One thing that was always left out in my high school English classes is just how progressive and explicit Shakespeare was with innuendos about sex. Image / Getty Images
• Warning: Contains sexual references
All of us were forced to drudge through Shakespeare in high school English. When you're 15 or 16, it makes little sense until your teacher discusses core themes with you and you're forced to write essays on them.
One thing that was always left out in my high school English classes is just how progressive and explicit Shakespeare was with innuendos about sex. His texts are littered with them – here's five we can still learn from today.
During the last few years Western society has started to take sexual consent seriously – taking us in leaps and bounds from how it was once approached (or, as it were, not approached). If you look into the late 1500s-written comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, you'll notice a lot of the play is about consent.
There we have date-rape drugs (Oberon putting fairy potion in Titania's eyes), Hermia being forced by her family into an arranged marriage, and – at the other end of the scale – Helena's unambiguous verbal consent given to her lover Demetrius. It clearly shows she's okay with S&M "rough play": "The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me but as your spaniel; spurn me, strike me…"
There are too many examples of how much of a fan Shakespeare was of cunnilingus, so here's a few I find most obvious:
In The Taming Of The Shrew there's lots of repartee between Petruchio and Kate about his desire to put his tongue in her "tail" (Elizabethan slang for vagina). In Venus and Adonis, a line actually reads, "Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie" – it's hard to be clearer about oral sex than that. Both are early suggestions that men would actually put their female partner's sexual satisfaction before their own.
Looking for another, even more discernible one? In Twelfth Night the butler Malvolio reads a letter with the following line: "By my life, this is my lady's hand" these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus makes she her great P's." Read it aloud.
Romeo and Juliet is usually the first Shakespearean play we are introduced to. It's a tragic story of love and loss, but it's also full of jokes about how much men desire anal sex from their female partners.
As Romeo's best friend Mercutio puts it bluntly: "O, Romeo, that she were, O that she were an open-arse, and thou a pop'rin pear!" Again, Shakespeare is supposed to be read out loud and when you say "pop'rin" it clearly becomes the penis joke "pop 'er in". But just like today, it's less-than-clear in Shakespeare's work if women actually want to partake in such an activity themselves.
Sir Ian McKellen, who has spent much of his career performing Shakespeare's work and has an intimate understanding of the characters, is convinced of the well-publicised rumour that Shakespeare was gay or bisexual. Shakespeare clearly understood homosexual relationships and wrote of them between some of his supporting characters – notably Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant Of Venice, and Olivia and Viola (cross-dressing as Cesario) in Twelfth Night.
Need more proof Shakespeare was A-okay with gay? Sonnet 18, and 125 of Shakespeare's other poems are written by the Bard himself to another man described as the "fair youth".
This is centuries before Call Me By Your Name, dear readers. These were published in 1609 but in 1640 they were given a hetero-treatment by publisher John Benson, who de-gayed the poems by changing the pronouns. Most editions have since returned to Shakespeare's original man-loving texts.
Most people know that women's parts in Shakespearean plays were performed by men, but this was because women weren't actually allowed on stage back then. Some critics dismiss this as the only reason for gender being blurred in Shakespeare's work.
Yet in many of Shakespeare's works, women dress as men, too. The aforementioned Viola/Cesario role in Twelfth Night is the biggest example of a women possessing both feminine and masculine energy. Throughout history, female actors have also brought a gender-bending dynamism to the stage – women have played Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Prospero from The Tempest for centuries.
What all of this tells us is there was a Shakespearean realisation of what we know (in 2018) to be true: many people have a fluidity to their gender and possess both masculinity and femininity. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
Two decades on, the surviving members of McKenzie Watch gather for their annual reunion.