Inspired by several previous threads on this board, I just wanted to see if we could get one going involving dirty jokes Shakespeare through into his works. They’re actually quite plentiful, but elusive, since in Shakespeare, not alot of them are instantly understood.
I’ll start us off with one – Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene I. Very easy to follow:
SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will
take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.
GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes
to the wall.
S: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels,
are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push
Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids
to the wall.
G: The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.
S: 'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.
G: The heads of the maids?
S: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.
G: They must take it in sense that feel it.
S: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and
'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.
If you read the whole scene there, Sampson’s mind is in the gutter the whole time. Anyone else wanna share some?
My brother did his high school senior thesis on Hamlet and gave me these two tidbits. I don’t have my copy handy so I can’t give scene and act. But when Hamlet is laying with his head in Ophelia’s lap she asks what he is thinking of. He replies:
“Country matters” (say the first word slow)
Also, according to his research, in shakespeare’s time the word “nothing” was slang for a woman’s genitals. Which gives the play Much Ado about Nothing a whole new meaning.
I know there’s a lot of dirty jokes in Taming of the Shrew, too.
Thanks, courteous wall:
But what see I? No Thisbe do I see.
O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss!
Cursed be thy stones for thus deceiving me! (testicles)
LYSANDER
The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again.
BOTTOM out of character
No, in truth, sir, he should not. ‘Deceiving me’ is Thisbe’s cue: she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see, it will fall pat as I told you. Yonder she comes.
Enter FLUTE
FLUTE as Thisbe
O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.
BOTTOM as Pyramus
I see a voice: now will I to the chink,
To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face.
Thisbe!
FLUTE as Thisbe
My love thou art, my love I think?
BOTTOM as Pyramus
O kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!
FLUTE as Thisbe I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.
My favorite sonnet…
"Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’
And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in overplus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea all water, yet receives rain still
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’
One will of mine, to make thy large ‘Will’ more.
Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’ "
-Sonnet 135
What? No Mercutio? I’ve always thought Mercutio was the “dirtiest” of the characters in Romeo and Juliet.
Act II, Sc. 4
Benvolio.
Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo!
Mercutio.
Without his roe, like a dried herring.–O flesh, flesh, how art
thou fishified!
(Read: Yo, he thinks the boy’s had sex . . . maybe. That’s how I’ve read it. I suppose you could say that he’s just left his heart behind, but it’s Mercutio for God’s sake.)
Same scene
Nurse.
Is it good-den?
Mercutio.
'Tis no less, I tell ye; for the bawdy hand of the dial is
now upon the prick of noon.
Nurse.
Out upon you! what a man are you!
And a play upon the word “whore.”
Mercutio.
No hare, sir; unless a hare, sir, in a lenten pie, that is
something stale and hoar ere it be spent.
[Sings.]
An old hare hoar,
And an old hare hoar,
Is very good meat in Lent;
But a hare that is hoar
Is too much for a score
When it hoars ere it be spent.
I always thought Romeo & Juliet Act 3 Scene 1 could be very funny if taken the right way.
Tybalt accuses Mercutio of “consorting” with Romeo, to which Mercutio replies:
Consort! what, dost thou make us minstrels? an
thou make minstrels of us, look to hear nothing but
discords: here’s my fiddlestick; here’s that shall
make you dance. 'Zounds, consort!
BENVOLIO
We talk here in the public haunt of men:
Either withdraw unto some private place,
And reason coldly of your grievances,
Or else depart; here all eyes gaze on us.
MERCUTIO
Men’s eyes were made to look, and let them gaze;
I will not budge for no man’s pleasure, I.
Minstrels could be pronounced like “menstruals” the pun on fiddlestick and making Tybalt dance, and Mercutio could pronounce “budge” and “bulge.”
Basically, Tybalt could be accusing Mercutio of being Romeo’s lover, and Mercutio is saying “Yeah. Right.” When Romeo tells Tybalt “I love you too,” all hell breaks loose.
In the 9th grade, we covered R&J, and I found out the textbook was bowdlerized a bit. After the “but, soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” scene, Romeo is confronted by a relative, who asks him where he’s been, as his bed was untouched. He replies that, “the sweeter rest was mine.” That bit, which implied he spent the night with Juliet, was left out.
We just finished covering The Tempest…
Scene one is aboard a ship in the middle of a huge storm, and the situation is looking pretty grim for the royal (the king, and associated men) passengers, who are cursing the boatswain’s ability to control the ship and everythign else in the vicinity. One of the characters, Gonzalo, speaks as follows:
"I’ll warrent him for drowning, though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstaunched wench."
Apparently this is taken either as 1) A reference to menstruation without the use of absorbent padding or 2) referring to being sexually unsatisfied and thus, the “leakiness”.
Actually, this is only mildly naughty, but I find it funny.
In R&J, in Act One, Scene III, Juliet’s mother, her nurse, and Juliet herself are all together. It’s just before the party the Capulets are throwing. The nurse is reminiscing about when Juliet was a toddler just learning to walk. The nurse’s husband was still alive then, and it goes like this:
Nurse: For even the day before she(Juliet)* broke her brow, and then my husband–God be with his soul! 'a was a merry man: --took up the child; ‘Yea’ quoth he ‘dost thou fall upon thy face? thou wilt fall backward, when thou hast more wit; wilt thou not Jule?’*
I vividly remember the freshman English class where we went over and over this brief scene. My teacher went down the rows of seats one by one asking students what the Nurse meant. I was the only one who got the joke, or at least the only one willing to admit to it.
The funniest part of that scene is probably not the joke itself, but the way Juliet and Lady Capulet react – its obvious they’ve heard the Nurse make the same joke countless times before.
These aren’t really jokes in Shakespeare’s plays, but they’re rather horrible/funny Shakespeare jokes that I found when searching for more about Mercutio. http://www.arches.uga.edu/~erhart/Jokes/Jokes.htm
“Shall I compare thee to a brick outhouse?”
But the Nurse:
LADY CAPULET . . . By having him[the Prince], making yourself no less.
Nurse: No less! nay, bigger; women grow by men.
Sex leads to babies, something the Nurse is more than ready to admit.
Macduff: Was it so late, friend, ere you wnt to bed, that you do lie so late?
Porter: 'Faith, Sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, Sir, is a great provoker of three things.
Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke?
Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, Sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.
Macduff: I believe drink gave me the lie last night.
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
Evans: What is the focative case, William?
William: O, vocativo, O . . .
Hugh: Remember, William, focative is caret.
Mistress Quickly: And that’s a good root.
That’s a stretch.
The first one that comes to my mind is from Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick is listing the traits of his perfect woman, and one of them is “virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her.”
Now she is in the very lists of love;
The champion mounted for the hot encounter.
The Winter’s Tale:
Second lady: She is spread into a goodly bulk; good time encounter her.
Anthony and Cleopatra:
Iras: Am I not an inch of fortune better than she?
Charmian: Well, if you were but an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it?
Iras: Not in my husband’s nose.
Twelth Night:
Fool: Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.
No, just dependent on a good performer for Mistress Quickly. Everything that comes out of her mouth, and probably a good many things that go in as well, has to do with sex. And she needs to be played as such. Believe me, when performed properly, there’s no ambiguity about what she means.