Shakespeare on Sex

“Of special interest.”—Sir Ian McKellen In Shakespeare on Sex, readers will discover William Shakespeare as they have never seen him before: a rebellious playwright determined to challenge Elizabethan England's sexual mores and champion the freedom of love. Drawing on the scandal of Shakespeare's own shotgun wedding after he impregnated twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway when he was still a teenage minor in a time and place that prohibited premarital sex, this groundbreaking book reveals how sex was at the heart of his life and art. Shakespeare filled his works with filthy jokes, lusty wordplay, and frank portrayals of sex and desire. But audiences today miss his peerless and purposeful smut, which flies by in iambic pentameter and Elizabethan slang. Shakespeare defied the restrictive laws of his day, giving voice to women, young lovers, and rebel hearts yearning for sexual liberation. Shakespeare offered revolutionary counsel in play after play, advice that can still help us all. This bold book uncovers the untold story about Shakespeare's mission to bring sexual liberation to the world's stage; it also shows how his constant focus on sex formed the narrative arc of his career, linking his plays to documented facts about his life. The big reveal that ends the so-called authorship controversy is monumental.

Marc Berley was professor of English at Rutgers and Barnard/Columbia. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Threepenny Review, Lit Hub, and newspapers nationwide. He has appeared on BBC and PBS and been covered by Reuters, USA Today, the Washington Post, and ABC's The View. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia. The author of After the Heavenly Tune and editor of Reading the Renaissance, he is founding editor of the award-winning literary magazine LitMag. He lives in New York. Visit him at marcberley.com.