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Shakespeare, Sex, and Love
Here is a lively look at how Shakespeare's treatment of human sexuality in his plays and poems relates to the sexual conventions, sexual mores, and actual sexual behaviors of his day. Pre-eminent Shakespeare critic Stanley Wells draws on historical and anecdotal sources to present an illuminating account of sexual behavior--and its consequences--in Shakespeare's time, particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Shakespeare's Stratford was a hotbed of small-town gossip; the town's records reveal many cases of slander involving accusations of cuckoldry and whoredom, as well as many prosecutions for fornication, sexual "incontinence," and adultery. Wells thoroughly explores this milieu, demonstrating what we know or can deduce of the sex lives of Shakespeare and members of his family and providing a fascinating account of depictions of sexuality in the poetry of the period. Wells even points to specific recorded events that find their way into lines and subplots in the plays. In the second half of the book, Wells goes on to explore the variety of ways in which Shakespeare treats sexuality in his plays and how he relates sexuality to love. Chapters cover everything from the fun that Shakespeare gets out of sex in his comedies; to the ways he relates sexual desire to both lust and love; to sexual jealousy in four major plays; and to Romeo and Juliet as the play in which Shakespeare focuses most centrally on issues relating to sex, love, and the relationship between them. "Whores and Saints" looks at his portrayals of the extremes of womanhood, and a final chapter, "Just Good Friends," investigates his depiction of same-gender relationships. Whether as a source of comedy, drama, debate, or passion, sex in Shakespeare's plays and poems is always intriguing, and there is no better guide to this subject than Stanley Wells.
295 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 8, 2010
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About the author
Stanley Wells
191 books47 followersStanley William Wells, CBE, is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 1, 2011
Review to come. Review has come:
For the last few months I’ve been streaming the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows” from my Netflix queue. It recounts the lives and loves of a Shakespearean Theater Company in Canada (naturally), and it’s at its best when it manages to incorporate Shakespeare’s plays into the storyline. Beyond the natural association of a Bard-related TV show and the book under review, Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare, Sex, & Love also reminds me of my favorite scene, which is from the 1st season, when the company is putting on “Hamlet.” Geoffrey, the artistic director, has been forced to moderate one of those turgid corporate seminars on the business acumen of literary figures, in this case Claudius. He’s standing up before a room of bored office drones and asks if they really think that they can learn anything useful about being better salespeople from looking at how Claudius deals with Hamlet, and a lonely voice at the back of the room says, “No.” “Good,” says Geoffrey, shoving the podium aside, “let’s fuck with some texts.”
And that’s exactly what Wells asks us to do in this short look at Shakespeare’s use of sexuality, lust, jealousy and love (both spiritual and carnal) in his works. The first part of the book (chapters 1-3) looks at Shakespeare’s social milieu (what was acceptable sexual behavior and what people actually did) and indulges in some speculation about his personal life; the second, and larger, part (chapters 4-10) looks at sex and love as Shakespeare wrote about it in his plays and poetry. Well’s final remarks neatly summarize his conclusions:
In Elizabethan/Jacobean England, sex outside of a marriage was illegal. Prostitution was illegal. Sodomy – which covered a lot of ground, including homosexuality – was illegal. But, of course, there was sex outside of marriage (Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne produced a child within six months of the nuptials), brothels flourished (Shakespeare’s collaborator on “Pericles,” George Wilkins ran one), and sodomy was frequently practiced (the Earl of Southampton had a houseful of pages with whom he dallied, and the Earl of Oxford is reported to have boasted that “he would often tell my lord Harry, myself, and Southwell that he had abused a mare”). Indeed, Wells refers to arguments suggesting that there was a community of young (and not-so-young) nobility who demanded homoerotic literature willingly supplied by authors such as Marlowe, Richard Barnfield and Michael Drayton, as well as Shakespeare. (Wells tries to set Shakespeare apart from this circle to some extent by noting that he was equally at ease writing heteroerotic verses and scenes and writes, “So perhaps we can say that Shakespeare succeeds in writing verse which, like that of the contemporaries I have been discussing, can certainly appeal to a homoerotic readership but which transcends the boundaries of subdivisions of human experience to encapsulate the very essence of human love.”)
Writers could be quite explicit. Thomas Nashe, for example, describes a young man’s nearly disastrous visit to a brothel:
These verses would never be published; rather they would be passed around like the samizdat of the Soviet era. The respectable stuff presented (heterosexual) love in an idealized manner modeled along the lines laid down by Petrarch.
As with all talented subversives, though, Shakespeare manages to get pieces by the censors, as in Sonnet 151, describing an erection:
And John Donne gets away with it by making the lover God Himself:
The point of all this is to show that while the official line was Puritanical, reality tolerated a wide breadth of sexual and sexualized expression. Which is not to say that the courts weren’t clogged with cases related to sexual offenses – they were – but the punishments were often light and only rarely fell upon the powerful (unless they had annoyed someone even moreso).
