Puritanical ideals that took hold in the 17th century neutered the plays of the century before. These same ideals today are a hold-over from the Victorian Age where women didn't menstruate and surely their farts didn't stink (they were called vapours...). The Bard was writing to an audience that lived daily up to their ankles in human and animal excrement. To say that he was writing as a Dickens or a Thackeray is akin to claiming that Rushdie is writing in the style of Sheherazhade or Mohammed. Chaucer is all about the dirty and it's a shame that we shield our best and brightest minds from the pithiest and funniest lines ever written in the English Language. "Beard" means what it means, a dirty joke, no more, no less. (Awfully funny, to boot, seeing as it is over 400 years old).

Speaking of menstruation, Twelfth Night contains what may be Shakespeare's only reference to it when Olivia tells Viola in I, v: "'Tis not that time of moon with me to make one in so skipping a dialogue."

Well dragged Sirra! It's too funny that most folk just don't get it.

So you, like Rosenbaum, think that Viola is wishing to grow pubic hair? Isn't she a grown woman?

Please explain.

It's a joke about pussy, you pussy. Read Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" l.3730 Although he does spell "beard" as "berd".

So she wants a pussy to grow somewhere other than her chin? That doesn't make much sense either.

There are much more obvious explanations, but I guess if you're convinced that the line HAS to be dirty, you'll believe anything.

I wish you wouldn't mince words, Jake. If you wish to interpret Shakespeare's plays as all angel wings and tights, that's your prerogative. I think he was writing for his shit-spattered audience, you know, the groundlings? The very fact that his work can be interpreted in so many ways is the lasting beauty of it. Just my humble opinion.