Celebrating the Bard in all his bawdy glory, an eminent scholar puts the spotlight on the down-and-dirty sexual puns lurking in Shakespeare?s work. Everyone knows of his matchless understanding of the human condition, but we have been deprived for centuries of the full extent of one of Shakespeare?s most brilliant dramatic devices. Restoring the saucy, often shocking meanings that lie beneath his words, Filthy Shakespeare gives modern readers a tour of the brothels, buggery, trannies, pimps, pricks, and other tawdry references populating his best-known works. The tension between sexual wordplay and politics provides a captivating historical backdrop, while the fascinating facts about life in Will?s England make us see his masterworks in their gritty authenticity. Revealing and riotously funny, Filthy Shakespeare is the perfect gift for anyone who wants to rediscover the master of the sexual pun at his most inventive.

The works of William Shakespeare contain at least 400 puns on male and female genitals. Despite the richness and breathtaking scope of his sexual language, too little attention has been paid to the sheer salacious inventiveness of his indecent puns - until now. His plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts and what they do. Filthy Shakespeare presents over 70 sizzling examples of the Bard at his raciest, arranged under different categories from Balls to Buggery, from Cunnilingus to the Clap, from Homosexual to Transvestite. Each filthy Shakespearean passage is translated into modern English and the hidden sexual meanings of the words explained in a glossary. In her fascinating and lively Introduction, Pauline Kiernan shows how Shakespeare's sexual wordplay had its roots in the social and political reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where the harsh facts of life were often disguised by bawdy, brutal punning, and in the era when the English secret service was born, deciphering secret codes became a national obsession.

This classic work sold with continued success in its original format This new edition will attract review coverage and is appearing in the Autumn Partridge Promotion Foreword by Stanley Wells - General editor of `Oxford Shakespeare'

Gollob, inspired by performance of Hamlet, immersed himself in all things Shakespearean.

Before Shakespeare in Love, there was Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun: a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life.

Only in the world of the theater can Nat Field find an escape from the tragedies that have shadowed his young life. So he is thrilled when he is chosen to join an American drama troupe traveling to London to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream in a new replica of the famous Globe theater. Shortly after arriving in England, Nat goes to bed ill and awakens transported back in time four hundred years -- to another London, and another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Amid the bustle and excitement of an Elizabethan theatrical production, Nat finds the warm, nurturing father figure missing from his life -- in none other than William Shakespeare himself. Does Nat have to remain trapped in the past forever, or give up the friendship he's so longed for in his own time?