Glorious . . . a beautifully presented guide to Elizabethan filth

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

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

'...piles ingenuity on scholarship to make the bard bawdier.'

`A thoroughly respectable academic slums it with this gloss on bum
jokes,...sexual practices and body parts

`A work of scholarship dressed up, with brilliant design, as
titillation'

Glorious . . . a beautifully presented guide to Elizabethan filth

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.

Quote for Filthy Shakespeare:
"Glorious . . . a beautifully presented guide to Elizabethan filth" Stephen
Bayley, Observer Book of the Year

The works of William Shakespeare contain at least 400 puns on
words for the penis and vagina. And these are just the tip of a very dirty
iceberg indeed...

Shakespeare is stuffed with wordplay and double entendres so filthy they
would make even our most risqué of comics blush. From The Two Gentlemen of
Verona to The Tempest, the plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts
and what they do. The sheer salacious inventiveness of his sexual puns is
breathtaking.

Shakespeare's towering genius lies in his matchless understanding of the
human condition, but for centuries we've been deprived of the full extent
of one of his most brilliant dramatic devices. It's time to unlock the
meaning behind the tantalising coded words. We can now rediscover the
master of the sexual pun at his most inventive.

Filthy Shakespeare presents more than 70 sizzling examples of the Bard at
his raunchiest, arranged under different categories from Balls to Buggery,
and from Cunnilingus to the Clap. Each filthy Shakespearean passage is
"translated" into modern English and the hidden sexual meanings of the
original words explained. A fascinating introduction shows how
Shakespeare's sexual wordplay had its roots in the social and political
reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Filthy Shakespeare is not just the quirkiest and dirtiest gift book of the
year, it also offers intriguing - and often surprising and startling -
insights into the richness and complexity of Shakespeare's language and his
world.

2007-09-28 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.