Review 'Looking for Sex in Shakespeare finds one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars in top form, witty, erudite and wonderfully sane. Illuminating the deep erotic riddles of the Sonnets, the rich performed life of the plays and the lascivious byways of post-modern criticism with equal insight, this collection is at once sufficiently amusing, serious and sexy to stand alongside the Shakespearean poetry that is its subject.' Michael Dobson'… this book offers clear, good-humoured answers …' Sunday Times'The leading scholar Stanley Wells has collected recent lectures on Bardic bawdy at the Globe into this handy packet of three essays.' The Independent'… stimulating and full of good sense; it contrives to be both fair-minded, and a bracing corrective to some current follies.' Sunday Telegraph'Mr Wells has fun with certain 'lewd interpreters', and everywhere shows a sanity and openness of judgment that critics and actors should note.' The Economist'… thoughtful and amusing … This is only a little book but it touches on some big theses: the relations between text and script and the different focuses of reader and performer (not always the same thing), as well as the frequent silliness of scholars and actors who are as fallible as the rest of us.' Around the Globe'Wells really has no equal writing today in terms of Shakespearean criticism and this superb book blows fresh air up the skirts of many a donnish fancy proving finally to be a corrective to many silliness which occlude the meaning of the plays rather than enhancing them.' Birmingham Post'It is a short, readable volume, which explores its subject with clarity and whose leisurely style reflects its origins in a series of public lectures.' Modern Literary Review Book Description Stanley Wells is one of the best-known and most versatile of Shakespeare scholars. This book considers how far sexual meaning in Shakespeare's writing is a matter of interpretation by actors, directors and critics. It will appeal to a broad readership of students, theatregoers and Shakespeare lovers. See all Product description
C**W
Interesting, if ambivalent, analysis of the sexual in Shakespeare
Stanley Wells - General Editor of Oxford editions of Shakespeare and the author of many publications on Shakespeare - gave three lectures at Shakespeare's Globe, London in the autumn of 2002. In this accompanying book, Wells has reinstated cuts he made for the evening lectures and added post-production thoughts. As the title suggests, Wells is interested in (and to a certain extent against) the fashionable practice of "teasing out" subtextual sexual meanings in Shakespeare's texts in literary criticism as well as on the stage. Wells attempts to "distinguish legitimate readings-between-the-lines from over-readings that are ahistorical and sometimes untheatrical in imposing upon the text meanings that must originate rather in the minds of the interpreters than of the dramatist". That is quite an old-fashioned approach nowadays - the emphasis on authorial intention accompanied by a devaluation of new readings which seek to understand Shakespeare in the context of modern social concerns (even if he specifically denies it, it is clear from the above quote that Wells views such readings as "illegitimate"). And it is worth asking: If Shakespeare's work is teeming with sexual puns, witty bawdy and simmering erotic tensions, can we faithfully say that it is possible to draw a line between "overreadings" and "the meanings that Shakespeare intended"?Wells is good on the effect that the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis has had on the interepretation of Shakespeare's plays, poems and sonnets, namely that it led to homoeroticism and homosexuality in general in Shakespeare's characters being better recognised. Diplomatically Wells concludes, "If Shakespeare himself did not, in the fullest sense of the word, love a man, he certainly understood the feelings of those who do".Where Wells is not so good, in my view, is with regard to his somewhat stuffy disgust of (but intense fascination with) sexual interpretations. At one point Wells deplores as "highly distasteful" the performer's use of modern innuendo in Much Ado About Nothing when Benedick, responding to Margaret's statement that Beatrice 'hath legs', knowingly says 'And therefore will come'. Modern productions have a legitimate right to reinvent and/or extend textual meanings without them being regarded as "cheapening", even if audiences in Shakespeare's day would have understood them differently.Wells remains a fascinating yet ambivalent critic of the sexual in Shakespeare.
C**S
Very useful background for AA316
I used this book for OU course AA316 - very useful background, good for TMAs.For the non-OU student, this contains some thought-provoking discussion on puns and sexual imagery and references in Shakespeare. And excellent, well-informed read that provides a 'way in' to some of Shakespeare's more complicated works.Thoroughly recommended.
A**N
How to get your groat's worth
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.
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