Looking for Sex in Shakespeare

Stanley Wells - General Editor of Oxford editions of Shakespeare and the author of many publications on Shakespeare - gave three lectures at Shakespeare's Globe, London in the autumn of 2002. In this accompanying book, Wells has reinstated cuts he made for the evening lectures and added post-production thoughts. As the title suggests, Wells is interested in (and to a certain extent against) the fashionable practice of "teasing out" subtextual sexual meanings in Shakespeare's texts in literary criticism as well as on the stage. Wells attempts to "distinguish legitimate readings-between-the-lines from over-readings that are ahistorical and sometimes untheatrical in imposing upon the text meanings that must originate rather in the minds of the interpreters than of the dramatist". That is quite an old-fashioned approach nowadays - the emphasis on authorial intention accompanied by a devaluation of new readings which seek to understand Shakespeare in the context of modern social concerns (even if he specifically denies it, it is clear from the above quote that Wells views such readings as "illegitimate"). And it is worth asking: If Shakespeare's work is teeming with sexual puns, witty bawdy and simmering erotic tensions, can we faithfully say that it is possible to draw a line between "overreadings" and "the meanings that Shakespeare intended"?Wells is good on the effect that the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis has had on the interepretation of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, namely that it led to homoeroticism and homosexuality in general in Shakespeare's characters being better recognised. Diplomatically Wells concludes, "If Shakespeare himself did not, in the fullest sense of the word, love a man, he certainly understood the feelings of those who do".Where Wells is not so good, in my view, is with regard to his somewhat stuffy disgust of (but intense fascination with) sexual interpretations. At one point Wells deplores as "highly distasteful" the performer's use of modern innuendo in Much Ado About Nothing when Benedick, responding to Margaret's statement that Beatrice 'hath legs', knowingly says 'And therefore will come'. Modern productions have a legitimate right to reinvent and/or extend textual meanings without them being regarded as "cheapening", even if audiences in Shakespeare's day would have understood them differently.Wells remains a fascinating yet ambivalent critic of the sexual in Shakespeare.

I used this book for OU course AA316 - very useful background, good for TMAs.For the non-OU student, this contains some thought-provoking discussion on puns and sexual imagery and references in Shakespeare. And excellent, well-informed read that provides a 'way in' to some of Shakespeare's more complicated works.Thoroughly recommended.

This slim volume (fewer than a hundred pages of text) by Stanley Wells is something of a tease. It consists of three lectures, originally delivered at the Globe in London, that treat the homosexual subtext in the Bard's poems and plays. It begins by asking three questions: "Is it right to convey significances that could not have been in the mind of the author as he wrote? Is it, on the other hand, impossible to ignore them? How free can we be in our handling of texts from the past?" Great questions, all, and we shouldn't be too disappointed if the text doesn't offer any definitive answers. After all, the joy in reading a book like this is to spend an hour or two in the company of a man who has dedicated his career to Shakespeare and who knows him like the back of his hand. For instance, I had missed all that stuff about masturbation in Sonnet 4, in which the young male friend is accused of "having traffic with thyself alone." As Dr. Johnson famously complained, Shakespeare couldn't resist a quibble. Another discovery involves a famous story by Oscar Wilde; I had no idea an "enlarged version" of "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." existed. Might the name of Wilde's boy player, Willie Hughes, be another pun? This will be, to some, a disappointingly brief offering, but Wells manages to pack more than a groat's worth of wit, and wisdom, into its pages. One trusts that there will be more lectures and more books by this author, who leaves us with a promise: "I have by no means exhausted my subject." His fans await the sequel.