Welcome to Shakespeare's Twisted Mind

     Shakespeare is the king of dirty jokes. There has hardly ever been, in history, a writer who so artfully wound together lyrical lines that could make your heart sing, and the absolute bawdiest, most profane phrases. Much Ado About Nothing, seeing as how it is one of Shakespeare’s most juvenile, most rom-com-y plays, is absolutely no exception. It is one of my favorite things about the play, honestly! Even the title, Much Ado About Nothing is a play on Elizabethan slang. In Elizabethan times, “nothing” or “no-thing” was slang for woman's genitals making the title of this play essentially Much Ado About Vagina. This really sets the mood for some really serious Shakespeare, doesn’t it?

      One of the bawdiest, and most unexpectedly nasty interactions happens betwixt Margaret, Hero, and later on, Beatrice. Act 3, Scene 4 gives us the gift of the longest and wittiest of the erotic inter feminine dialogues. Margaret has no shame, and while discussing Hero’s upcoming nuptials she asks, “Is there any harm in ‘heavier for a husband?’”(3.4.34-35). Margaret is essentially saying, there is no problem with having sex with your husband! She is clearly one of the most forward thinking ladies of the play, and this definitely reflects Shakespeare’s ideas of how women should really always express what they truly think. It’s fantastic! Their entire dialogue up to line 91 is so chock-full of sexual innuendo that I can’t even tell them all in five hundred words.

     It is so exciting after seeing a bunch of scenes that really read like boy’s clubs, with all the cuckold and bull's horn jokes, to get a glimpse of how the women really are just a dirty as the men! Just like in real life! It is just so exciting! It makes me so happy! All the aforementioned jokes are kind of confusing though, so I’ll explain them in at least one context. In Act 1 Scene 1, Benedick is referred to many times as the bull (1.1.256, 1.1.257), which, according to my very academic journal (it is actually a textbook, this isn’t a joke), Shakespeare’s Bawdy by scholar Eric Partridge, is “a man regarded as a habitual copulator” (73). Clearly, Bendick really got around. Seemed pretty harmless, didn’t it? Nope, Shakespeare is all about sex. Cuckold is actually a very simple term, but it’s really important to define in order to understand half the things that the younger men in this show say. A cuckold, as a noun, is a married man to whom his wife if unfaithful. As a verb it means to either be unfaithful to your husband, or to seduce the wife of another man.

     Shakspeare is all about sex, especially in Much Ado, and when it is not recognized it is an absolute crime. I really hope that when you. my dear reader, take a little peek at this blog post, it will reveal the absolute glory of how dirty Shakespeare is. Hope this was fun!