Chapter 3 offers what we know about Shakespeare and his domestic life – vanishingly little. He appears to have been sexually precocious. For the 60-year period from 1570 to 1630 recording marriages in Stratford, Shakespeare is one of only 3 who married before the age of 20. The average age (for both men and women interestingly enough) was 24. There’s also nothing particularly odd about the small size of his family; it could easily be explained by Anne having suffered some injury giving birth to the twins, Hamnet and Judith (note 1). And, though circumstantial, it’s unlikely that he was a faithful husband as a story found in the journal of John Manningham makes clear:
Wells also mentions William Davenant, the self-described bastard of the Bard, and the possibility that Shakespeare suffered from syphilis (or some other STD). Wells leans toward disregarding both. (Though he’s not explicit one way or the other, Wells is clear that all of this is speculation and, barring a truly groundbreaking discovery, forever unresolved.)
For Wells, what can be said – at most – regarding Shakespeare and his personal life is that he was a man betrayed by its turbulence as evidenced by Sonnet 129:
Wells isn’t sanguine about unearthing much of Shakespeare’s biography in his plays but he is more amenable to finding evidence in the sonnets for four reasons: (1) The sonnets, though written in the 1590s, were not published until 1609, and then in a probably unauthorized version. (2) Though the conclusion is subjective, Wells feels that the extreme anguish found in many rings true. Contrived anguish would not be beyond a man who wrote a character like Othello but combined with point (1) suggests a personal investment. (3) There are hints of a love triangle between Shakespeare, another man named Will and an unnamed woman. And (4) the collection is original and genre bending, breaking decisively with the Petrarchan model to explore not just idealized love but love (and lust) in all of its manifestations.
The final chapters look at Shakespeare’s works, primarily the plays. Chapter Four, “The Fun of Sex,” looks at Shakespeare’s comedic use of sexuality. As the Bard developed as a playwright he became more complex and, one might say, darker, more cynical even, in his outlook but in his earliest works he enjoyed bawdy badinage and played up many a situation for laughs. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, however, even his bawdy often served a dramatic purpose. Take for example this exchange between Kate and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew:
Aside from the comedy as these two spar with each other, the audience (or the reader) sees a developing relationship and attraction between them.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare develops four types of relationships. First, there’s that of Silvius and Phoebe, straight out of classic Renaissance pastorals. Then there is that of Touchstone and Audrey, two commoners whose affair illustrates basic carnal desire. The third relationship is between Celia and Oliver. It too must find a physical expression but is also more enduring and on a higher plane than Touchstone’s almost bestial lust. The final relationship, that between Rosalind (disguised as the boy Ganymede) and Orlando, is problematic and plays up the ambiguities of love and pushes the envelop as to how far a male-male relationship could go on the public stage.
In these and other plays, Shakespeare creates dramatic, though farcical, situations that emphasized their absurdity. Wells argues that as he matured, Shakespeare continued to milk sex for its humor but that the humor became darker and its presence less.
The next chapter takes us into the realm of “sexual desire,” and how one makes the distinction between love and lust:
Titus Andronicus depicts a situation of lust unalloyed with love of any sort; even the love of Bassianus and Lavinia seems oddly superficial. In later plays, “Shakespeare wrestles more creatively with human problems created by tensions between … raw sexual desire that seeks satisfaction only in the moment of gratification … and … sex as a natural and fruitful realization of virtuous and God-given desires which can find their fulfillment within a tenderly loving relationship….” (p. 122) (Note 2) Two examples of this are Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. In both of these plays, sexual desire and love are present in the relationships, and their propriety is examined. I will be honest and say that, not being a fan of the comedies, I hadn’t read these plays (a lack that will be remedied), and it was eye opening to read about the decidedly odd nature of the protagonists’ loves, particularly in AWTEW, where Helena entraps Bertram into marriage. Considering the circumstances and Bertram’s attitude, I can’t imagine that the final scene’s happy ending can last.
Wells argues here that for Shakespeare “sexual desire” is dangerous and must be controlled. Though an integral part of real love, desire is not its end, and if there is no more than desire than the sexual act is no more than rape.
Wells devotes an entire chapter to Romeo and Juliet because of its iconic status as love story. He opens his discussion by pointing out the sexually charged and violent nature of the opening scene dialog when two of Capulet’s servants enter:
And then there is Mercutio, who along with the Nurse, represents a very pragmatic view of love, and – in his case – a very cynical and violent one. A reader of the play would not be amiss if they wished to interpret his relationship to Romeo in a homoerotic light. At the very least, it expresses a desire to keep the girls out of the tree house and the fear of losing touch with close friends.
But Shakespeare takes Romeo and Juliet’s relationship to a higher level of commitment, leaving behind the practicality and cynicism of Mercutio and the Nurse.
