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Shakespeare,
the Bawdy Bard

ON SHAKESPEARE - by G.L. Horton

PC writes: That Shakespeare can be bawdy in his plays is fairly widely recognised. Yet I get the strong impression that N. Americans are uncomfortable with the topic.

Pooh! Some N. Americans, maybe. How soon you forget! Last time you launched this, I waded right in, and even raised the stakes. Of course, you "forget" because I reject your "aristocratic" characterization. But I'm an old American, raised among prudish country folk and as middleclass and Middlewest as can be-- and I have always felt, intuited, before I had either the verbal or physiological knowledge with which to decode it, that Shakespeare's every other thought was a naughty one. I got Partridge's bawdry book out of the library as a young teen and confirmed my nasty-minded suspicions.

I've always supposed that, like me, WS was precocious sexually as well as poetically, and that like me he learned to read without being schooled and memorized and wrote poetry long before he ever met another soul who wrote anything more ambitious than an itemized laundry bill. Certainly I had the impression when very young that old Will and I were the only two who ever gave rein to our dirty animal witty impish imaginations, and that it was a miracle that no one seemed to understand what we were thinking. Country matters are most easily explored when there are no armies of servants keeping their eyes on you, no solemn duties to be done-- but groves and barns are not without hazard. Like me, Will married young-- how else? When lust leads, a jackass can look like a god.

I've had no success with dirty talk on hlas, either, Paul. I offered chapter and verse on homoeroticism in the plays that echoed the sonnets', expressed my belief that as a youngster WS was romantically involved with an older man named Antonio, (and a Helena and at least one Anne) and averred that everyone who is well acquainted with lust recognizes that in action it can be polymorphous, and often perverse. I got cold silence and some small chiding for my extravagances. I don't think your aristocratic approach to the WS private parts will be any more pursuasive than my earthy one. But once more into the breach, Paul! (4/15/02)

 

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