Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society How Sexy Was Shakespeare? About this episode There's a bit of interest around Shakespeare at the minute - can we call this the Paul Mescal effect?
The Bard’s work featured many references to sex and sexuality - some more obvious than others. But what does the work reveal about the sexuality of Shakespeare himself?
Despite being married with three kids to Anne Hathaway in the sleepy suburbs of Stratford-upon-Avon, there’s much to suggest he lived a more extravagant life during his visits to London.
Joining Kate today is author of The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare, Anna Beer, to unpick the hints and clues to the playwright’s sexuality that lay within his work.
This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. How are you doing? I hope everything has been okay and that the chaos is starting to subside. And in order to get you through the festive period, we are here with another episode of Betwixt the Sheets. But you know what's coming before I can let you enter the hallowed vaults of Betwixt the Sheets? Yeah, it's the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, spoken from adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Right, now we can crack on!
1:09 Speaker 01 O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power doth hold time's fickle glass, is sickle hour, who hast by waning grown, and therein showest thy lovers withering as thy sweet self growest.
1:29 Kate Lister? You can throw many accusations at us here on Betwixt, but you can't say that we're not fucking highbrow after that. That was an excerpt from Shakespeare's Sonnet 126, and is the case with many of his love sonnets. It was written by a man to another man. You may well raise your eyebrows, betwixters, but what can this tell us about the man who wrote it? And his sexuality, his sexual leanings? Can it tell us anything at all? Was he happily married with three kids, living a houndrum life in Stratford-upon-Avon? Or was he living life on the wild side in London? Today, we are slipping between the Shakespearean sheets to find out about the sex life of
2:13 Kate Lister? the bard himself, William Shakespeare. And we're going to try and answer all of those questions and more.
2:42 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. I don't usually associate William Shakespeare with being a particularly private man. I mean, he wrote over 150 sonnets about love. Hmm. The thing is, and it's really weird, we don't really know very much about his love life at all. We don't know much about him, really, considering how influential he's been. So, ahead of watching Hamlet, we thought that we would take another look at this chat I had with Anna Beer, cultural historian and biographer about the man himself. What can we find out about Shakespeare's love life from his writing? Anything? Anything at all? What do we know outside of that?
3:24 Kate Lister? Well, let's get our ruffs on and find out. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Anna Beer. How are you?
3:41 Speaker 02 I'm very happy to be back. Thank you.
3:43 Kate Lister? You're kidding me. I had so much fun talking to you last time. The last time I spoke to you, I found out that Jane Austen made an anal sex joke and I don't know how I've lived this long and not known that.
3:53 Speaker 02 I can go lower. I can go lower.
3:58 Kate Lister? Well, we're definitely lower. Lower is good, that's what we're going for. And older, because we're talking about Shakespeare today.
4:05 Speaker 02 Yes, indeed. And you've invited me to talk about Shakespeare and sex and I was trying to think, when does he not write about sex? It just seems it's everywhere.
4:14 Kate Lister? But you don't learn that at school. That comes to you like later on if you go back to university or A level, or if you watch a film or something, then you suddenly realise how utterly filthy his plays are. And they glossed over all of that in school, all of that for the betwixt, betwath and the how and da, da, da, da, da. Nowhere did they point out that he's an absolute filthbag.
4:35 Speaker 02 Just last week, I was invited to talk to a bunch of primary school kids, year four.
4:40 Kate Lister? Oh god, Anna, what did you do?
4:41 Speaker 02 About Shakespeare. And I just thought, there's absolutely nothing I can say. Nothing, nothing. Everything. And every word I said had a double meaning in my own head and I had to sort of keep very, very.
4:52 Kate Lister? That's amazing.
4:53 Speaker 02 Anyway, so, yes. Primary school Shakespeare.
4:55 Kate Lister? You just sat there just going Shakespeare was a playwright, he wrote plays.
5:00 Speaker 02 He made things up, he dressed up and that's it, full stop.
5:04 Kate Lister? Are there any plays where he's not making rude smutty jokes, like the really serious tragedy ones or the royal history, or is it just an absolute smut fest from start to finish?
5:15 Speaker 02 That's a really good question, because I was thinking about a word that crops up over and over again, the word nothing. And by the way, the word nothing usually refers to female genitals, apparently, I've been swatting up on this, it can refer to male genitals as well. But we're just gonna stick with female genitals for the moment. And so much ado about nothing is what a fuss you're making about a woman's bits or countless, countless jokes about it. But those jokes are still made in some of the most serious moments of Shakespeare's tragedies, but
5:47 Kate Lister? Can't help himself.
5:48 Speaker 02 Having said that, there is a line that Shakespeare doesn't cross, and I'm thinking of King Lear, which is possibly the most traumatic play written in the English language. And Cordelia, virtuous, perfect Cordelia says the word nothing to her father. And I refuse, I refuse to see that as smut, okay?
6:10 Kate Lister? I've just got a sort of Shakespeare trying to get a knob joke in it like the most serious.
6:14 Speaker 02 Honestly, he does get a knob joke in whenever he can, as it were.
6:18 Kate Lister? I've never heard that nothing was slang for the vulva, and I've heard a lot of vulva slang. That is fascinating. Is that from this kind of like really weird ancient deeply misogynistic thing that the vulva wasn't an organ in its own right, it was a lack of a penis?
6:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, because a cock is a thing. And so Shakespeare writes an entire sonnet about no thing, nothing and thing. And he knows which one he wants.