Wells doesn’t bring this up but upon rereading the play, I came across a further example of Shakespeare’s wrestling with the ambiguities of love. It takes place in Act 4, Scene 1, when Juliet is despairing because she’s to marry Paris:
It’s in the ninth and tenth lines that Juliet – a very mature 13-year-old – acknowledges that even her undying love for Romeo may be betrayed by a traitorous heart.
If RJ is an example of a mature playwright struggling with all the complexities of desire and love, then his conclusion is “an elegy for wedded love, a condition in which sex … is subsumed in celebration of a spiritual as well as physical unity.” (p. 167)
From the pure, if ill fated, love of Romeo and Juliet, Wells next tackles sexual jealousy and though he glances at Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida and The Winter’s Tale, the center of his attention is, not surprisingly, Othello. Like RJ, the play opens with brutal images of sexuality as Roderigo and Iago badger Brabantio with images of the black ram mounting his white ewe and the beast with two backs. But then the audience hears Othello and Desdemona describe their love before the Venetian senate in terms that mirror Romeo’s descriptions of his love for Juliet – acknowledging a physical desire for each other but incorporating it in a fuller relationship.
Wells also points out that, unlike the jealousy of MAAN or TWT, Shakespeare brilliantly follows Othello’s descent into madness and self-destruction. And, overall, this series of plays shows Shakespeare’s growing confidence in depicting (potentially) corrosive passion.
Chapter 8, “Sex and Experience,” is the least persuasive of the book. Wells seems to be stretching his central argument to include Hamlet and King Lear but he does provide an interesting discussion of Antony and Cleopatra, where he looks at an affair as equally star crossed as Romeo and Juliet’s but from the points of view of two mature and realistic people.
(review continued in comment section)
For the last few months I’ve been streaming the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows” from my Netflix queue. It recounts the lives and loves of a Shakespearean Theater Company in Canada (naturally), and it’s at its best when it manages to incorporate Shakespeare’s plays into the storyline. Beyond the natural association of a Bard-related TV show and the book under review, Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare, Sex, & Love also reminds me of my favorite scene, which is from the 1st season, when the company is putting on “Hamlet.” Geoffrey, the artistic director, has been forced to moderate one of those turgid corporate seminars on the business acumen of literary figures, in this case Claudius. He’s standing up before a room of bored office drones and asks if they really think that they can learn anything useful about being better salespeople from looking at how Claudius deals with Hamlet, and a lonely voice at the back of the room says, “No.” “Good,” says Geoffrey, shoving the podium aside, “let’s fuck with some texts.”
And that’s exactly what Wells asks us to do in this short look at Shakespeare’s use of sexuality, lust, jealousy and love (both spiritual and carnal) in his works. The first part of the book (chapters 1-3) looks at Shakespeare’s social milieu (what was acceptable sexual behavior and what people actually did) and indulges in some speculation about his personal life; the second, and larger, part (chapters 4-10) looks at sex and love as Shakespeare wrote about it in his plays and poetry. Well’s final remarks neatly summarize his conclusions:
“(Shakespeare) saw sex as an instrument of relationships between people, and one that cannot…be divorced from love…. He knew of the dangers of mistaking animal desire for a higher passion, that the sexual instinct is one that may be misused, that it can lead to rape and murder, to a prostitution of all that is best in man. But he knew too that sex is an essential component of even the highest forms of human love, that it can lead to a sublime realization of the self in a near-mystical union of personalities….
Shakespeare gives us no easy answers, but he goes on helping us, if not to understand, at least to explore ourselves through his depiction of an amazing range of human sexual experience.” (pp. 250-51)
In Elizabethan/Jacobean England, sex outside of a marriage was illegal. Prostitution was illegal. Sodomy – which covered a lot of ground, including homosexuality – was illegal. But, of course, there was sex outside of marriage (Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne produced a child within six months of the nuptials), brothels flourished (Shakespeare’s collaborator on “Pericles,” George Wilkins ran one), and sodomy was frequently practiced (the Earl of Southampton had a houseful of pages with whom he dallied, and the Earl of Oxford is reported to have boasted that “he would often tell my lord Harry, myself, and Southwell that he had abused a mare”). Indeed, Wells refers to arguments suggesting that there was a community of young (and not-so-young) nobility who demanded homoerotic literature willingly supplied by authors such as Marlowe, Richard Barnfield and Michael Drayton, as well as Shakespeare. (Wells tries to set Shakespeare apart from this circle to some extent by noting that he was equally at ease writing heteroerotic verses and scenes and writes, “So perhaps we can say that Shakespeare succeeds in writing verse which, like that of the contemporaries I have been discussing, can certainly appeal to a homoerotic readership but which transcends the boundaries of subdivisions of human experience to encapsulate the very essence of human love.”)
Writers could be quite explicit. Thomas Nashe, for example, describes a young man’s nearly disastrous visit to a brothel:
“…limbs unwieldy for the fight,
That spend their strength in thought of her delight.
