Are there any examples of crude, toilet type humour in the work of great writers like Shakespeare,Chaucer etc?

Answer 1

Oh my God, YES!
Both Shakespeare and Chaucer were horrible about it AND famous for it.
Most even too nasty to explain on here.
And too numerous to list.
A lot of it was done in Elizabethan jargon and making puns on words, therefore making it difficult to catch for the average reader.
Shakespeare....Henry IV III, iii, 93-95
Flalstaff speaking of his missing "copper ring"....think your backside.
Antony and Cleopatra I, ii,56-59
'Not in my husband's "nose"'. (It's not that particular appendage he's talking about here.)
My personal favorite is found in Taming of the Shrew. II, i 213-223
"What with my tongue in your taile..."

As for Chaucer......The Wife of Bath's Tale.

Answer 2

Tonnes!

Chaucer invented the crude-dig type of written humor (though the slams were often a bit-backhanded) and Shakespeare brought it into the modern world.

Answer 3

A new book on Shakespeare's sexual puns is about to be published -- apparently every single one of Iago's lines in Othello contains a sexual double entendre (Kiernan).

As for crude toilet humour, there's Jacques in As You Like It, whose name would have been pronounced "jakes," Elizabethan slang for a toilet. Falstaff, in Henry IV 1 & 2, has a fine line in bodily humour, mostly relating to his own digestive system (he is, in modern terms, obese). These are just two famous examples.

Many of the comedies - and indeed, of the histories and tragedies - are full of savage and insightful humour about human beings' relationships to their sexual, digestive, diseased bodies. Some of it is very specific to Shakespeare's day and age (although jokes about syphilis may become contemporary again, given the statistics on STIs in the US & UK) and some is - or can be made, by a good production - relevant and very funny.

As for Chaucer, the current stage production of The Canterbury Tales by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London as been reviewed as bawdy and filthy. Many of Chaucer's characters live closely with their bodies, and others' bodies, particularly the wonderful Wife of Bath. He will often use metaphors that draw on the medieval understanding of digestion, disease and sexual reproduction, and this will sit happily side-by-side with learned religious discourses.

In fact, many medieval Christian writers use bodily metaphors, such as lactation, ejaculation, weeping and orgasmic sexual intercourse, to imagine or describe the soul's congress with Jesus.

Toilet humour is not necessarily "crude." It puts us in tune with our existence as physical bodies enduring or enjoying universal processes, connects us to other species dwelling on the planet and reminds us of life's essentials. It is possible to laugh at bawdy humour without there being the titillation of Victorian prudery -- which, incidentally, cut away many of the "indecent" lines in Shakespeare, giving rise to the term "bowdlerised" from a Mr. Thomas Bowdler who "edited" the plays for polite consumption.

Answer 4

I feel as though Chaucer's bawdiest tale is The Miller's Tale. Just read it, especially towards the end. (literal butt kissing ensues)

And just a tid bit of info, when crude language is utilized in texts such as shakespeare and Chaucer its referred to as being scatological -- a fancy way of saying 'toilet humor'

Answer 5

OMG!
it's full of it!
Chaucer is a little more difficult to grasp, because it's all written in middle-english, but Bill the Bard?
One of the bawdiest characters in english lit is the nurse from Romeo and Juliet -and that play is supposed to be a tragedy - you need to hear/see the plays rather than read them from the printed page.

Answer 6

Oh goodness... i might say my flaw is aside of my capability. As i've got suggested in the previous, I easily tend to get wordy and it may weigh down my sentences yet on the alternative, words additionally are my capability. I easily have a complicated vocabulary for many young ones my age. 0.5 the time my pals have no thought what i'm conversing approximately. i like great words and can p.c.. up a meaning somewhat rapidly with context clues. My distinctiveness is describing. i'm able to construct precise photos for my readers and in spite of the undeniable fact that i do no longer take gently to flaunting my strengths, i detect i'm quite darn stable with my descriptions. particular, i'm going to get a tad wordy at situations yet with a splash tweak right here and there, it somewhat is an extremely tricky scene. i like portray photos with words and coming up a place that isn't exist on earth. human beings many times grow to be aggravated with long descriptions yet I feed from them. In my own artwork, i attempt to decrease myself to dodge that drag-on description. All in all, words are my capability and weak spot. :) it somewhat is what you get for making the dictionary a secondary bible.

Answer 7

As far as I remember, there is a line in Chaucer: "privily he caught her by the cunte", which is usually rendered as "quim" in most recent translations. As for Shakespeare, who can forget "the beast with two backs"?

Answer 8

Absolutely! Shakespeare liked to throw in the odd scene to amuse the working class - the Porter's Scene in Macbeth is a classic - drunken porters discuss brewers droop!

Answer 9

I'm sure in a film version of Macbeth I saw at school (in 1990 or so), some kind of Gate Keeper made reference to a party the night before 'getting him in the mood' but the the alcohol meaning he couldn't perform???

Answer 10

In King Lear, Edgar is disguised as a poor, homeless tramp called Poor Tom. Lear's Fool says it's a good thing he's wearing a blanket "lest we all be shamed."

The Fool makes an arcane reference to sex earlier in Lear when he says: "Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill."