1. MARRIAGE
and Sex
William
Shakespeare18
Anne
Hathaway26
The legal age
for marriage
in Stratford
12
14
20-30
17-21
The usual age
for marriage
SEX AND LOVE IN POETRY
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece
are two erotic narrative poems by
Shakespeare that were immensely
famous during his lifetime. By 1636,
Venus and Adonis was reprinted in
sixteen different editions
“To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And, all in war with Time for love of you.
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.”
—Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15
RELATIONSHIPS
SEX IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
Emilia
Flavina
Many of the relationships between Shakespeare’s characters have
been commonly recognized as homoerotic to a certain degree:
Shakespeare creates many more unfaithful wives
than unfaithful husbands:
Queen Margaret
Lady Falconbridge
Tamora
Helen
Cressida
Emilia
Goneril
7Unfaithful
WIVES
4Unfaithful
HUSBANDS
Only a few bastards, children born to unwed
parents, exist in Shakespeare’s plays:
Bastard of Orleans
Cardinal Beaufort
Philip the Bastard
Don John
Thersites
Margareton
Edmund
7Bastard
CHILDREN
Measure for Measure features the widest range of
bawdy references to sexual liasions
oup.com/Shakespeare
Edmondson, Paul and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets
(2004), p. 30-31. Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and
Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977), p. 45, 49, 611, 615.
Wells, Stanley, Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (2010), p. 16.
EXPLICIT INNUENDOS
‘a game of tick-tack’
‘the rebellion of a codpiece’
‘groping for trouts
in a peculiar river’
‘longing for stewed prunes’
‘filling a bottle with a tundish’
SIMPLE INNUENDOS
‘do’‘handle’
‘embrace’
‘service’‘sport’
‘entertainment’
‘husbandry’
Shakespeare
wrote a
total of
154
SONNETS
Antonio
Bassanio
Richard II
Aumerle
Antonio
Sebastian
Achilles
Patroclus
Coriolanus
Aufidius
Palamon
Arcite
Celie
Rosalind
❤❤
Antipholus of Ephesus
Bertram
Gloucester
Mark Antony
20
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
strongly suggest a
MALE ADDRESSEE
7
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
strongly suggest a
FEMALE ADDRESSEE
❤