`What shall I do to show myself a man?
It will not be for aught that beauty can.
I kiss, I clap, I feel, I view at will,
Yet dead he lies not thinking good or ill.’
`Unhappy me,’ quote she, `and will’t not stand?
Come, let me rub and chafe it with my hand.
Perhaps the silly worm is laboured sore
And wearièd that it can do no more.’” (p. 45)
These verses would never be published; rather they would be passed around like the samizdat of the Soviet era. The respectable stuff presented (heterosexual) love in an idealized manner modeled along the lines laid down by Petrarch.
As with all talented subversives, though, Shakespeare manages to get pieces by the censors, as in Sonnet 151, describing an erection:
“My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,
But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her `love’ for whose dear love I rise and fall.
And John Donne gets away with it by making the lover God Himself:
“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town to’another due,
Labour to’admit you; but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthral me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
The point of all this is to show that while the official line was Puritanical, reality tolerated a wide breadth of sexual and sexualized expression. Which is not to say that the courts weren’t clogged with cases related to sexual offenses – they were – but the punishments were often light and only rarely fell upon the powerful (unless they had annoyed someone even moreso).
Chapter 3 offers what we know about Shakespeare and his domestic life – vanishingly little. He appears to have been sexually precocious. For the 60-year period from 1570 to 1630 recording marriages in Stratford, Shakespeare is one of only 3 who married before the age of 20. The average age (for both men and women interestingly enough) was 24. There’s also nothing particularly odd about the small size of his family; it could easily be explained by Anne having suffered some injury giving birth to the twins, Hamnet and Judith (note 1). And, though circumstantial, it’s unlikely that he was a faithful husband as a story found in the journal of John Manningham makes clear:
“Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.” (p. 71)
Wells also mentions William Davenant, the self-described bastard of the Bard, and the possibility that Shakespeare suffered from syphilis (or some other STD). Wells leans toward disregarding both. (Though he’s not explicit one way or the other, Wells is clear that all of this is speculation and, barring a truly groundbreaking discovery, forever unresolved.)
For Wells, what can be said – at most – regarding Shakespeare and his personal life is that he was a man betrayed by its turbulence as evidenced by Sonnet 129:
“The’expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”
Wells isn’t sanguine about unearthing much of Shakespeare’s biography in his plays but he is more amenable to finding evidence in the sonnets for four reasons: (1) The sonnets, though written in the 1590s, were not published until 1609, and then in a probably unauthorized version. (2) Though the conclusion is subjective, Wells feels that the extreme anguish found in many rings true. Contrived anguish would not be beyond a man who wrote a character like Othello but combined with point (1) suggests a personal investment. (3) There are hints of a love triangle between Shakespeare, another man named Will and an unnamed woman. And (4) the collection is original and genre bending, breaking decisively with the Petrarchan model to explore not just idealized love but love (and lust) in all of its manifestations.
The final chapters look at Shakespeare’s works, primarily the plays. Chapter Four, “The Fun of Sex,” looks at Shakespeare’s comedic use of sexuality. As the Bard developed as a playwright he became more complex and, one might say, darker, more cynical even, in his outlook but in his earliest works he enjoyed bawdy badinage and played up many a situation for laughs. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, however, even his bawdy often served a dramatic purpose. Take for example this exchange between Kate and Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew:
“PETRUCHIO: Good morrow, Kate; for that’s your name, I hear.
KATE: Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing:
They call me Katherine that do talk of me.
P: You lie in faith; for you are call’d plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation;
Hearing thy mildness praised in very town,
Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded,
Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs,
Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.
K: Moved! In good time: let him that moved you hither
Remove you hence; I knew you at the first
You were a moveable.
P: Why, what’s a moveable?
K: A join’d-stool.
P: Thou hast hit it: come, sit on me.
K: Asses are made to bear, and so are you.
P: Women are made to bear, and so are you.
K: No such jade as you, if me you mean.
P: Alas! Good Kate, I will not burden thee;
For, knowing thee to be but young and light –
K: Too light for such a swain as you to catch;
And yet as heavy as my weight should be.
P: Should be! Should – buzz!
K: Well ta’en, and like a buzzard.
P: O slow-wing’d turtle! Shall a buzzard take thee?
K: Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard.
P: Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry.
K: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
P: My remedy is then, to pluck it out.
K: Ay, if the fool cold find it where it lies.
P: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
K: In his tongue.
P: Whose tongue?
K: Yours, if you talk of tails: and so farewell.