6:46 Kate Lister? Yeah, it's this bizarre sort of talking about genitals, that the vulva is just an absence of a penis.
6:51 Speaker 02 It's a lack, it's a lack, it's the absence of the thing. And most of the words that are used around female body parts are about lack, about absence, about horror, holes, rings, things that suck men in and destroy them.
7:07 Kate Lister? Well, mine does anyway.
7:10 Kate Lister? One of the really interesting things I found about Shakespeare, or found out about Shakespeare, is that the way it's spoken on stage normally, or in film stuff, it wouldn't have actually sounded like that at the time. His dialect would have been different, the words would have been pronounced different. And there's a whole movement at the moment, and I forget the name of the professor who does it, and I'm really sorry, but I have read this, I promise. But he is staging plays in the original dialect, and then suddenly the work gets even ruder. Because now, when the inflections and stuff, like when Hamlet says to Ophelia, "I think you mean country matters" or something, and then like in the original dialect cunt is really emphasised. So it might even be ruder than we think it is.
7:51 Speaker 02 I am liking that a lot, because there's verbs that you read on the page, like "not acquainted with". Now, actually, if you read it, "not a cuntid with", the speaker is describing a man who does not have a cunt. And that's the whole thrill of this man. He doesn't have a cunt, he has a thing. Are you following this, dear?
8:12 Kate Lister? Yes.
8:16 Speaker 02 So I love that. There's also the whole business about staging, that you can bring the filth alive through staging. But at the same time, this is my historical brain working here. Yes, the language is doing loads of filthy work, relentlessly, even in the most inappropriate moments. But we've got to remember that back in Shakespeare's time, it was young boys playing the women's parts. And so there wasn't any physical expression, bodily expression, of woman on stage, of femaleness, as it were. So maybe that's why the language has to work so hard to draw attention, to create the sexy bits.
8:54 Kate Lister? Well, I often forget that, that the original, it would have been an all male cast. So even when like Romeo and Juliet are kind of, you know, having their pillow talk first thing in the morning, it would have been two fellas. When Othello is strangling Desdemona, it's two fellas. And that must have given Shakespeare a bit of licence to play around with other jokes that were going on there.
9:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're all the filthy jokes about sex, but there's also the playfulness, actually more joyous playfulness around gender in Shakespeare's works. And not just in the comedies, but particularly in the comedies he was writing at the end of the Elizabethan Reign, Twelfth Night, things like that. So you've got a boy actor dressing up as a girl to be on stage, and then... The girl character dressing up as a boy and then possibly going back to being dressed as a girl. I've already lost track, but the point is, gender is completely fluid.
9:43 Kate Lister? No, he does that a lot, doesn't he?
9:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:46 Kate Lister? Yes, because there are loads of plays where girl, girl characters dress up as boys. And that, that's like a big joke, but you forget that it's actually a boy in the first place disguised as a girl who's now pretending to be a boy, marrying somebody else who's, oh, it's very confusing.
9:59 Speaker 02 It's very confusing and like all the filthy jokes, a lot of them, I could get quite cross about actually, like you were saying about nothing, pretty reductive in their view of females' bodies. And I could give you hundreds of quotes about really nasty descriptions of heterosexual sex. But as I say, when it comes to gender, how we live as men and women, Shakespeare has fun. A lot of that nastiness really disappears.
10:23 Kate Lister? That makes me laugh because I do remember seeing somebody, some um, twit on Twitter, of which there are many, trying to make the claim that we should be more like Shakespeare somehow, that, you know, great works of literal, very heteronormative. It was just like, you're fucking kidding.
10:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, just no, just absolutely no. I was desperately trying to find moments of, as it were, lovely, conventional, conservative, home, family, man, woman, love moments. And they are very, very few and far between. And I was thinking about that. And oh, I have to tell you, I have to tell you, one of the slightly cheeky things I've done is occasionally I get invited into the great schools of England, which tend to be boys' schools and tend to be very, very expensive. Anyway, I was invited to do a session on Hamlet. I'm not going to say which school. I absolutely not because they're probably suing me. And I had this group of teenage boys playing scenes from Hamlet. And one had to be Hamlet and the other one had to be Horatio. And then I did a couple of scenes where Hamlet and Ophelia
11:20 Speaker 02 were talking to each other, or in fact, Hamlet was talking at Ophelia. There's a lot of that. And they experienced it and they were man enough, boy enough to admit it, that the real love shown in that play is between Hamlet and Horatio, between two men.
11:36 Kate Lister? That's interesting.
11:37 Speaker 02 And there's not much love around going on between Hamlet and Ophelia, even though that relationship is very important. So looking for the love in Shakespeare's plays, again and again, I come back to close friendships between men.
11:54 Kate Lister? Okay, that is very interesting because that.
11:58 Kate Lister? Shakespeare, he's a difficult character to get hold of because I might be wrong about this, but we don't know much about him, the actual person. And that's why there's all these like conspiracy theories about, oh, he didn't write any of it. It was all, it was actually Kit Marlowe. It was all blah, blah, blah. We don't know very much about the man himself.
12:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, correct.
12:15 Kate Lister? Do you think he might have been gay? That's not a fair question.
12:18 Speaker 02 No, no, no. It's a really, really good point.
12:20 Kate Lister? Shall we out him? We're gonna out Shakespeare.
