Looking for Sex in Shakespeare

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by Stanley Wells

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published May 2004, 120 pages, paper

ISBN 0521540399

Wells considers how far sexual meaning in Shakespeare's writing is a matter of interpretation by actors, directors and critics. Tracing interpretations of Shakespearean bawdy and innuendo from eighteenth-century editors to recent scholars and critics, Wells pays special attention to recent sexually orientated studies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, once regarded as the most innocent of its author's plays. He considers the Sonnets, some of which are addressed to a man, 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. 14 half-tones

 Contents

Foreword by Patrick Spottiswoode
Preface
Introduction
1. Lewd Interpreters
2. The originality of Shakespeare's Sonnets
3. 'I Think he Loves the World only for him': Men loving Men in Shakespeare's plays.