P: What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay, come again,
Good Kate; I am a gentleman.” Act 2, Scene 1
Aside from the comedy as these two spar with each other, the audience (or the reader) sees a developing relationship and attraction between them.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare develops four types of relationships. First, there’s that of Silvius and Phoebe, straight out of classic Renaissance pastorals. Then there is that of Touchstone and Audrey, two commoners whose affair illustrates basic carnal desire. The third relationship is between Celia and Oliver. It too must find a physical expression but is also more enduring and on a higher plane than Touchstone’s almost bestial lust. The final relationship, that between Rosalind (disguised as the boy Ganymede) and Orlando, is problematic and plays up the ambiguities of love and pushes the envelop as to how far a male-male relationship could go on the public stage.
In these and other plays, Shakespeare creates dramatic, though farcical, situations that emphasized their absurdity. Wells argues that as he matured, Shakespeare continued to milk sex for its humor but that the humor became darker and its presence less.
The next chapter takes us into the realm of “sexual desire,” and how one makes the distinction between love and lust:
“Love comforteth, like sunshine after rain,
But lust’s effect is tempest after sun.
Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain;
Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not; lust like a glutton dies.
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.” Venus and Adonis
Titus Andronicus depicts a situation of lust unalloyed with love of any sort; even the love of Bassianus and Lavinia seems oddly superficial. In later plays, “Shakespeare wrestles more creatively with human problems created by tensions between … raw sexual desire that seeks satisfaction only in the moment of gratification … and … sex as a natural and fruitful realization of virtuous and God-given desires which can find their fulfillment within a tenderly loving relationship….” (p. 122) (Note 2) Two examples of this are Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. In both of these plays, sexual desire and love are present in the relationships, and their propriety is examined. I will be honest and say that, not being a fan of the comedies, I hadn’t read these plays (a lack that will be remedied), and it was eye opening to read about the decidedly odd nature of the protagonists’ loves, particularly in AWTEW, where Helena entraps Bertram into marriage. Considering the circumstances and Bertram’s attitude, I can’t imagine that the final scene’s happy ending can last.
Wells argues here that for Shakespeare “sexual desire” is dangerous and must be controlled. Though an integral part of real love, desire is not its end, and if there is no more than desire than the sexual act is no more than rape.
Wells devotes an entire chapter to Romeo and Juliet because of its iconic status as love story. He opens his discussion by pointing out the sexually charged and violent nature of the opening scene dialog when two of Capulet’s servants enter:
“SAMSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.
GREGORY: The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.
S: ‘Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids, and cut off their heads.
G: The heads of the maids?
S: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads; take it in what sense thou wilt.
G: They must take it in sense that feel it.
S: Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and tis know I am a pretty piece of flesh.” Act 1, Scene 1
And then there is Mercutio, who along with the Nurse, represents a very pragmatic view of love, and – in his case – a very cynical and violent one. A reader of the play would not be amiss if they wished to interpret his relationship to Romeo in a homoerotic light. At the very least, it expresses a desire to keep the girls out of the tree house and the fear of losing touch with close friends.
But Shakespeare takes Romeo and Juliet’s relationship to a higher level of commitment, leaving behind the practicality and cynicism of Mercutio and the Nurse.
Wells doesn’t bring this up but upon rereading the play, I came across a further example of Shakespeare’s wrestling with the ambiguities of love. It takes place in Act 4, Scene 1, when Juliet is despairing because she’s to marry Paris:
“Tell me not, friar, that thou hear’st of this,
Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it:
If, in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help,
Do thou but call my resolution wise,
And with this knife I’ll help it presently.
God join’d my heart and Romeo’s, thou our hands;
And ere this hand, by thee to Romeo seal’d,
Shall be the label to another deed,
Or my true heart with treacherous revolt
Turn to another, this shall slay them both:
Therefore, out of they long-experienced time,
Give me some present counsel, or, behold,
‘Twixt my extremes and me this bloody knife
Shall play umpire, arbitrating that
Which the commission of thy years and art
Could to no issue of true honor bring.”
It’s in the ninth and tenth lines that Juliet – a very mature 13-year-old – acknowledges that even her undying love for Romeo may be betrayed by a traitorous heart.
If RJ is an example of a mature playwright struggling with all the complexities of desire and love, then his conclusion is “an elegy for wedded love, a condition in which sex … is subsumed in celebration of a spiritual as well as physical unity.” (p. 167)
From the pure, if ill fated, love of Romeo and Juliet, Wells next tackles sexual jealousy and though he glances at Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida and The Winter’s Tale, the center of his attention is, not surprisingly, Othello. Like RJ, the play opens with brutal images of sexuality as Roderigo and Iago badger Brabantio with images of the black ram mounting his white ewe and the beast with two backs. But then the audience hears Othello and Desdemona describe their love before the Venetian senate in terms that mirror Romeo’s descriptions of his love for Juliet – acknowledging a physical desire for each other but incorporating it in a fuller relationship.
Wells also points out that, unlike the jealousy of MAAN or TWT, Shakespeare brilliantly follows Othello’s descent into madness and self-destruction. And, overall, this series of plays shows Shakespeare’s growing confidence in depicting (potentially) corrosive passion.
