Shakespeare In Lust
Last updated: 02/10/2006 - 12:54
A provocative new study by one of the best known scholars of The Bard focuses on the lewder intentions of England’s finest playwright.
Looking For Sex In Shakespeare by Stanley Wells
Stanley Wells is one of the best known and most versatile of Shakespeare scholars. His new book, Looking For Sex In Shakespeare, considers how far sexual meaning in Shakespeare’s writing is a matter of interpretation by actors, directors and critics, and how much was there to start with.
Sexually-Oriented Studies
Tracing interpretations of Shakespearean bawdy and innuendo from eighteenth-century editors to recent scholars and critics, Wells pays special attention to recent sexually-oriented studies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, once regarded as the most innocent of its author's plays.
He considers the Sonnets, and asks whether they imply same-sex desire in the author, or are quasi-dramatic projections of the writer’s imagination. Finally, he looks at how male-to-male relationships in the plays have been interpreted as sexual in both criticism and performance.
Stanley Wells' lively, provocative, and open-minded new book will appeal to a broad readership of students, theatregoers and Shakespeare lovers.
Stanley Wells has devoted most of his life to teaching, editing and writing about Shakespeare. He was Director of the Shakespeare Institute from 1987 to 1997. He is the General Editor of the Oxford editions of Shakespeare and has been associated with the New Penguin edition. In 2002, he accepted the International Shakespeare Globe Fellowship, in which capacity he delivered three public lectures as part of Globe Education’s season of staged readings, lectures and events. It is from these three lectures that Looking For Sex In Shakespeare has grown.
Looking For Sex In Shakespeare is available now, from Cambridge University Press (Priced H/back: £30.00 P/back: £10.99).
More information available in Arts & Culture, Books