With Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, Stanley Wells crafts a pertinent examination of a subject scholars and theatre artists have focused on, particularly in recent years: the function and substance of sex in the works of Shakespeare. In bringing this topic to the fore, Wells provides an intriguing text that contemplates new issues of formal and lexical semantics pertaining to the sexual connotations in Shakespeare. Challenging prevailing expectations and interpretations, Wells examines sexual innuendo in Shakespeare’s work and tracks its implications by relating his findings to modern productions. His analysis of criticism and adaptations provides insights into the scripts themselves, as well as culture in general.
Wells’s study presumes that desires of contemporary Shakespeare audiences must be fulfilled. Theatergoers want to be seduced, and Wells finds that Shakespeare’s labyrinthine sexual meanings, once revealed, will tantalize audiences in ways suppressed in earlier treatments. He emphasizes that productions succeed when they bring to light the previously obscured erotic potential of Shakespeare’s texts.

Historiographically, Wells’s detailed textual analysis focuses on images of licentiousness, allusions to sex in productions of Shakespeare’s plays over the past four centuries. His scrutiny of earlier Shakespeare historians consolidates antecedent studies, the plays, the Sonnets, and postmodern criticism of discussions (and controversies therein) of homoeroticism in Shakespeare. Wells persuasively argues that, historically, scholars and critics of Shakespeare have often neglected or arbitrarily suppressed sexual meanings found within the plays, counteracting the ability of readers and spectators to discover valuable inferences and meanings related to sexuality.

The opening lines of Wells’s introduction state: “So much sex is readily apparent in Shakespeare that it might seem surprising that anyone should look for more” and concisely covers what he refers to as “fundamental questions about theatrical interpretation.” He intimates that how scholars represent the text is the catalyst for what effect representations will have upon “the minds of those who experience” these dramatizations. According to Wells, the symbiotic relationship that exists between text, performer, and audience facilitates an opportunity to reconstitute archaic connotation with avant-garde meaning.

Wells draws upon several well-known plays. At the center is his analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a script frequently hallowed as ethereal, but in fact a primer for the study of Shakespeare’s bawdy, holding hidden connotations related to the topic of savage anal intercourse. Supporting this contention, Wells points us to “‘Bestial Buggery’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1994) by Bruce Thomas Boehrer (31), which illustrates how Oberon is remedying obstacles of matrimony through subjugation of Titania into a prurient object of sexual enslavement by Bottom. This inferential correlation underscores the suitability of contemporary treatments of this spectacle. Indeed, Wells’ critique provides compelling justification for the interpretation and staging of these characters as engaged in explicit acts of carnal knowledge.

Wells’s chapter entitled “Lewd Interpreters” offers additional examples of licentiousness, to posit a radical departure from the erstwhile manner in which they have been interpreted prior to the twentieth century. This chapter considers heterosexual bawdiness in Romeo and Juliet, the climactic moment of Antony and Cleopatra, and innuendos in Love’s Labours Lost. Wells constellates this discussion with one on homosexuality pointing to Antonio and Bassanio in the Merchant of Venice, Iago in Othello, and Richard II, identifying potential homosexual readings, and carefully raises the question of how these characters’ sexuality should be staged.

While the overriding focus of Wells’s examination of Shakespeare is on sex in general, he investigates key issues of homosexuality and same-sex relationships in Shakespeare in the chapter “Men loving men in Shakespeare’s plays”, using Coriolanus, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice as primary texts. However, the clearest example is in Troilus and Cressida dealing with the “legendary friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus, which is, in Wells’s estimation, the “only unquestionable allusion” to homoerotic relationships in Shakespeare. Although Patroclus neither accepts nor denies Thersites’ charge that “thou art thought to be Achilles’ ‘male varlet’” (his masculine whore), Wells suggests that “Achilles and Patroclus might be lovers without Patroclus being regarded as a whore; or they might just be good friends”(88). Nevertheless, Thersites’ implication remains open to examination, according to Wells. There is a doubleness in Troilus and Cressida that allows concurrent parallel possibilities in the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus: a homoerotic love relationship as well as shared value for heterosexual relationships (that of the love between Achilles and Polyxena). Wells acknowledges responses from critics with opposing extreme positions: A.P Rossiter and Jan Kott who refer specifically, perhaps even homophobically, to this homoerotic relationship, and W.A. Darlington’s reaction to a John Barton production stating 'Shakespeare nowhere shows any sign of intending to make homosexuals of the two characters" (89). Wells’s exploration does not align itself with either camp; rather exploring the nuances between and the best elements of both critical agendas. Wells also points out that Troilus and Cressida was not staged before the twentieth century, a performance history leaving little ability to examine the play retrospectively.

In citing the paradoxes contained within Shakespeare’s use of perpetual wordplay, Wells underscores that the search for new meaning is not a recent phenomenon. Wells challenges readers to consider whether the sexuality in Shakespeare’s texts was in fact recondite to prior audiences. Perhaps the Victorians were not blindsided by the sex in Shakespeare; they may have heard the sexual meanings implicit in the texts as readily as we do today. Regrettably, however, subsequent interpreters have staged safer versions, sanitizing them to dilute their erotic potential and minimize their volatility.

This book is potentially useful to theatrical practitioners as well as theatre scholars and historians of gender and sexuality. Wells includes an outstanding cache of further sources worth consideration by those interested in learning more about sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays. Looking for Sex in Shakespeare is not a consummate text supplanting prior work on the subject. However, he combines close textual analysis of the plays with references to the annals of Shakespearean criticism and detailed production histories in ways that make this an exemplary consideration of expressions of desire in Shakespeare. His book is a vital resource that serves to demystify sex in Shakespeare, enabling readers to look at Shakespeare, and indeed sex itself, anew.