Shakespeare and Sexuality

Shakespeare and Sexuality

Author: Catherine M. S. Alexander

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-09-20

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9780521804752

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This book draws together ten important essays which explore the significance of sexuality in Shakespeare's work.


Queer Shakespeare

Queer Shakespeare

Author: Goran Stanivukovic

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-07-13

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1474295274

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Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of the criticism of desire, body and sexuality in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare criticism and queer theory, this collection demonstrates the vibrancy of queer Shakespeare studies. Taken together, these essays explore embodiment, desire, sexuality and gender as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw critical energy from focused studies of time, language and nature. The Afterword extends these inquiries by linking the Anthropocene and queer ecology with Shakespeare criticism. Works from Shakespeare's entire canon feature in essays which explore topics like glass, love, antitheatrical homophobia, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.


Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality

Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality

Author: Alan Sinfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1134143265

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Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as a body of ongoing argument and as it informs particular works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially in relation to sexuality in early-modern England and queer theory. The book has several interlocking preoccupations: theories of textuality and reading the political location of Shakespearean plays and the organisation of literary culture today the operation of state power in the early-modern period and the scope for dissidence the sex/gender system in that period and the application of queer theory in history. These preoccupations are explored in and around a range of works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Throughout the book Sinfield re-presents cultural materialism, framing it not as a set of propositions, as has often been done, but as a cluster of unresolved problems. His brilliant, lucid and committed readings demonstrate that the ‘unfinished business’ of cultural materialism - and Sinfield’s work in particular - will long continue to produce new questions and challenges for the fields of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies.


Sex with Shakespeare

Sex with Shakespeare

Author: Jillian Keenan

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0062378732

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A provocative, moving, kinky, and often absurdly funny memoir about Shakespeare, love, obsession, and spanking When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her—until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare’s language flowing through her blood for the first time. In Sex with Shakespeare, she tells the story of how the Bard’s plays helped her embrace her unusual sexual identity and find a love story of her own. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, Keenan’s smart and passionate memoir brings new life to his work. With fourteen of his plays as a springboard, she explores the many facets of love and sexuality—from desire and communication to fetish and fantasy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Keenan unmasks Helena as a sexual masochist—like Jillian herself. In Macbeth, she examines criminalized sexual identities and the dark side of “privacy.” The Taming of the Shrew goes inside the secret world of bondage, domination, and sadomasochism, while King Lear exposes the ill-fated king as a possible sexual predator. Moving through the canon, Keenan makes it abundantly clear that literature is a conversation. In Sex with Shakespeare, words are love. As Keenan wanders the world in search of connection, from desert dictatorships to urban islands to disputed territories, Shakespeare goes with her —and provokes complex, surprising, and wildly important conversations about sexuality, consent, and the secrets that simmer beneath our surfaces.


Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare

Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare

Author: James M. Bromley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-12-22

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1139505327

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James Bromley argues that Renaissance texts circulate knowledge about a variety of non-standard sexual practices and intimate life narratives, including non-monogamy, anal eroticism, masochism and cross-racial female homoeroticism. Rethinking current assumptions about intimacy in Renaissance drama, poetry and prose, the book blends historicized and queer approaches to embodiment, narrative and temporality. An important contribution to Renaissance literary studies, queer theory and the history of sexuality, the book demonstrates the relevance of Renaissance literature to today. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 'problem comedies', Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton's The Nice Valour and Lady Mary Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and her prose romance The Urania, Bromley re-evaluates notions of the centrality of deep, abiding affection in Renaissance culture and challenges our own investment in a narrowly defined intimate sphere.


Shakespeare, Sex, and Love

Shakespeare, Sex, and Love

Author: Stanley Wells

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-04-08

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0199578591

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How does Shakespeare's treatment of human sexuality relate to the sexual conventions and language of his times? Pre-eminent Shakespearean critic Stanley Wells draws on historical and anecdotal sources to present an illuminating account of sexual behaviour in Shakespeare's time, particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. He demonstrates what we know or can deduce of the sex lives of Shakespeare and members of his family. He also provides a fascinating account of depictions ofsexuality in the poetry of the period and suggests that at the time Shakespeare was writing most of his non-dramatic verse a group of poets catered especially for readers with homoerotic tastes.The second part of Shakespeare, Sex, - and Love focuses on the variety of ways in which Shakespeare treats sexuality in his plays and at how he relates sexuality to love. Wells shows that Shakespeare's attitude to sex developed over the course of his writing career, and devotes whole chapters to 'The Fun of Sex' - to how he raises laughter out of the matter of sex in both the language and the plotting of some of his comedies; portrayals of sexual desire; to Romeo and Julietas the play in which Shakespeare focuses most centrally on issues relating to sex, love, and the relationship between them; to sexual jealousy, traced through four major plays; 'Sexual Experience'; and 'Whores and Saints'. A final chapter, 'Just Good Friends' examines Shakespeare's rendering of same-genderrelationships.


Desire and Anxiety (Routledge Revivals)

Desire and Anxiety (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Valerie Traub

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-11

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1317619749

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In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.


Sexuality in the Comedies of William Shakespeare

Sexuality in the Comedies of William Shakespeare

Author: Stephen P. Thompson

Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC

Published: 2014-04-25

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0737769823

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This fascinating edition examines the comedies of playwright William Shakespeare through the lens of sexuality. Essays explore topics such as the ambiguity of Shakespeare's sonnets, Renaissance attitudes toward sexuality, themes of misogyny in Taming of the Shrew, and sexual anxiety in Much Ado About Nothing. Modern perspectives on sexuality and courtship are also presented, covering subjects such as social media and dating, modern mythology about the differences between genders, and a decline in American romantic comedies.


Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare

Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare

Author: Evelyn Gajowski

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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This collection of essays by an international group of prominent scholars explores, for the first time, the implications of presentism for issues of sexual orientation and gender in Shakespeare's texts. It offers crucial insights into our present professional, theoretical, political, and social moment, as well as readings of particular texts.


Sexual Types

Sexual Types

Author: Mario DiGangi

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-11-29

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0812205154

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Sexual types on the early modern stage are at once strange and familiar, associated with a range of "unnatural" or "monstrous" sexual and gender practices, yet familiar because readily identifiable as types: recognizable figures of literary imagination and social fantasy. From the many found in early modern culture, Mario DiGangi here focuses on six types that reveal in particularly compelling ways, both individually and collectively, how sexual transgressions were understood to intersect with social, gender, economic, and political transgressions. Building on feminist and queer scholarship, Sexual Types demonstrates how the sodomite, the tribade (a woman-loving woman), the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the court favorite function as sites of ideological contradiction in dramatic texts. On the one hand, these sexual types are vilified and disciplined for violating social and sexual norms; on the other hand, they can take the form of dynamic, resourceful characters who expose the limitations of the categories that attempt to define and contain them. In bringing sexuality and character studies into conjunction with one another, Sexual Types provides illuminating new readings of familiar plays, such as Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale, and of lesser-known plays by Fletcher, Middleton, and Shirley.