eMusic Bookshelf
Dirty Jokes In Shakespeare
The works of Shakespeare contain more than 700 puns on sex and more than 400 on genitals. But, sadly, most of these have been kept under wraps for centuries, depriving the world of some of the sharpest, most sophisticated and hilarious jokes in the whole of literature. Shakespeare’s sexual wordplay ranges from uproarious innuendoes to profoundly moving expressions of emotional pain. His kings, queens and aristocrats are as foul-mouthed as his clowns, and his women are expert dealers in the raciest double-entendres.
Why so many sexual puns? Shakespeare lived in a world that was vulgar and brutal by our standards, and people across the social spectrum spoke in a language that was full of colourful, bawdy and often blatantly filthy speech. His first patron, the Lord Chamberlain, was Queen Elizabeth I’s cousin, known for his ‘custom of swearing’ and ‘obscenity in speaking’ (as well as for fathering several illegitimate children and growing rich from the brothels up the road from Shakespeare’s theatre!) Shakespeare’s second patron was the King himself, Elizabeth’s successor James I, who was known as ‘the foul-mouthed King’.
Shakespeare’s theatre, the Globe, was located at the heart of London’s most notorious red-light district, Bankside (not far from where the reconstructed Globe stands today), and his plays abound with brothels. His most famous prostitute is Mistress Quickly — her name itself an obscene pun on Quick-lay.
Shakespeare’s astonishing genius lies in his supreme understanding of the human condition, and one of his favourite devices for getting his audience to explore the funny as well as the serious side of life was to play to its love of decoding meanings by making his tantalising subtext sizzle. Here’s a taste — but be warned: "down-and-dirty" doesn’t come near it!
Dr Pauline Kiernan is a Shakespeare scholar and screenwriter. Her books include Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns, which contains more than 70 examples of sexual puns in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama. She has held fellowships and lectureships at the Universities of Oxford and Reading, and was Leverhulme Research Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in its first years.
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Hamlet
ACT 3, SCENE 2
HAMLET Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs…
…. It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge.
Hamlet may be Shakespeare’s supreme intellectual but he’s also one of the playwright’s most foul-mouthed characters. Because his revulsion at his mother’s marriage to his uncle after his father’s death makes him regard all women as whores, he rejects his girlfriend Ophelia. But it often seems he’s having to talk himself out of love with her by treating her as if she’s a prostitute, goading her with obscene puns. He indulges in outrageous sexual banter with her in front of the whole court, with the sound-alike pun about her ‘country’ and his stiff sword needing her erotic ‘groaning’ to take the ‘edge’ off it. This is Shakespeare at his most witty and risqué — but also at his most psychologically acute. -
The Merchant of Venice
ACT 3, SCENE 4
PORTIA They shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack…
I’ll wear my dagger with the braver grace…
Like a fine bragging youth…
NERISSA Why, shall we turn to men?
PORTIA Fie, what a question’s that
If thou wert near a lewd interpreter!
Dildos were always good for a laugh in Shakespeare’s time. But behind the bawdy banter lurked male anxieties about being upstaged by these guaranteed-satisfaction-devices which never suffered from the one thing all men feared — the dreaded droop. Perhaps this was why men stuffed their codpieces to make them look as though they had permanent erections. Portia certainly thinks so when she tells her maid that when they dress up as men, they’ll need to put on a dagger — a pun on dildo — and brag, parade their codpiece and what’s inside it. Nerissa is horrified that if they wear false penises they’ll turn into men and want to use them! -
Love's Labor's Lost
ACT 4, SCENE 1
BOYET O, mark but that mark!
Let the mark have a prick in’t, to mete at, if it may be.
COSTARD ’a must shoot nearer, or he’ll ne’er hit the clout.
Then will she get the upshoot by cleaving the pin.
It’s one of the most sensationally outrageous scenes not only in Shakespeare but in all dramatic literature. It’s about archery — or rather, it’s about another game of ‘shooting’ using an image of an arrow piercing a ‘mark’ to produce multiple obscene puns. The male must hit the mark lower, so as not to miss the woman’s ‘clout’, while the female will get the upshoot by squeezing the pin hard. It’s about the male being out of practice at this game, although he’s an expert at squeezing the pin himself. The scene reaches its indecent climax (if you’ll pardon the pun) with the image of the archer’s bow hand intimately caressing the woman while she um…"brings him to a state devoutly to be wished for."
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona
ACT 3, SCENE 1
LANCE I am in love…'tis a milkmaid…Item, she can milk.
SPEED She can milk…Item, she brews good ale…Item, she hath no teeth.
LANCE Well, the best is, she hath no teeth to bite.
It may sound like a tedious piece of dialogue, short on laughs. But once you realise what these two servants are really talking about, you’ll soon be chuckling — and be more than a little shocked. Lance is discussing a list of his girlfriend’s attributes with his fellow servant Speed. Every item repeatedly puns on one particular skill of hers — ‘milking’. But they’re not talking about what her hands do with cows’ udders, and brewing ‘good ale’ doesn’t mean she gets good froth when she makes beer. Lance saves the most highly valued of his milkmaid’s attributes — and his dirtiest joke — for last. Why would a man say that the best thing about his woman is that she’s got no teeth? No clues for this one! -
The Taming of the Shrew
ACT 4, SCENE 3
PETRUCHIO Lay forth the gown…
O mercy, God…
What’s this — a sleeve? ’Tis like a demi-cannon.
What, up and down carved like an apple-tart?
KATHERINE I never saw a better fashioned gown,
More quaint, more pleasing, nor more commendable.
Shakespeare was a master of erotic antagonism when it came to dialogue between his lovers, and with his feisty Katherine and flamboyant Petruchio he perfected the art. Their cut-and-thrust verbal sparring makes every scene a rhythmic imitation of the sex act. As his original audience would have known, ‘gown’, ‘carved’ and ‘quaint’ were frequent puns on the most obscene word for female genitals; ‘up and down’ often meant sexual thrusts; ‘apple-tart’ was not for eating; and ‘sleeve’ and ‘a demi-cannon’ (a good six-incher) were not about his wife’s arm. Katherine defends the shape and beauty of her ‘gown’, saying she never saw one better fitted to provoke lust or more capable of giving pleasure. -
A Midsummer Night's Dream
ACT 5, SCENE 1
THISBE My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee…
PYRAMUS O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!
THISBE I kiss the wall’s hole not your lips at all.
For me, it’s the funniest scene in all Shakespeare — Bottom and his fellow craftsmen put on a show for the Duke and his courtiers, and they’re terrible. The plot of lovers kept apart by cruel parents is the same as Romeo and Juliet but this play turns high tragedy into comic farce involving a ‘hole’ in the wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe. And once you recover the obscene subtext that Shakespeare intended us to hear, there is no doubt that emissions from hair-covered cherry lips and shaggy stones, and kissing the wrong hole are not to do with a chaste kiss on the mouth. The ‘actors’ are blissfully unaware of the unintended innuendoes — which makes the whole scene even more hilarious.
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