In the sixteenth century there was a religious-erotic cult in Europe whose members were called Loïstes. Their rituals were marked by sexual orgies and erotic aberrations.
The corpus of Shakespearean plays contains numberless allusions and comments on sexual and amatory topics. The language, however, in which these references are couched is sometimes figurative, euphemistic, and seemingly innocuous and ingenuous. Sometimes, again, they are so expressed in the contemporary Elizabethan idiom as to have an immediate and illuminating impact on the contemporary audience: but, on a cursory perusal, the context may not spontaneously reveal the underlying currency.
There is, throughout the plays, mention of the functional processes and their media, of the organs of the human body, including what are usually termed pudenda. Shakespeare touches on the normal sexual functions and also on deviations, on tribadism and coprophilia, on lust and cuckoldry, on adultery and eunuchs, on all manner of erotic encounters, embraces, and circumstances.
In Troilus and Cressida, to take an example, lust, libido, and potency are illustrated:
Cressida: They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform: vowing more than the performance of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?
Act 3.2
Again:
Troilus: This is the monstrosity of love, lady—that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.
Act 3.2