Chapter 8, “Sex and Experience,” is the least persuasive of the book. Wells seems to be stretching his central argument to include Hamlet and King Lear but he does provide an interesting discussion of Antony and Cleopatra, where he looks at an affair as equally star crossed as Romeo and Juliet’s but from the points of view of two mature and realistic people.
(review continued in comment section)
August 13, 2015
Note: All of these ratings are based on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best.
Quality of Writing: 5
This is a very academic sort of work, which naturally gives it a boost in this area. Now, I understand that because of the academic nature, other sources need to be cited. But this book seemed to have one too many citations of the plays it discussed - as though it basically summarized the plays instead of analyzing them. So that knocks it down a few pegs. Nothing in the writing is particularly amazing to bring it up anymore, so a five it is.
Pace: 5
This book is not a page-turner, simply because of the density of its topic. However, it is laid out very logically and mostly without overlap in the chapters. Usually, when I rate novels, I say something about "chronological order" with regard to pacing; "logical layout" is the equivalent with nonfiction, and Wells does a decent job of it.
Plot Development: 5
For nonfiction, "plot development" translates as "argument layout." What this book lacked was a central argument. There was a premise, a sort of interconnected discovery adventure, but to no eventual end, making it difficult to force myself to start a new chapter. However, each chapter had a central idea that was well-explored and developed throughout the individual chapter, knocking this category up to a five.
Characters: 3
Warning: if you haven't read Shakespeare, don't read this book. Each character for each play gets only a cursory description, and you'll soon find yourself lost in the world of Shakespeare. However, the quick mentions of Shakespeare as a person added to my knowledge of him (or my ability to speculate, which is perhaps more interesting).
Enjoyability: 4
Eh. I'm not that into Shakespeare, nor sexual immorality. But it's an interesting topic, enough to hold one's adventure for a little while, especially if one if familiar with the plays.
Insightfulness: 8
I learned a lot about Renaissance society through this book, learning that it wasn't that different from our own regarding sexuality. Interesting how so much can stay the same. The Shakespeare part I understood some of, but some of it went over my as-yet-uneducated head, knocking off a few points.
Ease of Reading: 1
This is where academia rears its ugly head. Not only is the Shakespeare difficult, but Wells's own prose is rife with strange vocabulary (threnody? mellifluous?) and the general roundabout academic way of describing simple things. Do not read this book if you are a beginner to anything - reading, poetry, Shakespeare, sexuality, or English.
Photos/Illustrations: 9
Since Shakespeare is meant to be a play, the photos in the middle were helpful to see. Almost every specific staging that was mentioned got its own picture, so when I snuck a peek at the pictures beforehand, I was enticed to read on to find out what they were depicting. I only knocked it down a point because they were black and white and I wanted to see more of them!
All of this averages to a perfect 5/10 (isn't that nice?) which is a 2.5/5, hence the 3-star rating.
Quality of Writing: 5
This is a very academic sort of work, which naturally gives it a boost in this area. Now, I understand that because of the academic nature, other sources need to be cited. But this book seemed to have one too many citations of the plays it discussed - as though it basically summarized the plays instead of analyzing them. So that knocks it down a few pegs. Nothing in the writing is particularly amazing to bring it up anymore, so a five it is.
Pace: 5
This book is not a page-turner, simply because of the density of its topic. However, it is laid out very logically and mostly without overlap in the chapters. Usually, when I rate novels, I say something about "chronological order" with regard to pacing; "logical layout" is the equivalent with nonfiction, and Wells does a decent job of it.
Plot Development: 5
For nonfiction, "plot development" translates as "argument layout." What this book lacked was a central argument. There was a premise, a sort of interconnected discovery adventure, but to no eventual end, making it difficult to force myself to start a new chapter. However, each chapter had a central idea that was well-explored and developed throughout the individual chapter, knocking this category up to a five.
Characters: 3
Warning: if you haven't read Shakespeare, don't read this book. Each character for each play gets only a cursory description, and you'll soon find yourself lost in the world of Shakespeare. However, the quick mentions of Shakespeare as a person added to my knowledge of him (or my ability to speculate, which is perhaps more interesting).
Enjoyability: 4
Eh. I'm not that into Shakespeare, nor sexual immorality. But it's an interesting topic, enough to hold one's adventure for a little while, especially if one if familiar with the plays.
Insightfulness: 8
I learned a lot about Renaissance society through this book, learning that it wasn't that different from our own regarding sexuality. Interesting how so much can stay the same. The Shakespeare part I understood some of, but some of it went over my as-yet-uneducated head, knocking off a few points.
Ease of Reading: 1
This is where academia rears its ugly head. Not only is the Shakespeare difficult, but Wells's own prose is rife with strange vocabulary (threnody? mellifluous?) and the general roundabout academic way of describing simple things. Do not read this book if you are a beginner to anything - reading, poetry, Shakespeare, sexuality, or English.
