The smutty side of Shakespeare

A young college teacher who came to discuss Shakespeare with me was shocked when I said, in the course of our discussion, that, in his time, Shakespeare was primarily known as a great provider of masala entertainment. It was this, I said, that attracted to The Globe both the groundlings, the members of the poorer audience paying one penny for a place in “the pit,” and the richer patrons paying half a crown for a seat in the galleries. The young woman was completely nonplussed. ‘Don’t you like Shakespeare, sir?’ she asked.

I sighed one of those deep sighs of exasperation that had inevitably been part of my conversation with English teachers for well over three-and-a-half decades. If teachers were capable of higher levels of comprehension or thinking, they would be doing something more challenging and much more profitable than teaching. After this sobering thought, I resumed speaking. There’s no avoiding teachers; I’m paid for speaking to them after all.

I spoke to her about Jonathan Gil Harris’s 2018 book, Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian. ‘The book,' I said, ‘talks about the commonalities between the Bard and Bollywood.’  I remembered what Gil Harris had said in a recent  interview about his masala thesis, and I shared it with her. ‘Look at Antony and Cleopatra. You have these two eponymous lovers from two different continents, you have high tragedy as well as earthy comedy, you have plenty of music, and you have Bahubali-like scenes filled with melodramatic performers. Plus, of course, as in Bollywood films, you have a heroine who is believed to be embodying “infinite variety”!  Isn’t this masala entertainment par excellence?’ It appears Bollywood made Gil Harris re-read Shakespeare. ‘Here’s God’s plenty!’ said Dryden, gushing over the amazing range he found in Chaucer. Gil Harris says some such thing in Masala Shakespeare.

Well, all this is too much for English teachers: for the vast majority of them, Shakespeare is little more than a “tough” paper on the MA English Literature syllabus. The young woman listening to me had heard enough for comprehension, I thought; so I dismissed her and began to reflect on a related aspect of Shakespeare: the dark underside of his English. This hidden underbelly was opened up to me when, over a quarter century ago, I came across a very scholarly book called A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Significance, compiled by Frankie Rubinstein and published by Macmillan, London.

Allow me to provide a tantalizing glimpse of this dark underbelly. When Shakespeare used the word “altar,” he sometimes meant arse. He used the word “chin” to mean penis and “dulcet” to mean testicles – sometimes, I mean. “Pretty” sometimes meant buttocks for him. Worse still, “froth” could mean semen in Shakespeare, “grace” vulva, “caterpillar” pederast, and “lean” pimp. It looks as though a large number of words used by the immortal Bard of Avon and quoted with great enthusiasm by prudish professors of English referred to the sexual act, sexual organs, accessories to the sexual act, emotions related to the act, and the scatological parts and functions. If you want to know the extent to which the Bard could go in his penchant for the sexual and the scatological, you can read Rubinstein’s Dictionary.

Rubinstein has an illustrious and much more scholarly (by which I do not at all mean dirty-minded) predecessor in Eric Partridge whose pioneering book, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, on this valuable subject, is marketed as a Routledge classic. But Partridge is not so scrupulous as Rubinstein. His definition of “bawdy” is not so comprehensive as to include all the erotic practices of heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, perverts, castrates, and what have you; and, more importantly, he doesn’t throw so much light.

When I said “light” in the last paragraph, I meant it. Quite a few lines in Shakespeare’s plays have remained a mystery even to Shakespeare scholars. The traditional annotations provided by different editors are drab and unconvincing. Rubinstein’s Dictionary throws light on those hitherto dark and obscure areas; they are dazzlingly bright now, thanks to the punning dimensions Rubinstein has provided. He lists each usage of pun and illustrates it with a number of examples from Shakespeare’s poems and plays. The Dictionary would have one believe that Bill Shakespeare was not just ribald but vulgar.

Partridge, Rubinstein, and Gil Harris are interesting additions indeed to Shakespeare scholarship.