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SHAKESPEARE, SEX AND LOVE
Bard to the bone
27 May 201 Times Higher Education – Literary Newsletter
By Matthew Reisz
Matthew Reisz
talks to Stanley Wells, doyen of Shakespearean editorial scholarship, about his
lifetime commitment to the playwright and his new book on romance and the
'beast with two backs'
It is hard
not to think of
Alongside
such editorial scholarship, Wells has produced a stream of books aimed at a
broader readership, including Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays (2001),
Shakespeare: For All Time (2002) and now Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Given that
he turned 80 last week, his latest work offers a remarkably frank and
enthusiastic account.
It opens with
a brief guided tour of sexuality in Shakespeare's time. This considers
cross-dressing, the records of the "Bawdy Court", proposals for
licensing brothels, homosexual coteries and a fierce sermon condemning those
who treated what we would today call casual sex as "no sin at all, but rather
a pastime, a dalliance, and but a touch of youth". It even quotes some
prize extracts from The Choice of Valentines, Thomas Nashe's astonishing
privately circulated poem about premature ejaculation and dildos.
Shakespeare
was himself an "early developer", marrying young to a pregnant Anne
Hathaway. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, set partly in a brothel, was co-authored by
a seedy real-life brothel-keeper, George Wilkins. Although Wells rightly points
out that the Bard is "renowned as the great celebrant of romantic
heterosexual love", he (or his characters) often express intense sexual
disgust, and the fathers in the late plays give their daughters stern lectures
on the need for premarital chastity.
All this
leads to three key questions. What kind of story emerges if we try to deduce
Shakespeare's changing attitudes to sex? How significant are the homoerotic
elements? And just how smutty are certain phrases and passages?
Wells
explores the whole corpus and argues, perhaps a little schematically, that we
often find tensions between "raw sexual desire that seeks satisfaction
only in the moment of gratification" and "sex as a natural and
fruitful realisation of virtuous and God-given desires, which can find their
fulfilment within a tenderly loving relationship".
So how did
Wells achieve his position as eminent Shakespearean and chairman of the
Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust in
"It came
on me slowly," Wells replies. A grammar-school boy who was the first in
his family to attend university, he studied at
After that,
he recalls, he "drifted around for a bit and became a schoolteacher in the
country - as Shakespeare is supposed to have done - for six years, while
keeping up an interest in scholarly matters, especially palaeography".
His teacher's
pay meant that he couldn't afford proper holidays, so he applied to do
voluntary work at the postgraduate Shakespeare Institute in Stratford (part of
the University of Birmingham), offering to help transcribe documents from
microfilm.
This was
probably not a job that many people were queuing up to do and, at the end of
two weeks, he was asked if he would like to apply for a scholarship.
This led to a
PhD editing two works by Robert Greene and then, in 1962, a junior lecturing
post at the institute, where he was to remain until 1997, eventually becoming
director. An interlude saw him work as a research Fellow at
Despite
pointing out the schoolmasterly connection, Wells hastens to add that "I
don't think I'm Shakespeare reincarnated! But I hope I've developed a
sensitiveness to the spirit that infuses the plays - a sense of the language
that helps me to go beyond the language."
He remains
glad to have had a solid editorial training, "a demanding discipline"
that he often recommends to young scholars, since "you need to know about
bibliography, lexicography, the history of the language, the history of the
theatre as well as literary criticism. You can't edit a play in just a
technical sense - you've got to think about meaning and interpretation, even
when deciding whether to change a particular word."
Laurie Maguire,
tutorial Fellow in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, noted recently that
today's academic Shakespeareans often shy away from talking about loss,
jealousy or unrequited love in the plays, and instead concentrate on
"epistemology and representation and semiotics and differance and
liminality and cultural positions".
This is very
much not what one gets with Wells.
"I'm a
traditionalist," he agrees. "I'm interested in the structure of
plays. I'm interested in the attempt to discern artistry of language in
dramatic and theatrical art. I'm not a theorist: I've never approached the
works through French theory, for example.
"I also
see myself as a sort of populariser. I have no shame - indeed, I take pride -
in writing intelligibly and trying to interest the non-specialist. That is an
aspect of any real teacher: you have to be able to diffuse your knowledge, your
enthusiasm and your critical skills. I find it depressing when critics write in
a way that can be understood only by people within a very small circle."
Shakespeare
seems not to have had close links with the most overtly homosexual circles in
Elizabethan
Wells turns
to the work of queer theorists and asks whether there is anything in the
portrayal of male pairs such as Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice
"that might enable us to tell whether they are just good friends, or that
they love each other non-sexually, or that one of them feels unreciprocated
desire for the other, or that the two are lovers in the fullest sense of the
term".
His answer,
as a passionate life-long theatregoer (and honorary emeritus governor of the
Royal Shakespeare Theatre), is that there is no right answer. The same
relationships can be viewed and presented erotically or platonically, according
to what individual actors, directors and indeed members of the audience feel
happy with - and this range of interpretations is something to be celebrated.
More generally,
Shakespeare, Sex, and Love attempts
to steer a path between two extremes. It seems ridiculous today that editors
used to acknowledge lewd jokes, if at all, with a coy phrase such as "with
a bawdy quibble". But Wells clearly feels that the pendulum has swung too
far the other way, with articles on "bestial buggery in A Midsummer
Night's Dream" and Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance
literature at the University of Warwick, promoting the Royal Shakespeare
Company edition of the plays as the "filthiest" ever.
"I
thought I was able to take a more balanced view," Wells explains,
"and write about sex without lubricity, but with a sense of what is
theatrically workable. A lot of the interpretations people attribute to
Shakespeare in terms of sexual innuendo would require a terrible amount of bad
acting to put across - leering and mugging and gestures."
The book
surveys Shakespearean references to incest, oral sex, "married
chastity", "bed tricks", venereal diseases ("the Neapolitan
bone-ache") and their fearsome Elizabethan cures. It makes a plausible
case for finding double meanings in the words "die",
"hell", "nothing", "stand" and "will",
as well as "come" and "prick".
In one
complex passage, "out" is said to mean either "unable to ejaculate"
or "denied vaginal access". (Some of the "jokes" inevitably
take 10 minutes to explain and turn out not to be very funny.) But since such
words are naturally also used in more straightforward senses, there remains
plenty of room for debate about just how "dirty" some passages are.
Neither sex
nor Shakespeare is a topic likely to be exhausted any day soon. Wells brings a
lifetime of committed scholarship to his entertaining map of the territory.
Postscript:
Stanley Wells' Shakespeare,
Sex, and Love is published by
© Times
Higher Education
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