All Fours

Download or read book A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature written by Gordon Williams and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2001-09-13 with total page 1650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.