12:22 Speaker 02 Well, there's about four hundred ways to answer that question, but I wanna say two things. All that grenade you've lobbed into the conversation. I'll start with, we know so little about William Shakespeare's life. There are no letters from him. There are no letters to him. We have a few shreds of documentary evidence that you can put together and work out that he evades his taxes. And he makes a will and we're not even absolutely sure when he was born. But into that vacuum, into that space, into that nothing, we all project what we want Shakespeare to be like. So it's not just about authorship. It's also do we want him to be a happily married heterosexual guy? Who's really in touch with middle England values and just wants to go home to Stratford?
13:05 Speaker 02 Or do we want to make him a kind of wild bisexual crazy actor, lovey in London, escaping domesticity and all those kids? So whichever way you go, and it's the same with saying, what was he in terms of his sexual identity, what we would say sexual identity? And that brings me to my second big point, and I've grappled with this. I have grappled because I had to write a biography of Shakespeare and talk about Poison's Chalice, but.
13:30 Kate Lister? Just, just one line. We know fuck all. Next.
13:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, yes. Move on, people. But do we read from the plays to the man? Do I look at, say, Hamlet the character? And say, Hamlet has got a lot of problems. He's brilliantly written. Of course he's brilliant. It's a work of genius. Such depth, such complexity, but he's pretty focused on a sex life of his mother who's not that old.
13:55 Kate Lister? That is weird, isn't it?
13:57 Speaker 02 Really nasty and villainous. He's got lots of theories about how terrible women are. And he's got a hundred and one fears about his own masculinity. He's so terrified that he's not a real man. Now, do I say, hmm, Hamlet, interesting character there? That must be Shakespeare. Or if that's true, then is he also Cleopatra? Is he also Coriolanus? Is he also? That's what troubles me about the reading from the plays to the life. But what we can say, is what we came in on, is that Shakespeare cannot resist putting filth into his plays, and he's got a fascination with sex and gender that runs like a seam through everything he wrote.
14:34 Kate Lister? I know that it's kind of trendy and interesting, cool to go back and do a queer reading of texts, and believe me, I've done my fair share of it, but there's a lot of it in Shakespeare.
14:42 Speaker 02 There is.
14:43 Kate Lister? There's a lot of it.
14:45 Speaker 02 I was of the generation that perhaps a few of the bawdy jokes were explained to me with diagrams, but queer sex, no, no, no, no. And Shakespeare makes it easy to say no, no, no, because he tends to give us utterly heteronormative endings. Yeah, male female couples get together in marriage. It's just that when you actually look at what's come before, I was checking up a few of my queer moments, as it were, and it's not just the cross-dressing, though that is glorious and fun and unresolved, which I think is the queerest thing about it. I think if you look at a character like Coriolanus, the play is one of Shakespeare's Roman plays, it's set in Roman times, remember the Romans and the Greeks had absolutely no problem with male male sexual activity.
15:28 Speaker 02 So Shakespeare, and all these contemporaries have got this, how do I use stories from that time when this was okay, in my time when this is absolutely not okay? And what's interesting is that he does not drop that, he doesn't tone it down, he actually ramps up the homosexual desire and makes it very, very explicit. For example, a character called Orphidius, I could read, if you actually want to hear some of Orphidius's sexual fantasies about our hero Coriolanus, who by the way is happily married, but that, as we know, doesn't mean a thing. So Coriolanus has quite a few problems with women, he's got the mother from hell, it's one of the most brilliant studies of a very, very nasty older woman, angers my meat and I sup upon myself, this is a bitter woman.
16:12 Speaker 02 He's got a completely non-entity of a wife, these women are just not important to the play. But his real emotional attachment is to the men he goes to battle with, his opponents, the men he fights with, he's a soldier through and through. And when they meet, they say, oh, let me clip ye in arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart as merry as when our nuptial day was done and tapers burnt to bed with. So man hug, yeah, this is actually better than my marriage. So that's just act one.
16:42 Kate Lister? Ooh.
16:43 Speaker 02 Later on, let me twine mine arms about that body where against my grained ash, it's a stick, my grained ash and broken and scarred the moon with splinters. When they finally meet, this is late on in the play and everything's going wrong, except for this bromance. Orphidius, who's a very macho general, says, I have nightly since dreamt of encounters twixt thyself and me. We have been down together in my sleep, unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat and waked half dead with nothing. Now, I've suddenly, given our conversation earlier, is he actually saying, I'm a man having a wet dream about you, another man, but I wake up next to my wife, who's got
17:27 Speaker 02 this nothing that I'm supposed to use?
17:29 Kate Lister? And there was a fisting reference in there as well.
17:32 Speaker 02 And a throat reference, which, yes.
17:34 Kate Lister? Wow. Even like when you'd have to be careful that you're not reading things from a modern perspective, that still sounds quite gay to me.
17:43 Speaker 02 Yes, you'd get a bunch of scholars in the room and they would argue this and that. But one of the things I'm constantly remember, since I kind of live in the 16th century, is that this is a world in which our notions of privacy and intimacy and perhaps even love are irrelevant. So if you're a bloke and you're going to war, or you're going hunting, or if you're a servant, or you're a master, or you're just travelling, you are going to be living in close quarters with other men. You're going to be sleeping with them, you're going to be eating them. And, you know, maybe your clothes fall off from time to time and you have nice times together. And as long as you don't go public with that, as long as you don't make a song and dance about it, I mean, it's how English society has run for hundreds of years.
18:24 Kate Lister? It is, really.
18:25 Speaker 02 As long as you don't make a fuss about it, you can do whatever you like. What's interesting to me is that Shakespeare actually foregrounds, I think, more than many of his contemporaries, homoeroticism, and between women as well, but particularly between men.
18:37 Kate Lister? Does he do some lesbians as well? Because they often get missed out of this kind of stuff. You know, it's all gay, gay, gay, and then the lesbians are stood there going, um, excuse me, hello.
18:47 Speaker 02 You do have the problem of these boy actors again, in that you're just simply not going to get quite such a free song. If it's two boys playing girls who are getting on with each other. But I had to dig hard to find the lesbian free songs. They are there, but most notably perhaps in the final play that Shakespeare co-authored right at the end of his dramatic life called Two Noble Kinsmen. And yeah, you have to look pretty hard for girl on girl action. It's fairly easy to find male characters who are in love with another man. Of course, just as you're not going to get real life sex simulated on stage, because remember, these are boys acting women, you're not going to get anything obvious.
19:31 Speaker 02 Again, the language has got to do it all. Two generations later, you will get unpleasantly rape and exposure, you know, because you've got actresses on stage and everybody likes seeing women take their clothes off.
19:40 Kate Lister? Is there any actual sex in any of Shakespeare's plays? Like actual stage directions, like kissing and fondling? Or is it all just implied and suggestive? Is there any physical contact between the characters?
19:53 Speaker 02 That is such a good question, and I'm not quite sure how to answer it kind of chapter and verse. There's certainly moments when there's a phrase like, I'll stop your mouth. And the editors of the play will say, right, that means Benedict should kiss Beatrice. Shut up, woman, I'm going to kiss you. And depending on how you look at that, that's either being a sexual predator or it's a really sexy moment. So there are these moments of kissing, but actual bed scenes, you could get pretty close with somebody like Antony and Cleopatra, I suppose. You get Cleopatra dressing up in Antony's armour.
20:31 Kate Lister? What do we know about Shakespeare's actual sex life? Do we know anything? Because we can go through his plays and go, that's a bit gay, or that's a bit lesbian, or that's a bit saucy. But do we know anything about his sex life at all?
20:45 Speaker 02 Short answer is no, except for, if we're looking at timelines, we know that eighteen year old Will is having sex with possibly mid twenties Anne.
20:56 Speaker 02 In the summer of fifteen eighty two.
20:58 Kate Lister? Really?
20:58 Speaker 02 Yes, and they are not married. So I think that's probably it. We know that because a baby arrived the next spring. And in between time, the happy couple got married and then twins followed a couple of years later. So I think that the only thing I can say with certainty is that Shakespeare had sex with Anne Hathaway. And they produced three children between them. Beyond that, I cannot say anything, but but but but. What is fascinating is what we even do with those shreds of information in that. A lot of people look at Shakespeare's early plays, by which time he's gone to London to make his career as an actor and then a playwright.
21:40 Speaker 02 And they'll say, oh, he's he's traumatized, poor boy. It was a terrible marriage. He was forced into marriage, older woman, hag, hag even, twenty six, twenty seven, his young, sweet, eighteen year old. Isn't it awful having three kids in two years and then and and twins? No wonder he had to escape. And so a play like Taming the Shrew, good old James Joyce, who I normally love, but he saw it as shrew ridden Shakespeare. The Taming of the Shrew, which is deeply punitive and very unpleasant treatment of Caterina, who's a feisty woman, is Shakespeare working out his unhappy marriage. That then morphs more recently into not only is he escaping an unhappy, a forced marriage.
22:19 Speaker 02 But of course, he is bisexual stroke homosexual. And I mean, I've read things from Stephen Greenblatt, for example, who's written a wonderful biography, but my god, I wanna. Challenge some of his ideas that William, sweet, sensitive, intellectual, clever William couldn't really find what he was looking for in Anne.
22:37 Kate Lister? It's a lot of guessing going on there, isn't there? I mean, considering all we know is he married Anne Hathaway, not the actress, that'd be impressive. But he married Anne Hathaway, they had some kids and he ends up in London. That's really all we know.
22:51 Speaker 02 And again, good old archaeologists, we like archaeologists because they deal with facts.
22:55 Kate Lister? Do.
22:56 Speaker 02 Have now shown that the family home, I mean, Shakespeare was sending money home. He was going home to Stratford. He wasn't completely cut off in London from the family life. He couldn't be. And then he does retire there. And though I don't quite buy the soft focus thing, he's just, you know, lovely, contented elderly couple, bringing up their grandkids, all the rest of it. There is this sense that his life in London and his life in Stratford weren't like completely separate. He was pursuing his career and potentially with the support of his family. And Anne was running a very, very successful and complex home back in Stratford and doing very well, thank you.
23:38 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Anna after this short break.
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24:49 Kate Lister? What was that thing that in his will, he famously left her his second best bed?
24:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
24:54 Kate Lister? That like to modern ears, sounds very peculiar. What is that?
24:59 Speaker 02 It does. Well, again, give me 10 Shakespeare scholars and they'll all have different takes on this. A lot of ink has been spent on this and some people are saying, look, this has nothing to do with anything. Look at the big picture. What Shakespeare's doing is he's got two surviving daughters. As many people know, his one son died, the boy was only 11. So Shakespeare's got this problem. He's a bloke in a patriarchal society. He does not have male heirs. So he's doing a lot of shuffling around in his final months. He's got an extra problem in his final months. His thirty one year old on the shelf spinster daughter has finally got around to getting married, but a month after that marriage, which happens in Shakespeare's
25:40 Speaker 02 last year, her husband is up in the church courts for incontinence. He's been shagging somebody, there's a baby, and the woman has died in childbirth, the woman he's been having an affair with.
