Shakespeare's Bawdy (Routledge Classics) - Softcover

Eric Partridge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415254000 ISBN 13: 9780415254007

Publisher: Routledge, 2001

Synopsis

This classic of Shakespeare scholarship begins with a masterly introductory essay analysing and exemplifying the various categories of sexual and non-sexual bawdy expressions and allusions in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The main body of the work consists of an alphabetical glossary of all words and phrases used in a sexual or scatological sense, with full explanations and cross-references.

About this title

Review:

When Shakespeare's plays were first performed, they were popular with everyone: they weren't classics yet or a requisite course to be suffered. The stories were good entertainment for the masses, with a bawdy streak a mile wide. Certainly Shakespeare's depth and insight into human nature was appreciated, but surely some came just for the dirt. Shakespeare's contemporaries didn't need a glossary to get the jokes, but we do. Thank goodness for Eric Partridge's dictionary of Elizabethan smut, so we can get the double-entendres, too. Thus, "hardening of one's brows" (The Winter's Tale) refers to being cuckolded, "laced mutton" (Two Gentleman of Verona) is a prostitute, "riggish" (Cleopatra) means lascivious, and "groping for trout in a peculiar river" (Measure for Measure) means copulating with a woman. With an essay on the sexual, homosexual, and nonsexual bawdy in Shakespeare, an index to the essay, and a full glossary of bawdry, Partridge puts the nudge and wink back in Shakespeare.

About the Author:

Eric Partridge (1884-1979) was the author of some three dozen books, mainly on the aspects of the English language. Stanley Wells is an eminent Shakespearean scholar and the general editor of Oxford Shakespeare.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0415254000
• ISBN 13: 9780415254007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 304