Photos/Illustrations: 9
Since Shakespeare is meant to be a play, the photos in the middle were helpful to see. Almost every specific staging that was mentioned got its own picture, so when I snuck a peek at the pictures beforehand, I was enticed to read on to find out what they were depicting. I only knocked it down a point because they were black and white and I wanted to see more of them!
All of this averages to a perfect 5/10 (isn't that nice?) which is a 2.5/5, hence the 3-star rating.
July 1, 2018
A interesting look at sex and love in the plays.
Starts well and goes in depth on a handful.of plays and highlights sexual puns or passages of love.
Towards to end it gets repetitive a bit but still interesting take on individual plays
A few subjective readings but Stanley Wells makes clear it the actors or Directors choice how to play a scene or character as Shakespeare leaves the true meaning ambiguous
Starts well and goes in depth on a handful.of plays and highlights sexual puns or passages of love.
Towards to end it gets repetitive a bit but still interesting take on individual plays
A few subjective readings but Stanley Wells makes clear it the actors or Directors choice how to play a scene or character as Shakespeare leaves the true meaning ambiguous
June 19, 2017
A wonderful, insightful read. It does not seek to alter or convince, merely to inform, giving strong textual evidence, as well as historical fact, how Shakespeare sought to entertain and enlighten through the relationship between human sexuality and love. If you're a fan of the works, when just a few, there's something to be learned for any curious mind on these pages.
August 18, 2020
It's not often I compliment a book by saying it was "surprisingly good." This book fits that description to a T.
It's pretty dry, but manages not to be boring, even though the author didn't have a bawdy point of view. Just some really interesting observations. I also loved his view of queer readings of Shakespeare texts.
It's pretty dry, but manages not to be boring, even though the author didn't have a bawdy point of view. Just some really interesting observations. I also loved his view of queer readings of Shakespeare texts.
September 20, 2021
An interesting take on the analysis of Shakespeare's work. This analysis provide a window, a view into the world where Shakespeare's lived. Honestly, it is an interesting world. While, the moral value might have been different, what I find to be interesting is how, despite such wide chasm, we and them aren't that much different.
May 24, 2019
He makes me realise that one has to be a dedicated adolescent to find much of the sexual references in Shakespeare. This is not to deny that much of what Shakespeare wrote has sex as a theme but so much?
January 25, 2021
all these explanation about subtext, double entrendre, and innuendos when a character is explicitly named 'Benedick'
November 24, 2015
It is a undeniable fact that Shakespeare, beloved, respected, elevated Shakespeare, wasn't averse to the odd dick joke. Or more than the odd dick joke. In point of fact, both Shakespeare's plays and poetry are full of 'bawdy', as Wells calls it: sexual puns, sexual allusions, homerotic subtext - the only reason so much of it has remained under the radar is because Shakespeare is rarely graphic or obvious - as Wells comments, 'his bawdy is often indirect, metaphorical or allusive'. But Shakespeare is full of sex. After all, it was in Titus Andronicus that he gave the world perhaps the first 'your mother' joke -
This book sets out to demonstrate Shakespeare's use of sex in his work - both sex as it relates to lust and sex as it relates to love, sex as comedy and sex as tragedy and violence. Wells discusses sex in all its manifestations, with examples from the plays and the sonnets - sex both married and unmarried, sexual desire, sexual jealousy, chastity, whoredom and same-sex relationships, from both the male and female perspective.
Wells also takes not just a textual but a linguistic approach, exploring how different words and terms can be interpreted, how sexual allusions that may have been obvious to an Elizabethan audience can be lost on us and how terms quite innocent in Shakespeare's days may take on a different meaning today.
At one point Wells states, 'dramatic texts take on lives of their own in relation to the society in which they are performed and to the personalities of those who experience them. The plays read us, just as we read them.' Modern performances of Shakespeare tend to play up the sexual angle, whereas Victorian performances played it down or censored it altogether. Much of the sexuality in Shakespeare's plays is deliberate, no doubt about that - but there is just as much that is ambiguous, subtle, open to debate or interpretation (again no doubt deliberately) and this is where what we see on stage reflects to a very great extent our own expectations and preoccupations. Is Shakespeare full of sex, or are we conditioned by our hypersexualised culture to see sex even where it is not? It is part of the genius of Shakespeare that both statements can be equally true.
Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"
Aaron: "That which thou canst not undo."
Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."
Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."
This book sets out to demonstrate Shakespeare's use of sex in his work - both sex as it relates to lust and sex as it relates to love, sex as comedy and sex as tragedy and violence. Wells discusses sex in all its manifestations, with examples from the plays and the sonnets - sex both married and unmarried, sexual desire, sexual jealousy, chastity, whoredom and same-sex relationships, from both the male and female perspective.
Wells also takes not just a textual but a linguistic approach, exploring how different words and terms can be interpreted, how sexual allusions that may have been obvious to an Elizabethan audience can be lost on us and how terms quite innocent in Shakespeare's days may take on a different meaning today.