25:53 Kate Lister? Oh, no. What Jerry Springer shit is this?
25:56 Speaker 02 Yes, a month after the marriage. And so Shakespeare's making all these efforts to kind of secure his estate while his family life is kind of imploding. So I think the second best bed is like a red herring. I think William and Anne are fine by the standards of their time, but it's a really low bar for a happy marriage.
26:15 Kate Lister? I was guessing, there must be more to this than why so many people have felt the need to go, he was definitely gay, or at least he liked the fellas, than just, there's a lot of homoerotic subtext in some of his plays. And I suppose one of the biggest clues that people love to point to is his sonnets, and the fact that so many of them are inescapably addressed to a boy.
26:36 Speaker 02 Yes.
26:37 Kate Lister? It's not even ambiguous. It's he, he, he, and they're definitely love letters. Oh, my lovely boy, who in thy power does hold times fickle glass in his sickle hour, blah, blah, blah. It's definitely, beautiful boy, he's dead pretty, I might fancy a bit of him. And that has caused endless debate of people going, they're just good friends, stop it. You don't write to your friends like that. And then other people going, definitely gay. What's your take?
27:02 Speaker 02 One of my favourites is that he likes imagining these things, but he would never act on it.
27:06 Kate Lister? Oh, that's fun. Yes, yes. He's imaginary gay.
27:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, there are so many ways to straighten out Shakespeare's sonnets. It's astonishing. I've thought about this a lot. I love Shakespeare's sonnets. I love most of them. I've heard them read at heterosexual weddings. I chose one of Shakespeare's sonnets to read, When My Own Husband Died at His Funeral. This is how much I love his poetry. And for me, it was a great love poem. But, but, but, that love poem I was reading, as a heterosexual woman at my husband's funeral, is screamingly gay as well. And I think that, to me, is the glory of Shakespeare, is that. He gives us words, he gives us words to talk about, to explore all our experiences.
27:54 Speaker 02 And I'm not saying let's ignore the racism, the antisemitism, the misogyny. Um. It's all there, but there's still this sense in which, maybe the most radical thing is that a poem which is about male male love can still mean so much to people stripping out who's doing what to whom. In the same way, those plays where boys turn into girls and and girls turn back into boys and then maybe back into thee. Suddenly, gender and sexuality doesn't become quite as important. They don't become as crucial. Some other things go beyond that. I don't know. I might be sounding a bit woolly on this. Having said that, filth, yeah, the sonnet's far a bit totally filthy place. But you're saying I'll have a bit of that. Can I read one sonnet?
28:38 Speaker 02 Oh, please do, yes. Because it's the one with acquainted in it, which you'll remember means something else. It's the really, really famous one, which is sonnet twenty, and it begins, a woman's face with nature's own hand painted hast thou the master mistress of my passion. So this is an expression of desire, love, whatever we want to say, the master mistress of my passion to a male who looks female, a man who looks like a woman. And then the poem goes into a bit of a riff about, but you're better than women. We're back to all this misogyny, I'm afraid. A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted. The shifting change as is false women's fashion.
29:20 Speaker 02 And I'm more bright than theirs, less false in rolling. So you're better than a woman. You look like a woman, but you're better than them because they are essentially horrible, icky, false, whatever. And then this is either the tragedy of the poem or the humour or both. And for a woman were thou first created. So the speaker's saying, you know, this beautiful creature, this master mistress of my passion was originally created as a woman. But then nature, as she wrought thee, fell adoting. So nature herself, capital N, loved this beautiful woman so much. Now, nature is female, nature cannot have same-sex love, so nature turns her into a man. And this is the key bit. And by addition. Add a cock.
30:04 Speaker 02 By addition, me of thee defeated. I mean, I will finish the poem in a second, but this idea that simply because this man has a penis, their passion is defeated. I mean, it's painful. And then I'll just read the last few lines, and now you're completely fluent in these words about nothing, you'll see. And there's word pricked in here, which means exactly what you think it is. And by addition, me of thee defeated. By adding one thing to my purpose, nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure, mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure. So this is a man with a penis, women will use him.
30:49 Speaker 02 He will use women. It's a pretty reductive view of sex. The speaker's love for the man is not sexual. Because it cannot be, it cannot be, it is not permitted in the world in which this poem is written.
31:02 Kate Lister? I think what's kind of very astonishing about them to me is that I've been over them and looked at them. And when you read something like that from one perspective, your first thought is a historian is like, calm down, there might be another reason. And you try and go through them, like I was thinking, well, maybe these are poems written from a woman's perspective to a male lover. Like maybe he was commissioned to write them or something, but then you go in through them and it's like, no, it's not though. Because he's quite clearly addressing a boy as a man. And it's inescapable, isn't it? It's right there. This is a love letter from a man to another man.
31:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, I totally agree. As I say, I've seen every attempt to straighten out these poems and every single one of them fail.
31:39 Kate Lister? Yeah.
31:40 Speaker 02 Interestingly, I've also seen attempts to kind of smooth out the misogyny, the extreme hatred, the expensive spirit in a waste of shame. Spirit is semen.
31:51 Kate Lister? It's pretty bad, isn't it?
31:52 Speaker 02 And you can tell me whether this is actually true. I've read somewhere that if a man ejaculates. The belief was at that time, they lost five minutes or an hour of their life.
32:00 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah, that goes right back to the ancient world.
