Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature: Three Volume Set Volume I A-F Volume II G-P Volume III Q-Z (Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary)

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This monumental work in three large volumes is the one which I use most frequently when wanting to inform myself on the use of "bawdy", or sexually "indecent" language or imagery, in Renaissance literature (especially plays, but also poetry like Donne's). The author has for one thing assembled a much larger range of examples to illustrate sexual meanings than are provided by any other scholars. In the case of this area of language, that really matters. Many readers, even today, vastly underrate the frequency of sexual meanings in e.g. Shakespeare or other Renaissance dramatists. The truth is that they and their audiences were almost addictively fond of sexual jokes, and these often are not understood by people today, or at best glimpsed as just possibly a local "quibble". What Williams shows is that most of such instances of word-play are not at all incidental, but so frequent that one can in fact speak of a sexual "language" or "code" which was clearly widely shared and understood during the period he covers. This can only be done by producing MANY examples of a particular usage, as he does. He also demonstrates that many hitherto "unsuspected" words frequently carried a sexual meaning. Neither he nor I want to suggest that the sexual meaning is usually the ONLY (or even the DOMINANT) meaning in all but a limited number of words which are "merely" sexual. Our point is, rather, that many seemingly "innocuous" words are so frequently used in a sexual sense that that sense should not be seen as something occasional or additional, but as commonplace and central.

The dictionary is, for all its comprehensiveness, by no means complete. See for example Joost Daalder and Antony Telford Moore, "*Mandrakes* and *Whiblins* in *The Honest Whore*" (*Studies in Philology*, Fall 1997, 494-507) as a discussion of words not adequately covered - or understood - by Williams. Another word he does not list (or at least not as a separate entry) is *thatch* for "pubic hair". And there certainly are other omissions. Nevertheless, this work far more often helps one out than it lets one down, and it is difficult to see how any editor of a Renaissance play containing sexual punning (and many do!) can afford to ignore this work. All university libraries should own it as an important reference tool. - Joost Daalder, Profesor of English, South Australia