shakespeare: pervert

Back when I was in high school, perhaps as some kind of tactic to get a bunch of dis uninterested first-generation slackers excited about literature, our English teacher spent several lessons discussing ‘Shakespeare’s Bawdy’ — the dirty jokes Shakespeare built into his plays to coax roars from the lower-classes (and maybe a few of the upper-class, too). When I heard we were going to be getting the collected works of Shakespeare on the site, my mind went the same place it usually does: the gutter.

We got in touch with Dr. Pauline Kiernan, who wrote the terrific and hilarious Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns, and asked if she’d be willing to submit a modified, PG-rated version of some of the bard’s naughtier quips to the site. You can read the result here. Some of ‘em I’d heard before (most of the ones in Hamlet get repeated pretty regularly), but some of them — like, say, the ones in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — were new to me (and more than a little surprising). It’s I guess a little comforting to know that even the great Shakes was not above a bit of blue humor. Hopefully when you’re done with this, you’ll be completely satisfied, grinning from ear to ear.

That’s what she said.