Is Romeo and Juliet #NSFW? - reflections on two lines

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In Hainan Dao, where we set our scene,

We watch, students and I, the famous play.

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It was hot evening in September or October, ten years ago. There was no AC in the classroom, and the ceiling fans added to the noise: outside there were cicadas -- not too bad, giving local colour -- but the real drag was the bounce of basketballs, echoing up from the quad below. Every minute or two a student would jump to their feet and rush to the back of the room, or the corridor, to take an urgent call. Through all this I watched the play, Baz Luhrmann's film version. I had watched it many times, showing it to different groups in different universities in China, and each time I noticed something new.

This time it was these lines, spoken by Friar Lawrence to distraught and frantic Romeo, when Romeo comes to him in his cell after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt.

Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed.
Ascend her chamber. Hence and comfort her.
III-iii-146-7

And it seemed to me that there was a redundacy here, and also a temporal irregularity. Her chamber is her bedroom, and I thought that actually Romeo should be going to her room before he went to her. Another signal is that "going to her" and "ascending her chamber" say, on the surface the same thing.

"There's a double meaning in that!" I thought with glee, like another deluded fool.

Perhaps you're already with me, but first let me put forward a different kind of actor who might speak these lines. Here they are delivered at face value, but what if Frankie Howard was playing the priest? Too young to remember Frankie Howard? Then what about Graham Norton? If Frankie or Graham Norton spoke these lines I can imagine them shovelling on the innuendo.

Ascend her chamber. Yes, missus. titter not.

Or another actor, who could pull off a shutter:

Hence and c-c-c-c-c-comfort her.

There's a similar joke in Henry VI, part 1

And, for myself, most part of all this night,
Within her quarter and mine own precinct
I was employ'd in passing to and fro,
About relieving of the sentinels:

There's another important consequence of thinking of Frankie Howard as a Shakesperian h'actor, but for now just this one point: Is Romeo and Juliet a romantic tragedy, or a sex comedy, albeit one with a huge sting in its tail? Romeo and Juliet is an important play, a text, and I'm not for one minute trying to suggest that it is only a sex comedy, but equally it is not only a romantic tragedy. Shakespeare's audiences would not have needed a glossary to decipher all the old words, and so would have been awake to all the jokes and innuendo, and their attentions so focused, as are ours on the romance and tragedy, would not have noticed:

It is the east, andJuliet is the sun.

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A few years later I was giving another class to another group of students, also in China. I was unpacking some of the meaning from Romeo's famous lines at the beginning of the Balcony scene:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she:
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green
And none but fools do wear it; cast it off.

And these lines are so beautiful, so romantic!

The students were full of attention, but slowly their faces fell. Then I reached the lines

Be not her maid ...
Her vestal livery ...
... cast if off.

"So basically, he's looking into Juliet's bedroom, wishing her to take off her clothes and stop being a virgin."

"Just another guy!" said one girl in disgust, her romantic illusions shattered.

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Thank you for reading.