32:03 Speaker 02 I think that's been hanging around for a while, as it were. So the expense of spirit ejaculate is a waste. But it also means the waist is the middle area of the woman. So sex between a man and woman is just a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of spirit. And it's horrible.
32:18 Kate Lister? He isn't nice to women, really, Shakespeare, is he?
32:21 Speaker 02 No.
32:21 Kate Lister? So if we accept that, like, the man writing to another man, he really fancies him. But what does that tell us about same-sex relationships at that time? Because, you know, it's tempting to think that it's all fire and brimstone and thou shalt not and, you know, people being executed for this stuff. But here he is, just writing, I really love you, like, women are shit to shag, I wanna, and all that stuff. Like, does that change our view?
32:45 Speaker 02 I think the misogyny, nobody would have batted an eye.
32:47 Kate Lister? Oh, no, no one would have cared about that.
32:48 Speaker 02 The but, as it were, is that it's always, but I can't.
32:52 Kate Lister? I see.
32:53 Speaker 02 I mean, so many people have said, this is just a ramped up version of male male friendship. They're just good friends. And I've seen that over and over.
32:58 Kate Lister? I've never written to a friend like that.
33:00 Speaker 02 No, no. And also with friends, there aren't relentless jokes about cocks and nothings and.
33:06 Kate Lister? No. If a friend wrote to me and said that they wanted to come on my stomach, but that would be a waste, I would not consider them a friend anymore.
33:15 Kate Lister? That's kicked it up a notch in my book with something else, then, I think.
33:19 Speaker 02 There is also humour. There's an amazing poem, which has got a phrase in it, which I I've thought of at the most inappropriate moments. It's fourteen lines joking about his name. Now, we know William Shakespeare wrote this on it, but there's a character, the speaker is suddenly identified as Will. And Will means penis, but it can also confusingly mean vagina and desire and all sorts of other things. And so if you look at that poem, it says, I offer you Will in over plus. And I just love that. And that is being offered to the woman. Yes, I'll take Will in over plus, whatever that might mean. There's a kind of playfulness in that poem that you don't get that often in the sonnets. So what would people at the time have made of Shakespeare playing these games with language,
34:04 Speaker 02 with sexuality, with gender, what have you? Well, the truth is that other people were doing it in more obvious ways. You've got Christopher Marlowe writing a play about Edward the Second and having Edward the Second, a king, being killed by a hot poker up his bum. Yeah, this is not happy stuff. You've got a poet called Richard Barnfield writing an openly explicitly homoerotic series of poems. But what both those examples do is they distance in some way. So Edward the Second, it's history, people. There's a bit of space.
34:36 Kate Lister? Yes.
34:37 Speaker 02 Richard Barnfield, it's pastoral poetry. These are shepherds and it all happened a long time ago.
34:42 Kate Lister? This is what shepherds do.
34:44 Speaker 02 Interesting about Shakespeare is he brings it here now to the streets of London, to a world of sexually transmitted diseases, of pubs and bars and what have you, and actors fighting amongst themselves. And I think in a way that's one of his bravest steps.
35:00 Kate Lister? I think so.
35:00 Speaker 02 We may not like what we're reading, but it's happening here and now, not, these aren't shepherds and other shepherds.
35:06 Kate Lister? So tell me about the other notorious figure in these sonnets that has had people for hundreds of years going, it might be this person, it might be this person, the dark lady that he writes to a lot. I mean, there's been so much speculation about who is this dark lady?
35:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm going to really spoil things by saying.
35:23 Kate Lister? Oh, yeah, go on.
35:23 Speaker 02 The word dark is only used once in the sonnets and it might not even refer to the woman. And the word lady is never used. So the dark lady as an idea is a complete destruction of.
35:35 Kate Lister? What?
35:36 Speaker 02 White critics.
35:37 Kate Lister? What?
35:37 Speaker 02 Yes, I know, I know. It's shocking when I, when I found that out. And the reason I found that out is because I was working on one of the contenders to be the dark lady, Emilia Bassano, who became Emilia Lagna, a poet in her own right. And certainly was kind of around at the same time, but the dates don't quite work. So the dark lady is another one of these things. We've just become obsessed with something that really isn't actually in the poem. What there is, is a woman character who is desired by the speaker against his will. Lots of puns intended. He hates himself for desiring this woman and.
36:14 Speaker 02 They sometimes have sex, they sometimes don't have sex. Sometimes she has sex with his friends, sometimes she's angry with them. It's a brilliant study of a profoundly dysfunctional, utterly sexual relationship, whereas the other relationship with the young man is dysfunctional in a completely different way. Who she was, I have absolutely no idea. And I really, really don't buy the whole thing that Shakespeare would write into the thing. He's, oh, he has venereal disease in 1602, and that's why Anne won't have him back. And that's what the word stain in sonnet X means. We're picking out one word and saying, well, that means he's got syphilis or something like that. So in answer to your question, I don't think there's
36:55 Speaker 02 a real woman behind these sonnets. What I do think is that there's got to be, and this is deeply unprofessional of me as an academic to say. I like unprofessional. It's back to what you're saying. The energy and the intensity of those poems of longing, of desire, of frustration, of love towards the young man, the beautiful young man. I think that's got to be, even if we're being completely cynical, is to impress some young nobleman, somebody with money, somebody who's going to finance his next play, maybe. But I still think there might have been a real young man.
37:32 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
38:05 Speaker 02 I'm still reeling from the fact that you've just said there's no dark lady. There is a sonnet to her, though, isn't it? Isn't there what? Have I just imagined all of this? Have I hallucinated the whole thing?
