Romeo and Juliet Steaminess Rating

R for sex, sexual language, brief nudity, and bawdy jokes

There’s very little in Romeo and Juliet that can’t be interpreted as some kind of dirty joke. Even the most serious moments in the play have sexual puns lurking under the surface. Here’s a guide to some of the play’s bawdy bits (the Elizabethan term for dirty jokes). It’s not definitive, since that would mean reprinting most of the play, so here are two rules you should follow when looking for the sexual parts of Romeo and Juliet:

1. If it seems like a line might be a sex joke, it’s probably a sex joke.
2. If it seems like there’s no way a line could be a sex joke, there’s still a high probability that it’s a sex joke.

Some general guidelines:

• Watch out for references to death. In Elizabethan slang, "to die" means to have an orgasm. (Compare to the French slang for orgasm, "la petite mort," the little death.)
• Any reference to weapon/sword/dagger/tool/arrow/shaft/thrust can be interpreted not just in the literal sense (all the men in the play do carry swords) but also as a reference to their metaphorical "swords." This should become clear pretty early in the play, when Sampson says, "My naked weapon is out" (1.1.34). Also, any reference to Cupid’s shafts in particular is not just talking about the naked baby’s cute little arrows.
• "To stand" is used as a metaphor for having an erection.
• References to falling, sinking, or bearing burdens are all supposed to conjure the image of women with men lying on top of them. (Or, occasionally, men with adventurous women on top of them.)

A sampling of dirty jokes in the play:

• The opening pages of the play are basically one long dirty joke. Two Capulets are talking about "thrusting" Montague women to the wall. Gregory boasts about his "naked weapon" and describes how he will use his "sword" to "cut off" the "maid’s heads" or "maidenheads" (their virginity).
• In 1.3, the Nurse’s long story is about one of those moments when a small child accidentally says something really dirty. In this case, toddler Juliet had fallen on her face and gotten a big bump on her head. To comfort her, the Nurse’s husband picked her up and asked her, "Fall’st upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age" (1.3.60-61). Juliet, not knowing what he meant, stopped crying and said, "Ay!" (Yes.) The toddler just agreed that when she got older, she would fall backward with a man on top of her, rather than on her face. The Nurse thinks this is just hilarious.
• Lady Capulet also gets her moment of dirtiness in 1.3, but it’s more subtle. When she is describing how great Paris is to Juliet, she starts using these really bizarre metaphors:
  
  The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
  For fair without the fair within to hide:
  That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,
  That in gold clasps locks in the golden story;
  So shall you share all that he doth possess,
  By having him, making yourself no less. (1.3.95-100)These don’t really make sense– unless you assume that Lady Capulet is trying, very awkwardly, to talk to her thirteen-year-old daughter about sex. Rather than using the birds and the bees, though, she’s talking about "the fish" and how it lives "in the sea." Then she starts talking about a "book" with "gold clasps" and a "golden story" inside.
• Almost everything Mercutio says is dirty. He and Romeo have an epic back-and-forth in 1.4 that involves cupid’s shafts, sinking underneath the burden of love, and Mercutio’s command, "If love be rough with you, be rough with love / prick love for pricking and you beat love down" (1.4. 27-28).
• Even Juliet has her moments. In the balcony scene, as she’s talking to herself about how amazing Romeo is, she’s not just thinking about his dreamy eyes and great personality. "Tis but thy name that is my enemy," she argues to herself. "Thou art thyself, though not a Montague./ What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm nor face, nor [pause, grin] any other part belonging to a man" (2.2.41-45). In the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, Claire Danes does a great reading of this line.