Yay for Shakespeare Smut!

From the Observer Online:

David Smith
Sunday March 26, 2006
The Observer

Sexing up Shakespeare is a handy trick for directors seeking to exploit the Bard's bawdy humour to put bums on seats. Now one woman has gone further with the most intensive search ever for sexual innuendo, toilet humour and smut buried deep in the national poet's oeuvre.

'The plays are absolutely packed with filth,' said academic Héloïse Sénéchal. 'I've found more than a hundred terms for vagina alone.' That the author of As You Like It would, were he alive today, be writing for Viz magazine is implied by Sénéchal's research for the footnotes of a new Royal Shakespeare Company edition of his complete works which promises to be the most candid ever.

She claims that previous editions of Shakespeare have been too prudish, and that by using computer techniques she has uncovered unrecognised double entendres. These were aimed at the working classes who crowded into the Globe in London for their fill of bawdy entertainment. Sénéchal has identified seemingly innocuous words such as carrot, pencil and horn as terms for penis, while she pinpoints pie, fruit dish and 'buggle boe' as references to the vagina.

'We are trying to resist the cultural embarrassment that has permeated footnotes in the past,' she said. 'Shakespeare is now an institution, and there is an assumption, especially in schools, that he was using high rhetoric. But the majority of his audience were labourers, craftsmen, ordinary people being catered for in a popular way. They were as smutty-minded then as we are now.'

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I'd go on, but you can read the rest of the article at the Observer's site. Bill really was a naughty boy! The whole reason for blogging it is that I find it amusing that Shakespeare, a pulp author of his time is so revered today, but if you are a "pulp" or genre author nowadays, you're somehow less than those who aspire to be "literature." I used to write "literature" and I've long since decided my ability to tell a good yarn is more useful to people than providing my personal opus on live, the universe and everything. Yay for bawdy Bill! :D