Pooh! Some N. Americans, maybe. How soon you forget! Last time
you launched this, I waded right in, and even raised the stakes.
Of course, you "forget" because I reject your "aristocratic"
characterization. But I'm an old American, raised among prudish
country folk and as middleclass and Middlewest as can be-- and
I have always felt, intuited, before I had either the verbal
or physiological knowledge with which to decode it, that Shakespeare's
every other thought was a naughty one. I got Partridge's bawdry
book out of the library as a young teen and confirmed my nasty-minded
suspicions.
I've always supposed that, like me, WS was precocious sexually
as well as poetically, and that like me he learned to read without
being schooled and memorized and wrote poetry long before he
ever met another soul who wrote anything more ambitious than
an itemized laundry bill. Certainly I had the impression when
very young that old Will and I were the only two who ever gave
rein to our dirty animal witty impish imaginations, and that
it was a miracle that no one seemed to understand what we were
thinking. Country matters are most easily explored when there
are no armies of servants keeping their eyes on you, no solemn
duties to be done-- but groves and barns are not without hazard.
Like me, Will married young-- how else? When lust leads, a jackass
can look like a god.
I've had no success with dirty talk on hlas, either, Paul.
I offered chapter and verse on homoeroticism in the plays that
echoed the sonnets', expressed my belief that as a youngster
WS was romantically involved with an older man named Antonio,
(and a Helena and at least one Anne) and averred that everyone
who is well acquainted with lust recognizes that in action it
can be polymorphous, and often perverse. I got cold silence
and some small chiding for my extravagances. I don't think your
aristocratic approach to the WS private parts will be any more
pursuasive than my earthy one. But once more into the breach,
Paul! (4/15/02)
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