Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (review)

Stanley Wells is one of the few Shakespeare scholars, on either side of the Atlantic, to have attained anything like a popular readership for his books outside of the academy. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love is the most recent entry in a body of work that includes Shakespeare for All Time (2002) and Shakespeare and Co. (2006). Wells's goal with this new book is no small undertaking: he aims to provide a wide survey of attitudes toward love, lust, and sexual practices within Shakespeare's life, times, and works. He begins by noting the purging of sexuality in Shakespeare's plays by past generations of editors and directors, which has been balanced by an interest (particularly in recent years) in digging beneath the surface of the texts to find sexual meanings not immediately apparent. Wells explores the intriguing dialectic between negation and augmentation of sexuality primarily through a focus on the vexed relationship between love and lust, "the spiritual and the earthly" (7). Throughout this elegantly written study, Wells mediates between popular criticism and academic scholarship, between bolstering Shakespearean authority and contextualizing the plays by examining shared authorship and performance choices, and finally between when a reading is "gratuitous" or "pornographic" and when it is "true" to the text.

The book is divided into two parts: in the first, "Life and Times," Wells delves into the sexual mores and practices of Shakespeare's times, with a particular focus on the scanty facts of Shakespeare's own life; in the second, "Plays and Poems," he provides readings of nearly all the works in the canon. In the introduction Wells critiques other works on the same topic for not encompassing the scope of the subject of sexuality. The historical sections in part 1 are generally more interesting than the textual analyses in part 2, primarily because the book as a whole sacrifices original close readings to breadth of coverage.

Some of Wells's most persuasive points relate to homosexual practices and poetics; for example, in his analysis of Troilus and Cressida in part 2, he points out the homophobia of critics like Jan Kott who (assuming the role occupied by Thersites within the text) have used derogatory language to describe the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Even more effectively, in the second chapter of part 1, he expands Mary Bly's assertion that there was a "self-aware homoerotic community in early modern London" by claiming that certain late sixteenth-century writers "were aware of a body of readers specially attracted by homoerotic literature, and that they attempted to satisfy those readers' tastes" (50–51). Wells focuses on Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield (the only Elizabethan poet other than Shakespeare to address sonnets to a male), and Michael Drayton, who he argues formed "a group of poets with linked interests in homoerotic subject matter for poetry, and there are clear signs of direct influence and aesthetic fellowship among them" (57).

Part of Wells's point in theorizing a "homoerotic community" among these three poets is to separate Shakespeare and his work from this fellowship, with the implication that Shakespeare is superior. There is latent bardolatry in Wells's approach (although I suspect he would never use this term) that shows up throughout the book as a whole, marking it as popular, rather than wholly scholarly. Extravagant praises of Shakespeare are made mostly in passing, such as when he describes the plays as "whole and perfect" (122) and says of Romeo and Juliet, "Shakespeare deploys his mastery of language to differentiate character with virtuosic skill" (167). Other cues that Wells wrote the book primarily for a popular audiences (despite the fact that it was published by Oxford) include his accessible, almost breezy writing style, which employs contractions, the occasional colloquialism, and eschews jargon. He also plays down academic scholarship, sometimes omitting scholars' names within the body of the text and keeping the footnotes minimal. The title itself, with its three keywords guaranteed to appeal to a wide range of audiences, combined with the handsomely produced volume that...