Will was standard Elizabethan slang not only for penis but also for vagina, and both senses are played on in the sonnet.

 

"This night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honour' All's Well that Ends Well, Act 4, Sc.3, (The First Lord).

 

All commentators note or recognize this.To cite just a handful: Stephen Booth (1977) pp.466f.;Helen Vendler (1997 on no.136) p.574-5; Colin Burrow (2002) p.650.

Also Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye' (1986) p.293

The more I think about this, the more I become certain that Messrs et Madame Rowse, Booth, Velen, Burrow and Fineman have sadly failed to apprehend the real sense of this line, and, instead, eagerly injected their own wilful readings into Will's words. That is, where they are not simply playing follow-my-leader, as is the cautious scholar's wont. What other multiple evidence is there in Elizabethan texts for a specifically genital reading of "will"?

 

When Byron says that

 

... we'll go no more a-roving .....
For the sword outwears its sheath,

are we to assume that "sword" was widely recognized Georgian slang for penis ?

 

The most famous soliloquy in Northern literature is usually interpreted as solely a meditation on suicide. However, also present in Hamlet's troubled mind are thoughts of revenge by murder, as well as his sense of sexual frustration and/or disgust. Is the passage

 

When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

 

(or botkin, to adopt Kinbote's improved spelling, p 175) supposed to signal to us that "bodkin" was also common Elizabethan slang for "penis" ? The answer would be

 

........... a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.

 

Jury out on this one.

 

Charles