38:13 Kate Lister? No, no, no. There are loads and loads of sonnets towards the end of the sequence addressed to a woman.
38:18 Speaker 02 Oh, thank God. I thought I'd had some kind of Shakespearean breakdown. My mistress's eyes are nothing like that. Yeah, my mistress, my mistress.
38:25 Kate Lister? Her, yes.
38:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's a mistress, there's a character. And in all these sonnet sequences, you've got a cast of characters, and this is true of Philip Sidney and Richard Barnfield, all the rest of it, who are kind of bed hopping. It's like a soap opera. So, yeah, there is a mistress in there who is female and has female body parts. And there's a relationship that goes on. But there's this one moment that it says her hairs are like wires. People have extrapolated out from that. She's described as hell, which is not quite the same thing as saying that she's dark skinned, black, Jewish, whatever, you know, we're going to interpret dark as. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? How much has been written about this woman?
39:04 Kate Lister? One of my favourite theories about the dark lady is that she was a real sex worker who was working in a brothel near the Globe Theatre, who went by the name of, I think it's like Black Bet or Black Luce, I think, was her name, who actually is in the historical records. I was so invested in that story. I want that to be true.
39:22 Speaker 02 I want that to be true as well, partly because I think there's a fascinating, and probably you've written it, and I'm going to put my foot in it, book of how how Shakespeare represents the sex industry in his plays.
39:35 Kate Lister? That's not me, I'm afraid. No, actually, no, I did write that. That's totally me. It's not.
39:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:42 Speaker 02 I mean, one of the great things about Shakespeare is that his plays are so open to interpretation, and not just because they're plays and they're going to be performed, but because there are kind of fault lines in almost everything, and it allows us to do what we want with it. But that's true of his representation of sex workers, of punks, whores, whatever it's called.
40:01 Kate Lister? Hmm.
40:01 Speaker 02 Particularly in Measure for Measure, a play that intrigues me. It's a regime change play. It's the only play, again, that Shakespeare sets in a city that looks a bit like London. It begins with the idea that the brothels in the play are going to be torn down as a kind of clean up London act. It's set in Vienna, but it doesn't matter. This really is London, which is exactly what's going on in London at the time in sixteen oh four. And so Shakespeare's taking topical stuff and he's setting his play in these brothels that are condemned, the people in them are condemned. But the only trouble is, follow your own logic. Does that mean if you have sex with a prostitute, you're going to hell in all sorts of ways? Literally going to hell every time you fuck her.
40:41 Kate Lister? So I think an educated guess, and this is the problem, is it's all guesswork, but I would be very, very surprised if Shakespeare and his contemporaries didn't have immediate associations with the sex industry of London because theatres were notorious cruising grounds for people selling sex and buying sex, weren't they?
40:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, the the sex and theatre industry are absolutely symbiotic, no question about that at all. You haven't yet got the actresses being sex workers, culture sounds, whatever we want to call them, which are going to a couple of generations later. But it was one of the number one reasons that moralists did not like theatre land, nor did they like boys dressing up as women, because of course that would encourage unnatural lusts in the audience.
41:22 Kate Lister? Of course. It's such a fascinating subject, isn't it? Because sex is inescapably woven throughout Shakespeare. Like even the best attempts to sanitise it and tell us that they were just good friends and and no, that isn't what that word means and prick meant something completely different back then. It's an absolute smut fest. And yet we know so little about the man who actually wrote it, next to nothing at all.
41:46 Speaker 02 And it's one of the reasons I think he's still so much part of our culture. I mean, would it help if there was a hundred volumes of letters? For example, one of his contemporaries, one of the guys he worked with, Edward Elaine, we've got letters from him to his wife and he calls her my good sweet mouse. And he writes to her about the garden and how much he's missing her. And it's absolutely lovely. But if we have those letters from Shakespeare, would it somehow make him a bit, I don't know?
42:11 Kate Lister? Maybe. That's an interesting point. If suddenly you had the answers to everything, if he was just writing home to Anne about, you know, and explaining, oh, I don't really fancy boys. I just got commissioned to write this thing and.
42:21 Speaker 02 Yes.
42:23 Kate Lister? Maybe you're right, maybe that would suddenly become quite dull, wouldn't it? If it was.
42:28 Speaker 02 Well, so it's this lovely blank canvas where we can project all our Shakespeare's on and all our own desires and all our own societies' questions about these things. But I do need to come back to another contender for the young man in the sonnets. And then later on, as the dedicatee for the sonnets when they were published. So they're written early in Shakespeare's career, fifteen nineties, and published twenty years later. Really very big gap for the time. In fact, they were completely out of fashion by the time they came out in print. But the Earl of Southampton, a lot of people think he is the man. You can look at it two ways. You can look at it cynically, professionally, practically. This is, he's an Earl for goodness sake. That means he's got, you know, power, patronage, money, all the rest of it.
43:10 Speaker 02 He's also profoundly, I want to say feminine. There's a portrait of him that was only revealed to be of him in two thousand and two. It was always thought to be of a lady until that point. So this is a man who presents as master mistress. So for all these reasons, and I should add, Shakespeare dedicates his first two volumes of poetry, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of the Grease, to the Earl of Southampton. So you've got this connection. The only trouble is, this is where it gets a bit boring. Yeah, is that a fantasy? I could dedicate my next book to you and hope for the glittering prizes that might fall
43:49 Speaker 02 from your celebrity status. But you might think, who the hell is this woman? You know, it's not necessarily going to work like that. There was a lot of speculative dedications going on, trying to get in with somebody. But nevertheless, in terms of the kind of gender bending, the master mistress things, the Earl of Southampton fits with that. To complicate matters, when he was younger, again, this is a trajectory you see for a lot, well, not a lot of men, but a healthy minority of men, is that they are experimental in their youth, shall we say. It's like Bill Clinton's not inhaling. And then tick, tick, tick the box, marries, has a good soldier's career. In fact, people say he can't be gay because he becomes a soldier.
