Shakespeare on Sex

“Of special interest.”—Sir Ian McKellen The Bawdy Bard: Shakespeare, sex, and the liberation of love In Shakespeare on Sex, readers will discover William Shakespeare as they’ve never seen him before: a daring playwright determined to challenge Elizabethan sexual mores and champion the freedom of love. Drawing on the scandal of Shakespeare’s own youthful shotgun marriage 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, as well as the bawdy brilliance of his plays, this groundbreaking book reveals how sex was at the heart of his life, his art, and his legacy. Far from prudish, Shakespeare filled his works with sly jokes, lusty wordplay, and frank portrayals of desire—audiences today miss his peerless and purposeful smut, which flies by in iambic pentameter and Elizabethan slang. He defied the restrictive laws of his age, giving voice to women, young lovers, and rebels yearning for liberation. Shakespeare saw sex as both a miraculous joy and a source of human and societal troubles, and he offered revolutionary counsel in play after play, advice that can still help us all. This bold book tells a groundbreaking story about Shakespeare’s mission to bring sexual liberation to Elizabethan England. 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. Accessible, entertaining, and deeply researched, Shakespeare on Sex unlocks the erotic subtext of the Bard’s greatest plays, from Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet. It is essential reading for theater lovers, Shakespeare students, and anyone who wants to understand how sex shaped the greatest writer in the English language. It is perfect for beginners and required reading for Bard enthusiasts. This book will transform the Shakespeare landscape.

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, LitHub, the New York Post, and newspapers nationwide. He has appeared on BBC, WOR, and KABC and has 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.