Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include

Sexual Symbolism, Religious Language, and the Ambiguity of the Spirit: Associative Themes in Anglican Poetry and Philosophy.

Abstract by Ralph Norman (Canterbury University)quoting from a piece Alan wrote in The Spectator, 17th April, 1964 - a review of Patridge's SHAKESPEARE'S BAWDY. (grateful thanks to Ralph Norman for providing a pre-editorial draft-version of his article.)

Unfortunately, one euphemism Partridge should have included with these is missing from the original list as published in the first (1947) and second (1955) editions of Shakespeare’s Bawdy. These early editions of Partridge’s book drew the following critical remarks from Alan Brien in The Spectator on the 17th April, 1964, pointing out the missing medical – and theological – euphemism:

Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include the meaning. Yet the evidence for claiming that it carried this extra sense in Elizabethan times (compare “spunk” today) is undeniable … I see that Leslie Fiedler, in a volume published in 1962, makes the same point. This gives edge and bite to the famous “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action”, especially if “waste” can also be read as “waist”.
And I have a clinching quotation to help Mr Fiedler along – in Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), he writes, “It hath been observed by the ancients that much use of Venus doth dim the sight … The cause of dimness of sight is the expense of spirits.”

The reference to Shakespeare – ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – is, of course, to Sonnet 129, ll. 1-2; the reference to the critical scholarship – to Fiedler and his remarks on dirty puns and double entendre – is to The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. To put his omission right, Partridge included an extract from Brien’s article – spelling Fiedler’s name (alas!) incorrectly – in the subsequent, third (1968) edition of his book. But in the quoted article from The Spectator, Brien had neglected to state that, before Fiedler, Patrick Cruttwell had already noted the connection of ‘spirit’ and ‘sperm’.