At one point Wells states, 'dramatic texts take on lives of their own in relation to the society in which they are performed and to the personalities of those who experience them. The plays read us, just as we read them.' Modern performances of Shakespeare tend to play up the sexual angle, whereas Victorian performances played it down or censored it altogether. Much of the sexuality in Shakespeare's plays is deliberate, no doubt about that - but there is just as much that is ambiguous, subtle, open to debate or interpretation (again no doubt deliberately) and this is where what we see on stage reflects to a very great extent our own expectations and preoccupations. Is Shakespeare full of sex, or are we conditioned by our hypersexualised culture to see sex even where it is not? It is part of the genius of Shakespeare that both statements can be equally true.
February 20, 2016
“Shakespeare, Sex, and Love” is a good addition to the library of books on Shakespeare and his works. Written in an academic, yet easy to read, style the book is laid out in an almost textbook fashion. Stanley Wells arranges the text in two parts, the first dealing with Shakespeare’s “Life and Times” and the second focusing on “Plays and Poems”. The division in the text works nicely. Kudos also goes to Mr. Wells for constantly reminding the reader that his interpretations are at best conjecture. We can never know for sure what Shakespeare was thinking or intending. Too many scholars have forgotten that!
Mr. Wells breaks Part II of the text into six subcategories and fits most of the plays and poems into one of them. His explanations are intriguing and thought provoking. He is also very zealous about pointing out that much of what people put on/into Shakespeare is from their perspective. All we have is the text, not Shakespeare’s mind.
Personal highlights for me included his examination of the contrasting views of love and sex between the Bard’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “As You Like It”. They were fascinating and helped illuminate both plays for me. I also found chapter 4 (The Fun of Sex) and chapter 10 (Just Good Friends?) and Wells’ analysis of the plays he puts into those categories to be absorbing reading.
“Shakespeare, Sex, and Love” is not an introductory text on Shakespeare, but rather a readable academic examination for those familiar with Shakespeare’s body of work. I think the book would be even more interesting to those who see a lot of Shakespeare in performance, as it deal with various interpretations of scenes and characters, prone to be interesting to those who see the plays performed regularly.
All in all, an engaging text. I enjoyed it.
Mr. Wells breaks Part II of the text into six subcategories and fits most of the plays and poems into one of them. His explanations are intriguing and thought provoking. He is also very zealous about pointing out that much of what people put on/into Shakespeare is from their perspective. All we have is the text, not Shakespeare’s mind.
Personal highlights for me included his examination of the contrasting views of love and sex between the Bard’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “As You Like It”. They were fascinating and helped illuminate both plays for me. I also found chapter 4 (The Fun of Sex) and chapter 10 (Just Good Friends?) and Wells’ analysis of the plays he puts into those categories to be absorbing reading.
“Shakespeare, Sex, and Love” is not an introductory text on Shakespeare, but rather a readable academic examination for those familiar with Shakespeare’s body of work. I think the book would be even more interesting to those who see a lot of Shakespeare in performance, as it deal with various interpretations of scenes and characters, prone to be interesting to those who see the plays performed regularly.
All in all, an engaging text. I enjoyed it.
August 3, 2011
Very interesting. This isn't as dirty as it sounds. It isn't about Shakespeare's love life, but more of a history of the use of sex & love in his plays. He makes the point that back in Shakespeare's time the use of puns was much more common that it is today. So many of the puns he used had a sexual meaning, but since we don't pun as much in some performances they aren't understood. He also talks about the use of sex as a form of power for both men & women in his plays & poems. He compares Shakespeare to his contemporaries and explains that in the poetry and literature of the day, sex was a favorite subject. He does spend some chapters on Shakespeare's personal life & the issue of his sexuality, how it influenced his writings.
October 19, 2013
The historical examination of views on sex as well the expression of homoerotic desire during Shakespeare's time sheds light on many of the passages dealing with sex and love in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The close reading of the plays were just the right amount of speculative, and the author did well to avoid overly bawdy interpretations when there was no evidence for that kind of interpretation. I found the book to be quite interesting but only in a conversational, "did you know that..." kind of way. I wouldn't recommend it as a completely scholarly study of Shakespeare's writings on sex and love, but for the reader who is casually curious about these themes, it serves as an excellent introduction.
December 29, 2021
Very interesting, particularly at the beginning, but I felt as if he was documenting different instances of sexuality but not making too many conclusions with these observations, which is why it's a slightly lower rating from me.
February 7, 2011
Too speculative when it came to Shakespearian lit but I enjoyed the non-fictional analysis of sex (and punishment) in the Renaissance age.
April 7, 2013
I really loved this book. Useful and inciteful and very helpful for lovers or teachers of Shakespeare.
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March 9, 2015ez már néha TMI volt, de BA thesis, I'm coming!
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