44:29 Kate Lister? Oh, now that's just silly.
44:33 Speaker 02 So, Earl of Southampton fits this template that you're talking about. He's sort of hiding in plain sight as a young man, mastermistress, but as he gets older, he becomes more and more establishment. And Shakespeare, or whoever put out Shakespeare's sonnets, doesn't dedicate it to Earl of Southampton. And more importantly, the Folio edition is not dedicated to Earl of Southampton. So is that because, you know, it becomes too straight, too boring? Or is it just because Shakespeare was running with a particular crowd in the early 1590s who were into their crossdressing and
45:06 Kate Lister? Trying to get a bit of patronage.
45:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, just getting food on the table for the little kiddies back home in Stratford. I've got one more thing. I've just come across my
45:13 Kate Lister? Oh, go on, please.
45:14 Speaker 02 That had to be buried in a footnote and was certainly not going to be brought out for the year four school kids. You're asking, what would people have made of the very, very obvious sexual innuendos throughout Shakespeare's work? Well, not only do we not know about William Shakespeare's life, but he wrote almost nothing, in fact, zero, I'd say, about his own writing. He was not a self reflecting author. He didn't care whether his books came out. He had no interest in all that. Fortunately, we've got an example of somebody who's completely opposite, Ben Johnson, the guy who was mainly responsible for getting the plays out in print after Shakespeare's death. Ben Johnson, we know, collected that kind of classical literature, Latin literature,
45:54 Speaker 02 that was unadulterated filth, explicit. And he had uncut versions. There were the cleaned up versions that the schoolboys had, and then the uncut versions, always the same culture. So he's got Uncut Marshall and Epigram 2.28, if you want to look it up, people. And there's a guy in Epigram 2.28 who is abstaining from all the penetrative sexual activities. I'm reading from notes here. Okay.
46:21 Kate Lister? I see.
46:21 Speaker 02 And Marshall says, two possibilities remain, and then moves on. Ben Johnson, in his notes on this, he's annotating his erotic poetry, always the scholar notes in the margin that there are two possibilities, fellator and caniling. These are attentive readers, and I'm absolutely sure Ben Johnson knew Shakespeare, worked with him all the rest of it. They're in a world in which uncut versions of these classical works are circulating. And so perhaps we forget just how unprudish they were, the things they were reading were, and no wonder.
46:56 Kate Lister? My favourite part about that entire story is the idea of somebody annotating their porn. Which is solid.
47:01 Speaker 02 I has Ben Johnson, that porn annotator.
47:05 Kate Lister? Just making little notes.
47:10 Kate Lister? You do it today, I'm just like, that's not what a builder looks like. He would never fix her washing machine with that wrench. I'm not having this. Oh, and you've been so much fun to talk to. My final question for you, this might be a mean one. What is your favourite Shakespearean sex joke? What's the one that you might even laugh at? Like, you know, if you go and watch a Shakespeare play, everyone laughs really hard at the jokes to show that they got the jokes. And everyone else is sort of sat there going, I don't think I understood that. And then they go, well, you have to know Shakespeare. But like, what's your favourite proper Shakespeare joke that would actually make you laugh?
47:42 Speaker 02 Oh, that is a curve ball because so many of them are so nasty and they make me sad.
47:47 Kate Lister? You laugh and then you go, oh, I'm horrible.
47:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm a horrible, horrible person. I think I've already mentioned one of them. I do love the sonnet about Will in over plus.
47:55 Kate Lister? That's amazing.
47:56 Speaker 02 But I think the fact that I'm really struggling with this, I'm allowed to bring in another author.
48:02 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah, you are absolutely.
48:05 Speaker 02 So Philip Sidney also wrote his sonnets and he kicked off the whole craze for it 10 years before Shakespeare. And in there, it took me a long time to realise that this was a filthy joke. He's pleading with a woman, married woman, who he desires. He says, you know, you'll cry over something you read, you'll cry at the movies, but why won't you feel some pity for me? He ends the thing, I am not I, don't think of me as me, pity the tail of me. And for years I thought, oh, how beautiful the tail of me. It's my story. Listen to me, listen to me. And then I realised tail is penis. So have pity on my cock. And so I like, I like that. If somebody used that line on me, it would work. Yes.
48:45 Kate Lister? That's that.
48:48 Speaker 02 Deal done.
48:49 Kate Lister? Oh, Anna, you've just been amazing. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
48:54 Speaker 02 They can find me on Twitter at Anna Rose Beer.
48:58 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming on and telling me all about rude Shakespeare. This has been amazing.
49:04 Speaker 02 Thank you very much indeed. But you've made me think, I need to find a joke that I actually think is funny.
49:09 Kate Lister? You need to find your favourite joke. That is your homework assignment.
49:13 Speaker 02 Okay, thank you.
49:17 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Anna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are going to be finding out how single women could survive in medieval Britain and we'll be meeting Scotland's witch queen. If you would like us to explore a subject or if you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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