Crucially for Whitefriars puns, ‘words that gained their obscenity from adherence to one sexual organ are transferred to a mediatory position between the male and female body.
The sexual double entendre in such puns thus resonates with hetero- and homoerotic desire, blending female and male sexual organs. In a doubly transgressive manoeuvre, she undresses her female character (down to a crammable bit), but at the same moment, she also renders her femaleness into maleness, admitting to ownership of a rare, and phallic, bit.
Pen is/has/boasts of two bits, self-lovingly stacked. The gendered ambiguity of her response (‘I am myself a rare bit’), could be explained as a cross-dressing pun. On a physical level, Peg has a phallic bit, since ‘she’ is played by a boy actor. But ‘bit’ was a pun applicable to the genitalia of both genders. When a boy actor, dressed as a young woman, puns on ‘her’ beloved’s sexual organs, may he not also reference his own equipment? When Peg in the Whitefriar’s play Cupid’s Whirligig announces, ‘I am of my selfe a rare bit’, in response to her friend Nan’s kindly remark that Peg needs some ‘Cramming’, the character offers a double-edged pun on sexual genitalia.
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