Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns

by Pauline Kiernan

The works of William Shakespeare contain at least 400 puns on male and female genitals. Despite the richness and breathtaking scope of his sexual language, too little attention has been paid to the sheer salacious inventiveness of his indecent puns - until now. His plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts and what they do. "Filthy Shakespeare" presents over 70 sizzling examples of the Bard at his raciest, arranged under different categories from Balls to Buggery, from Cunnilingus to the Clap, from Homosexual to Transvestite. Each filthy Shakespearean passage is translated into modern English and the hidden sexual meanings of the words explained in a glossary. In her fascinating and lively Introduction, Pauline Kiernan shows how Shakespeare's sexual wordplay had its roots in the social and political reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where the harsh facts of life were often disguised by bawdy, brutal punning, and in the era when the English secret service was born, deciphering secret codes became a national obsession.

• ISBN10: 1592403271
• ISBN13: 9781592403271
• Publish Date: 4 October 2007 (first published 26 October 2006)
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Out of Print: 27 August 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Gotham Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 303
• Language: English

Reviews

[inlibrisveritas]

At first I enjoyed the concept of this novel, it was funny and enlightening at points. But after getting a few sections into it it became hard not to think that the author was grasping for straws. As she said in the beginning it's important to know when the double meanings come into play, and I don't really think she's got that quite down to a practice yet. Because some of this are so outrageous they just don't make any sort of contextual sense at all...
It is a goofy read, so I recommend it for maybe some very light reading. Nothing committal or you'll get fed up like I did