Sexuality in Shakespeare | Peter Cummings (essay date 1993)
Peter Cummings (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Bawdy Planet," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. CI, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 521-35.
[In the following essay, Cummings surveys Shakespeare's use of sexual imagery, wordplay, innuendo, and metaphor.]
Composition is superior to love-making as a means of satisfying the need for self-expression…; almost equal to it as an anodyne to that loneliness with which all of us, but especially the literary and artistic and musical creators, are beset.… Moreover, to write of sex and love serves both to satisfy—and perhaps to justify—the intellectual and spiritual need to create and homeopathically to assuage one's physical desires.
—Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy
Not saying the operative word seems a particularly devious and deadly form of...
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