A Hundred Vaginas

I've found more than a hundred terms for vagina alone. Now, that's a nice soundbite for plugging a book (or a blog post). This is Héloïse Sénéchal quoted in the Guardian today about her new Royal Shakespeare Company edition of the complete works. She claims this edition will be less prudish than all others in its glossing of sexual slang. Stanley Wells (always in the front of the S-for-Shakespeare section of a reporter's rolodex, apparently), somewhat petulantly says: If the best thing you can say about a new edition is that it's filthy, it doesn't say a lot. It's a gimmick, an attempt to grab attention. That's right, a gimmick, unlike, say, titling a book Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, a book that has been pitched to me by more mailings from Cambridge UP than any other I've seen, not that anyone is looking to grab any attention of course, rigorous Dryasdusts as we all are. I'm happy that Sénéchal will be introducing our undergraduates to more terms for penis and vagina, though I'm sure they can rattle off more than a hundred already. But her class-based explanation for the abundance of bawdy puns in Shakespeare is bizarre: These were aimed at the working classes who crowded into the Globe in London for their fill of bawdy entertainment .... "Shakespeare is now an institution, and there is an assumption, especially in schools, that he was using high rhetoric. But the majority of his audience were labourers, craftsmen, ordinary people being catered for in a popular way. They were as smutty-minded then as we are now." Someone needs to brush up her Rochester.