@mocat , here's a teaser from the introduction:
MUCH ADO ABOUT THINGS AND NO THINGS
In his 1512 work
De Copia, Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus addresses the scope and importance of what he called the “abundant style” (think “copious,” i.e. abundance). Erasmus’ commentary was confined to the field of rhetoric, but his message is equally applicable to all humans, since humans by nature are, to use Kenneth Burke’s famous phrasing, “word-lings.” Erasmus writes, “If in these circumstances we find ourselves destitute of verbal riches and hesitate, or keep singing out the same old phrase like a cuckoo, and are unable to clothe our thought in other colors or other forms, we shall look ridiculous when we show ourselves to be so tongue-tied, and we shall also bore our wretched audience to death” (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_copia). I cannot prove whether or not Shakespeare was familiar with Erasmus’ work, but still I chuckle to think of the myriad ways Shakespeare could have punned off of “tongue-tied” in his own work (in context, “tongue” often carried the double-meaning “clitoris”). In a famous section of
De Copia, Erasmus demonstrates his “abundant style” by presenting 195 variations of the common correspondence greeting “your letter pleased me greatly.” Not to be outdone, Shakespeare’s works contain more than 200 variant expressions for male genitals alone – an abundant style indeed! Perhaps in a show of sexual bi-partisanship, his works also include nearly 200 synonyms for female genitals. These figures come from the appendix to Pauline Kiernan’s quaint (lol) volume
Filthy Shakespeare, to which I am indebted. Did Shakespeare employ such abundance of phrase because the Elizabethans were not as comfortable discussing sexuality in public as we are today?
Fie! The opposite is true. In fact, I’m feeling slightly uncomfortable as I type this paper, and I will feel more than slightly uncomfortable presenting it. Shakespeare’s plays are
engorged with sexual imagery/energy, and his audiences were fine-tuned to hearing what we now call subtext in a way that we can hardly begin to imagine. “And those ears were trained to hear every nuance of meaning in a word, including, and especially, ones with sexual undertones. This was because so many people used language in this way and because, quite simply, they went to so many plays” (Kiernan,
Filthy Shakespeare). The most obscene of Shakespeare’s sexual puns often go undetected by modern readers, and the reasons for this are plentiful. Beginning in Shakespeare’s time and continuing uninterrupted to the present, sympathetic editors have merely glossed over them while moralists have censured and, in some cases, deleted them entirely. Shakespeare’s audience was acquainted with a manner of living that to modern readers would seem immoral, decadent, vulgar, and brutal. Poverty, famine, disease, and corruption were an ever-present reality for the lower classes. This was an era characterized by excess of all kinds, which in part explains the turmoil that would later erupt in the seventeenth century. During the Interregnum, the Puritan-dominated Parliament sought to address the excesses of the previous regime by banning, among other things, the theatre. But now I am getting dangerously close to composing a research paper rather than the compendium of crassness I set out to write...
