The Profane Poet

When I was reading Shakespeare in school, I never enjoyed it like I do as an adult--and one of the main reasons was because I found the arcane language difficult to read and understand. The copies of the plays that we used in school had the play itself printed on only one side of each page; the facing page contained footnotes explaining the use of words and phrases that have changed or disappeared from the vernacular all together, but even that didn't help 100% of the time.

But I've moved past that as an adult. It has nothing to do with getting older and everything to do with learning--and thereby understanding--a language that has changed drastically over time. And being able to understand the language led to my other main reason for enjoying Shakespeare: I get the dirty jokes now.

Plays in Jacobean and Elizabethan England were startlingly raunchy affairs. Surviving texts show a wealth of profanity and sexual innuendo that we in the modern world would be pretty squeamish around. The only reason Shakespeare's work isn't heavily edited or challenged is because most of the R-rated content is written in a way that is no longer obscene. Other playwrights used a lot of swearing, some of it graphic--plays had lines like 'I fart at thee!', 'A turd in your teeth!', and 'Shit on your head!' Shakespeare seemed uncomfortable with doing this and at that time his plays would have probably been considered somewhat prudish in their lack of profanity. But what Shakespeare lacks in swearing he more than makes up for in dirty jokes.

I was reading 'Twelfth Night' and came to Lady Olivia's insult to Malvolio the weasel, in which she asks him if he's tired of 'self-love', which basically means she called him a wanker. Then she accused him of being diseased, the implication obviously meaning sexually transmitted disease. The next character that speaks, the Fool, makes reference of Mercury--on the surface this is an allusion to ancient Roman mythology, but it would have been an extremely dirty joke to the audience at the time because mercury was often used as a treatment for... syphilis.

Yeah. Shakespeare was seriously multi-talented, but his specialty seems to have been 'being a pervert'.

Stay classy, O Bard. Stay classy.