BERNARD KATZ
Recently AR published an essay of mine titled “Was God a Dirty Old Man?” According to the Bible, he certainly was. If you read the Bible objectively—and not selectively—you’ll soon see that there is much that is unworthy of a so-called omnipotent and loving deity. For you’ll discover flaws, errors, contradictions, debaucheries, atrocities, (holocausts), absurdities and obscenities galore. Why, there’s more than enough of this evidence to turn even a hardcore fundamentalist into a secular humanist!
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616—the same time that the King James translation was made, making that version its greatest translation. As you know, Shakespeare is considered the greatest of all playwrights. The enduring appeal of his plays recognizes the complexity of moral questions and, as one scholar put it, “in unparalleled richness of his language.”
It may be “richness of language to him”—but an objective reading shows it to be downright pornographic, down-to-earth, raw street language that any uncouth person could easily use and understand. After all, Shakespeare wrote mostly for the low-class whorehouse crowd, not the educated middle and upper-classes.
But the greatest English translation of the Bible, the King James Version of 1611, was bowdlerized—its uncultured raw words were perfumed by a group of very talented churchmen. When James Vl of Scotland became king of England in 1603, there were two competing Bibles: the Bishop’s Bible, preferred by the church authorities, and the Geneva Bible, the favorite of the people. But James ordered a new translation that all must use, so he appointed fifty-four learned men to do the work. The translation was published in 1611 and its final revision differed from the original in over four hundred places. After forty years it replaced the Geneva Bible in the affection of the people. But it was so bowdlerized that readers were convinced that God never used the bawdy language of the whorehouse crowd of rowdies that attended Shakespeare’s plays!
To demonstrate that, like the god of the Bible, Shakespeare was also “a dirty old man,” I’m going to quote a chapter from Dr. Pauline Kiernan’s book, “Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns.” But first a brief description of her work.
Celebrating the Bard in all his bawdy glory, hers is a hilarious and insightful look into the down-and-dirty sexual puns lurking in Shakespeare’s body of work. London’s Elizabethan theaters were in the seedy part of town, close to whorehouses but never far from puritanical scum. In that climate, Shakespeare became a master of the double entendre, crafting lines and scenes that unfolded in a variety of meanings—the wickedly funny, the suggestively erotic, and even hitting hard at corrupt politicians and clerics. From the Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest and King Lear, the plays and poems pulsate with puns on body parts and what they do, and reveal shocking meanings beneath the brilliant codes.
Shakespeare’s genius lies in his matchless understanding of the human condition, but for centuries we’ve been deprived of his most brilliant dramatic devices. Finally, acclaimed Shake-spearean scholar Pauline Kiernan unlocks the meaning behind the coded words. Her book “Filthy Shakespeare,” presents more than seventy examples of the Bard at his raunchiest, with each passage translated into modern English and the hidden meanings of the original words explained. A fascinating introduction shows how Shakespeare’s amazing range of word play had its roots in the social and political reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
What follows is one of her chapters so that you can recognize that Shakespeare, like the God of the Bible, is “a dirty old man.” Since the plot is about homosexuality, please read about David’s relationship with King Saul and Jonathon. Along with the many warnings and commands against being gay, the Bible actually cites instances in which major biblical figures engaged in activities that are homosexual in nature. For instance, in 2 Samuel 1:26, David says, “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”
And Paul told his followers to greet one another with a holy kiss in Romans 16:16, 2 Corinthians 13:12, l Thessalonians 5:26, and Peter 5:14. To say that these verses are ambi-guous regarding physical love and cannot be really used to substantiate strong biblical support for homosexuality is quite misleading. In fact, what is now called the “kiss of charity” was originally known as the “holy kiss.” In the early church, it actually became a rite practiced so widely, that St. Augustine (4th CE) had to tell the women to war “clean linen” to these all-night sexual orgies so as to increase their “religious zeal”!
Here is a chapter from Kiernan’s book:
CORIOL-ANUS
CORIOLANUS
Act 4, Scene 5
Coriolanus offers an astonishingly potent mix of violence and male homoeroticism. In performance, the exchanges between Coriolanus and Aufidius pack such a powerful punch, they have an almost visceral impact on the audience.
When the two warriors, Coriolanus and Aufidius, meet in-one-to one combat, their wrestling resembles some frenzied sexual clasping of pleasure and pain. In a world dominated by military values, where blood shed in battle is worn as a mark of honor, even enemies can act like lovers—they need one another to reinforce an identity that is defined solely by their prowess on the battlefield. Aufidius’s speech here suggests an orgasmic outpouring of emotion for his enemy.
Aufidius
Let me twine
Mine arms about {thy} body…
I loved the maid I married…
But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold…and I have nightly since
Dreampt of encounters ‘twixt thyself and me’—
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat–
And waked half dead with nothing.
Aufidius
Let me coil my arms around your body.
I loved the maid I married, but when I see you here, see your impressive cock, my captivated heart dances more than when I first saw my wedded mistress astride my prick. Every night I’ve dreamt of erotic encounters between you and me. We’ve fucked each other in my sleep, unbuckling each other’s helmets, fisting each other’s throats, and woken up half dead from fucking.
Now here’s the meaning of the words that unlock the hidden meaning behind the coded words:
Noble thing. Impressive cock. {‘Thing’ is a pun on penis, and also on vagina}.
Threshold. Prick. {Pinning also on ‘thresh’ and ‘thrash’ in the sense of Fuck}.
Been down together. Fucked each other. {‘To down’ was also a pun meaning ‘to whore’}.
Nothing. Fucking. (As well as punning on female genitals (there is ‘nothing’, i.e. no penis, between a woman’s legs), ‘nothing’ often puns on musical ‘noting’ or ‘pricking’ of notes. ‘Nothing’ would have been pronounced more like ‘no-thing.” A ‘prick-song about fucking. ‘Notes’ also meant male genitals, and long and short notes referred to penis size.
Peter Hall’s production of Coriolanus at the National theater in 1984 brought out very strongly the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. So strongly, in fact, that theater-goers in the crush bar could be heard pronouncing the play’s title as ‘Coriol-anus’.
During Shakespeare’s time the theater acquired a reputation for homosexuality. One disapproving commentator wrote that a sodomite is someone who is ‘at every play and every night sups with his ingles’ (an ‘ingle’ was the young passive partner in a homosexual relationship). In Poetmaster (1601), a comedy by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, a father is appalled to learn that his son wants to be an actor: ” What”? Shall I have my son a stager now, an ingle for players?”
No doubt, after this presentation of evidence, I hope you’ll read both the Bible and Shakespeare quite differently—and conclude that both the God of the Bible and Shakespeare were “dirty old men!”