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."
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