeare Company edition of his complete works promises to be the most candid ever.
She claims that previous editions of Shakespeare have been too prudish, and that by using computer techniques she has uncovered unrecognized double entendres. These were aimed at the working classes who crowded into the Globe in London for their fill of bawdy entertainment. Senechal has identified seemingly innocuous words such as carrot, pencil and horn as terms for penis, while she pinpoints pie, fruit dish and "buggle boe" as references to the vagina.
"We are trying to resist the cultural embarrassment that has permeated footnotes in the past," she said. "Shakespeare is now an institution, and there is an assumption, especially in schools, that he was using high rhetoric. But the majority of his audience were laborers, craftsmen, ordinary people being catered for in a popular way. They were as smutty-minded then as we are now."
An example, according to Senechal, is A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, scene 1. Flute, playing Thisbe in the mechanicals' play, laments that a wall separates "her" from her lover, Pyramus:
Flute: O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans
For parting my fair Pyramus and me.
My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones (meaning either mortar or testicles),
Thy stones with lime (puns on "limb," ie, penis) and hair (plays on sense of "pubic hair") knit up in thee.
A few lines later, Thisbe tries to kiss Pyramus, but cries: I kiss the wall's hole (gap/anus), not your lips at all!
Shakespeare has been accused of risque humor before. Dr Johnson deemed A Midsummer Night's Dream not the sort of play Queen Elizabeth I should have seen. In the 19th century Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler produced an edition that censored expressions "which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family."
But the topic has been increasingly fashionable since the publication in 1947 of Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge. One essay was entitled "Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's Dream." On stage, audiences have enjoyed -- or endured -- numerous productions with a lewd emphasis.
A current production of Measure for Measure at the National Theatre has an aroused Angelo exclaiming, "What's this?" as he clutches his crotch.
The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, to be published by Macmillan next year, wears its frankness on its sleeve. Its general editor, Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at Warwick University, said: "The greatness of Shakespeare comes from his capacity to confront every aspect of human experience and in particular to hold together the great paradoxes of our being -- love is one of our highest aspirations, while sex is one of our basic biological instincts, yet the two go intimately together.'
But Stanley Wells, author of Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, said: "If the best thing you can say about a new edition is that it's filthy, it doesn't say a lot. It's a gimmick, an attempt to grab attention."
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS