Looking for Sex in Shakespeare

This slim volume (fewer than a hundred pages of text) by Stanley Wells is something of a tease. It consists of three lectures, originally delivered at the Globe in London, that treat the homosexual subtext in the Bard’s poems and plays. It begins by asking three questions: “Is it right to convey significances that could not have been in the mind of the author as he wrote? Is it, on the other hand, impossible to ignore them? How free can we be in our handling of texts from the past?” Great questions, all, and we shouldn’t be too disappointed if the text doesn’t offer any definitive answers. After all, the joy in reading a book like this is to spend an hour or two in the company of a man who has dedicated his career to Shakespeare and who knows him like the back of his hand. For instance, I had missed all that stuff about masturbation in Sonnet 4, in which the young male friend is accused of “having traffic with thyself alone.” As Dr. Johnson famously complained, Shakespeare couldn’t resist a quibble. Another discovery involves a famous story by Oscar Wilde; I had no idea an “enlarged version” of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” existed. Might the name of Wilde’s boy player, Willie Hughes, be another pun? This will be, to some, a disappointingly brief offering, but Wells manages to pack more than a groat’s worth of wit, and wisdom, into its pages. One trusts that there will be more lectures and more books by this author, who leaves us with a promise: “I have by no means exhausted my subject.” His fans await the sequel.
Rating: 4 / 5