When most people hear the name Shakespeare, they tend to think of sophisticated, high-brow writing. Shakespeare is indeed one of the most brilliant minds of his day—even in all of literature—but this does not mean that his writing was always classy and proper. In fact, when we actually take the time to read Shakespeare, we find the exact opposite to be true. His plays are chock-full of sexual innuendos of all different levels. Perhaps the best and most intriguing part, though, is the subtlety with which they are written, so that each person reads just as much into it as they look for. Many of Shakespeare's innuendos are not obvious at first. Although part of this is because of the changes in the English language throughout the years, another large portion is due to Shakespeare's subtle mastery of the written word. Language is its own form of art, a medium that Shakespeare was brilliantly fluent in. It takes a clever man to twist a turn of phrase, but to do as Shakespeare does and create three or even four levels of meaning in a single phrase is a form of genius rarely seen in today's pirate stories. The best part of Shakespeare's writing, though, is that it is not dirty just to be dirty. Believe it or not, the innuendo serves as more than a vehicle for sexual jollies. Shakespeare's use of sexual references in his play engages the reader, drawing them in to the mythological realm, helping them to discover who they really are.
Upon taking a closer look at Shakespeare, the sheer number of sexual references is surprising. However, they are not meant solely to please the primal aspect. Rather, they serve as a catalyst, as it were; a springboard for the escape to the mythological realm. A prime example of this is in the relationship between Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although it was definitely a heartfelt embrace of the lower, more primal aspect of humanity, it leads up to something so much greater than that. Titania—representative of the Goddess of Complete Being—is so much more than a pretty face and a steamy evening. She can offer him the world, an escape from his normal, boring life, and she says so in Act III, Scene I, starting in line 163.
“The honey bags steal from the humblebees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glowworm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.”
Those are not everyday requests. You certainly cannot go to Wal-Mart and pick up a pair of butterfly wings to fan moonbeams from someone's eyes. For Titania, however, it is an everyday occurrence. She lives in a realm outside of our own, where everything is possible, and nothing is too much to ask. If Bottom only asked, Titania could give him everything that he ever wanted. He could literally hold the world in his hands, but it would not be the world that one would first expect.
The goddess also beckons in Venus and Adonis, which is a prime example of what happens when one rejects the completeness that she has to offer. It matters not why Adonis chose to deny Venus, his fate remains the same. And deny he does, with a vengeance. In the end, it is his downfall, although he does not realize it at the time. In fact, he thinks himself noble for resisting temptation.
“'If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues,
And every tongue more moving than your own,
Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs,
Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown;
For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear,
And will not let a false sound enter there...”
Lines 775-780 marks just a small portion of his foolishly eloquent rejection. The play is a beautiful display of love and lust that is chock-full of sexual innuendo as well. Even Adonis' fate of being gored in the groin by a boar is representative of sexual acts. Yet even that saving temptation is not enough to save him from his death—not “death” in the sexual sense, as Shakespeare used it, but the physical. Adonis could have achieved immortality if only he had not resisted the goddess' wiles, but as it was he lives on as a memory, an example of what can happen to us if we are not careful with how we handle our myth. You could even say that Adonis mythed the point. It wasn't about sex. Although that might have been what it seemed to be on the surface, the reality was that Venus offered so much more than that. In fact, she offered him eternity.
Another example of the goddess chasing after a foolish, disinterested man is found in All's Well That Ends Well. Perhaps the play escaped the lauding that it truly deserved, for Helena was a goddess in her own right. She may have been pushy and chased after a man who was a real boor, but if we can laugh at the innuendo flooding this play, we are most certainly boors as well. Bertram was too interested in other things, rejecting Helena because she was not “of his rank.” Although this is true, the scales are not tipped in Bertram's favor. After all, a boor can do nothing to stand beside a goddess, unless she first offers him her hand and promises him the world. But he must first be clever enough to realize that this is in his interest, and that going off hunting or fighting battles with his man-friends will not do him any good in the long run. In fact, it will most often end up getting him into a lot of trouble that he could very easily have avoided. All that he has to do is to open his arms and embrace his goddess, and the entire world can be at the tip of his fingers. Hunting with the boys simply cannot compare to ruling the world beside a woman of incomparable beauty, and yet so many boors think that it can.
One would think that this would be obvious, that we would make the connection. However, when we see the mistakes that others have made, it does not remind us that we should not follow them. Instead we rejoice at their misfortune or laugh at their stupidity, never realizing that we are doing the same thing that they did. The problem with this is that people do not like to see others get everything that their heart desires. Our jealous little hearts do not enjoy seeing other people successful and happy when we are not. This leads to a denial of the mythical realm of happiness, because we see it as something that is not attainable. People are generally uninterested in the realm of the Woode. After all, it is not actually even a part of the real world. It is merely a figment of imagination. But there are times when imagination is the only thing that keeps us alive. And sometimes, though we hate to admit it, it is escaping into a world where everything is fantastic that actually keeps us from losing our minds. We are all Persephones, separated at birth from our great mother goddess and spirited away to a place full of vile, despicable things. We delight in filth, lust, and all sorts of terrible things, and forget the goodness that we knew in another life. So Demeter calls to us through Shakespeare, drawing us in with the bawdy and obscene that we love so much, and reconnects us to herself and the world that she has to offer us. Some say that embracing this realm makes us lunatics, but in reality it is only when we lose our minds and run into the arms of the goddess that we find ourselves truly sane.
