One of the books I purchased in preparation for Brush Up Your Shakespeare Month is Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns by Pauline Kiernan. The book has a somewhat titillating title, and it certainly is chockablock full of blunt - nay, crude - sexual terms. But it does a good - if overenthusiastic - job of identifying representative scenes in many of the plays that involve decidedly bawdy terms.

Often the bawdy scenes are comical as well (or would have been played for comedy in Shakespeare's time, such as the scene recounting the death of Sir John Falstaff in Henry V - nowadays played for ill-judged pathos most of the time, but likely played for laughs among the bawdy Elizabethan crowds), but sometimes they are not - again, as in Henry V, where Henry threatens the Dauphin and the French using tennis terms after the Dauphin sends him a mocking gift of tennis balls, or in the scene outside Harfleur where he tells the Governor of Harfleur to let him in now while he has control of his men, or he'll let them loose to rape and pillage.

There is little art in Kiernan's translations - when she decides that a word of Shakespeare's dialogue stands in for something else - and she usually uses particularly blunt words for body parts and actions involving them - she swaps her body parts and whatnot for Shakespeare's text, ordinarily without any nuance or subtlety.



From Romeo and Juliet, Act II, sc. 1:

Mercutio If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
O Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse, and thou a popp'rin' pear.

From Filthy Shakespeare:
If love be blind, he won't be able to fuck the vagina.
He'll sit under a medlar tree
and wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
that girls call open-arses when they're talking dirty on their own.
O Romeo, if only she were, O if only she were
an open arse, and you an erect penis popping it in her.

And seriously? This was one of the tamest translations in the book.


That said, it's been useful to sort out some of the scenes where I can tell there must be something going on, but I'm not sure what it is.

For instance, in the case of Falstaff's death, which is communicated in Henry V, I didn't see that the scene added anything to the action, but I couldn't figure out what it was there for. Sure, we knew Falstaff was involved with Prince Hal during the Henry IV plays, so it makes sense to sew up that particular loose end. But really, that scene is kind of boring when staged as a serious one. I suspected that, like many of the scenes that now seem misplaced and/or tedious, it was supposed to be a comical scene. I suspected, also, that it had something to do with sex. In Filthy Shakespeare, I learned that I was correct about the sexual puns, and likely the comedy. If you were to read the book, you'd see what I mean.

Now Kiernan, the author, definitely has serious credentials - she has a Ph.D. from Oxford, and she taught there for many years, and has written several books on Shakespeare. She's got serious bona fides, in other words. So in some ways, this is a scholarly work tarted up in profanity, a way of educating modern audiences into some of the nuances of Shakespeare's work, and on exactly how many different levels he was sometimes operating at the same time. It's a testament to his skill that the surface words he used continue to make sense and resonate even when secondary meanings are overlooked.

A final note: A hardcover copy of Filthy Shakespeare will be the prize for next week's Brush Up Your Shakespeare Contest, with details on that to follow. In the meantime, don't forget to enter this week's contest by sharing your favorite Shakespeare quote in the comments to the Once More Into the Breach contest post.