Shakespeare, Sex, and Love

By Stanley Wells
Oxford University Press, $27.95, 282 pages

Extensive Shakespeare scholar and author Stanley Wells offers a terrifically interesting read in Shakespeare, Sex and Love even if you’re not completely familiar with Shakespeare. In fact, it might help liven your understanding of his work in a more gritty and realistic way than ever before, showing how art imitates life through the plays.

The book is arranged in two parts, the first offering an analysis of the time, language, and poetry in relation to sex and sexuality in Elizabethan England. The second part looks at the ways that sex and views thereof translated into the plays themselves and how Shakespeare related the sex in the plays to love.

“Shakespeare gives us no easy answers, but he goes on helping us, if not to understand, at least to explore…an amazing range of human sexual experience.”

While this is a somewhat scholarly work, it’s accessible to anyone with a liking for Shakespeare, Elizabethan England, or the history of sex and sexuality in general. There are also plenty of quotes and lots of color and black and white plates of persons and images from history as well as some from modern renditions of the plays. The plays may be old but the ideas endure, in this case showing that content, such as sex, initially dubbed “common,” holds the interest of the masses still today.

Reviewed by Axie Barclay