[EXPLICIT CONTENT, ADULT LANGUAGE AND SOPHOMORIC SEX HUMOR AHEAD… SKIP IF EASILY OFFENDED.]
You’ve been warned: Get out now while you can.
Germaine Greer, lecturer and author of Shakespeare’s Wife, has claimed that due to its perversity, burlesque, and eroticism, Venus and Adonis was the Fifty Shades of Gray of its day. It certainly was popular–as seen in the number of editions published (16 before 1647). And Eric Partridge, he of the great dictionary Shakespeare’s Bawdy, refers to the poem as a “cornucopia of amorous phraseology” (Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Partridge, Eric. New York: Routledge Classics, 2001; page 48).
So, while the whole poem has sexual imagery (remember the few hints I mentioned on Wednesday), I’m going to focus today on stanzas 32-40, where we gets some pretty damned fine double entendre… Continue reading “BAWDY Venus and Adonis: stanzas 32-40, or “bottoms and hillocks and mountains, oh my!” [EXPLICIT]”