If there is any one aspect of Shakespeare's work that singles him out from every other great writer, it is the astounding comprehensiveness of his treatment of love and sex. Not only do those great themes figure prominently in virtually every play he wrote, he explores, with detailed vividness, a range of sexual and amatory experience that leaves Masters and Johnson looking pretty skimpy. From the most exalted Petrarchan effusions to the basest bodily function, he covers the waterfront.
Professor Stanley Wells, in the latest of his many superb studies of the writer to whom he has devoted most of his working life, plunges deep into this fertile hinterland though I had better watch my language after reading his chapter on "The Fun of Sex", where the double, triple and quadruple layers of filth to be detected in the most innocent phrase are laid bare.
It is evident that the Elizabethan mind was a riot of suggestibility on the subject. Wells approaches this soberly, eschewing what he calls the pornographic approach of Pauline Kiernan in Filthy Shakespeare ("100 of Shakespeare's most shocking, tantalisingly-coded sexual subtexts, ranging from Wanking to Dildos"), and discerning a certain fastidiousness in Shakespeare's approach to bawdy by comparison with his contemporaries. It's only a matter of degree, though: even in Shakespeare, one innuendo sets off another, quibble mounting on quibble's back, triggering multiple orgasms of mucky meanings.
After a while, one begins to feel quite giddy. Noting the hysteria engendered in the actor Roger Allam and his fellow-players during rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet by the Arden edition's frequent recourse to the formula "with a bawdy quibble" (eventually they set the phrase to music as a sort of madrigal), Wells calmly elucidates the layers of sexual meaning in passages such as Orlando's apparently innocent question in As You Like It, "Who could be out before his mistress?" Does the word "out", worries Wells, mean "inability to ejaculate" or "be denied vaginal entry". This is a world, remember, in which the word "wit" means "sexual organs" and "matter" means "semen".
This sort of thing has high entertainment value, of course the prof as smut-hound but, as he wisely observes, "some members of Shakespeare's audience saw no bawdy in the passage . . . others found one set of indecent meanings, while yet other audience members found something quite different to snigger over." "How rich," he cries, characteristically, "is Shakespeare's imagination that it can give rise to such a variety of interpretations!"
The effect of this exposition of the sexual exuberance of the plays is, in fact, exhilarating and even moving: all human life is indeed in Shakespeare's plays. The absolute filthiness of the Elizabethan mind is a kind of absolute truthfulness: all the processes of the body, the heart, the soul, are there, frankly, fleshly, on the page and thence on the stage (though, as Allam and co discovered, it is a serious challenge for an actor to convey even a 10th of the bawdy quibbles on offer: perhaps the best course is Edith Evans's decision to utter everything she didn't understand as if it were faintly improper).
Wells's first chapter offers a quick tour d'horizon of sexuality in Shakespeare's time, which reveals that despite fire-and-brimstone ecclesiastical condemnation, and the existence of so-called Bawdy Courts, which could condemn you to prison or humiliating public penance for carnal lapses, all forms of sexual activity seemed to flourish vigorously. The medical textbooks agreed that sex was good for you: "moderate evacuation", wrote Thomas Cogan in The Haven of Health in 1594, had many advantages. "It maketh the body more light and nimble, it openeth the pores and conduits, and purgeth phlegm; it quickeneth the mind, stirreth up the wit, reneweth the senses, driveth away sadness, melancholy, anger, fury."
Prostitution, though technically illegal, was everywhere available, especially in London (though Wells acquaints us with the remarkable fact that in Oxford there was in the 12th century a street named Gropecuntlane). These "nunneries" (brothels, as in Hamlet) catered to all tastes, including an establishment where male prostitutes satisfied "forlorn unfortunate dames married to old husbands". The theatre was closely associated with these activities; the actor-managers Alleyn and Henslowe both owned inns which were in fact brothels, as did Shakespeare's co-author, the unsavoury George Wilkins, who was responsible for chunks of Pericles. Boy actors were known to be available for hire for sex with both men and women.
Technically, sodomy was punishable by fierce laws which, however, were almost never enforced: in the whole of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, there were only six indictments and one conviction, and that was for sex with a five-year-old boy. The king himself, though married and the father of three sons, was flagrant in his passionate pursuit of male favourites, justifying his involvement with one, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with the startling and rather moving words (uttered to the Privy Council): "Christ had John, I have George."
Writers dealt with sex with a clear-eyed directness that was soon to disappear from the language: there is something wonderfully frank about the tart's response to her client's loss of erection in Nashe's A Choice of Valentines: "'Unhappy me,' quoth she, 'and will't not stand? / Come, let me rub and chafe it with my hand. / Perhaps the silly worm is laboured sore / And wearièd that it can do no more.'" To describe glorious manhood as a silly worm certainly puts sex in its proper perspective.
Shakespeare, though less anatomically precise, is equally conscious of physical frailty in the erotic sphere, as certain sonnets make clear. The Sonnets, of course, are teeming with sex, and unique in Shakespeare's output in that they seem to be autobiographical. The virtuoso punning riffs on the name Will seem to suggest as much: "So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will / One will of mine to make thy large Will more. / Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill; / Think all but one, and me in that one, Will" will signifying not only male but also female sexual organs, as well as being Shakespeare's first name, and that of the possible addressee of the poems addressed to a male lover. Wells who takes the radical view that no more than a dozen of the Sonnets are actually addressed to a man notes, in a brilliant phrase, that those poems unmistakably addressed to a woman betray "severe psychological tension in a man who must acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it".
This complex awareness of sex and emotion is what makes Shakespeare so perennially riveting: Wells studies his increasingly subtle and multifarious treatment of it through the plays, from the exuberance and freshness of Love's Labours Lost, with its joyful discovery of amorous attachment and acknowledgment of the realities of desire and its consequences "The child brags in her belly already . . . it is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh" through the ecstasies and agonies of Antony and Cleopatra, the sombre and painful revelations of Troilus and Cressida, the sexual chaos at the core of Hamlet, culminating in the exalted affirmation of marriage in The Tempest.
Wells is superb in his discussion of the density and the particularity of Shakespeare's exploration of love and sex, drawing attention again and again to the precision of his language: what a depth of erotic experience is betrayed, for example, in a line such as Cleopatra's, as she prepares to die bitten by an asp ("a pretty worm"): "The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch / Which hurts and is desired." Or the physical brutality of the Bawd's instruction to Boult in Pericles: "Crack the ice of her virginity." Or the extraordinary intimate tenderness of the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, which defies categorisation: "We cannot say," observes Wells, "that Shakespeare explicitly portrays a sexual relationship, but equally . . . we cannot deny that the text permits such a sub-textual reading." Shakespeare is the least black-and-white of writers, and the least judgmental.
Wells's concise and elegantly written book subtly and systematically illuminates Shakespeare's acknowledgment of the glory and the horror of what it is to be fully human, the unceasing contradictions, the inescapably oxymoronic nature of our life, especially in this area of sex and love. It is his supremacy in this territory which makes him so much the greatest of writers, effortlessly eclipsing his closest rival for the crown, Charles Dickens.
Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles is published by Vintage.
