Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.

Shakespeare's use of sexual language, imagery and erotic themes is extensive, varied, and although this is necessarily hard to establish, probably innovative at times. This glossary provides a first-hand guide to Shakespeare's sexual language, some of which is notoriously difficult to unravel and whose roots go back into earlier literature. Compiled by Gordon Williams, author of the authoritative three volume Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, this is a comprehensive but concise reference guide to sexual language and imagery in Shakespeare. Entries are cross-referenced and include references to textual examples where possible.

This book investigates how the sexual element in Shakespeare's works is complicated and compromised by the impact of print. Whether the issue is one of censorship and evasion or sexual redefinition, the fact that Shakespeare wrote in the first century of popular print is crucial. Out of the newly-accessible classical canon he creates a reconstituted idea of the sexual temptress; and out of the Counter-Reformation propaganda he fashions his own complex thinking about the prostitute. Shakespeare's theatrical scripts, meeting-ground fro the spoken and written word, contribute powerfully to those socio-sexual debates which had been re-energized by print.