Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1756153 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
Glorious ... a beautifully presented guide to Elizabethan filth - The Observer Filthy Shakespeare ... claims that the collected works contain 150 puns for female genitalia, and 180 for male. Kiernan lists them all - The Guardian Kiernan is a pukka scholar ... She finds sex in more or less everything: her method might be called sexegesis. Not everybody will be convinced by all the salacities she discerns in Shakespeare's language, but I hope she won't misinterpret me if I say she makes a good fist of it - The Spectator Glorious ... a beautifully presented guide to Elizabethan filth - Stephen Bayley, Observer Book of the Year

Company Magazine
..who knew the hidden sexual innuendos within the Bard's works!
This new book has unearthed loads of them.'

The Guardian
...Pauline Kiernan..obligingly translates the smuttiest scenes so
that we can appreciate the full extent of the smirkathon. It's
fascinating...'

Customer Reviews

Shake that spear
While we may have sniggered at his name and Hamlet's reference to 'country matters' at school, this book goes much further. The author has, in a rigourously academic manner, completely untied the laces of Elizabethan satire and revealed the jokes, from the carnal chrismas cracker variety to the most subtle inuendo, contained in almost every one of Shakespeare's lines. A masterpiece.

Opportunistic
The authoress may well be a respected academic, but this book reads like the product of an overheated mind. For a short while, it is rather smuttily amusing, but soon becomes simply pornographic and 'boring' - which is a word containing the letter 'o' representing female genitals and the letter 'i' representing the male, thus the whole word is a pun on copulation. Yeah, right!

Serious Punning
The great thing about Filthy Shakespeare is the way the author shows how Shakespeare used extreme sexual puns for a serious purpose. Most of them are not there to titillate the audience. Kiernan demonstrates how he entertains the audience in order to encourage them to question their assumptions about the big issues such as moral hypocrisy,political corruption,the human cost of war and so on. The introduction alone makes it worth the money - I have never read anything that brings Shakespeare's world so alive. I think the fact that she is a dramatist as well as a scholar makes the book such a good read - she explains quite difficult things in an easy-to-read way. The extracts where she shows how Shakespeare uses sexual undertomes to make the scene more intense or poignant were a revelation to me. I think she has achieved what she says she hoped to - to give us the chance of hearing the sexual meaning behind the words that his original audience would have heard,and shown how this enriches our experience of the plays.