Pauline Kiernan’s Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (Quercus, £12.99) is a work of scholarship dressed up, with brilliant design, as titillation. It is as if a lady professor were to arrive on the lecture platform in a shocking pink bikini. Kiernan is a pukka scholar: a first in English and doctorate in Shakespeare at Oxford, fellowships and lectureships galore. In As You Like It, Duke Senior finds ‘sermons in stones’. Kiernan finds sex in more or less everything: her method might be called sexegesis. The section headings include ‘Pertaining to Cunnilingus’, ‘Pertaining to Dildos’, ‘Pertaining to Male Whore’ and ‘Pertaining to Wanking’. Not everybody will be convinced by all the salacities she discerns in Shakespeare’s language, but I hope she won’t misinterpret me if I say she makes a good fist of it.
The publishers Collins & Brown have reissued Good Housekeeping’s 1945 pamphlet, A War Bride’s Guide to the USA (£6.99). By the end of the second world war, over 100,000 British women had married American servicemen. A lot of what the pamphlet told them would still be helpful advice today (‘It is good American, when thanked for a real favour, to say “you’re welcome” ’), though I doubt that a modern bride would need to be warned not to be shocked if a tramp was called a ‘bum’.
Three writers have ventured into verse — Charlie Ottley in Cautionary Verses and Ruthless Rhymes for Modern Times (Constable, £9.99); James Landale’s Cautionary Tales: Comic Verse for the 21st Century (Canongate, £7.99); and James Murden in The Cosmic Verses: A Rhyming History of the Universe (Michael O’Mara Books, £9.99). The first two writers clearly had the same idea, of giving us a load of Bellocs. Not surprisingly, they have both dreamed up a character called James, addicted to, and rhyming with computer games; and each also has an odious little girl who jabbers ceaselessly into her mobile. Landale: ‘Gloria Bone was Apt to Drone/ All day upon her Mobile Phone …’ Ottley’s Sally is most satisfyingly blown up when she forgets to turn off her mobile near a petrol pump:
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