Shakespeare on Sex
How Will's Love Life Shaped the Plays and Liberated the World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Skyhorse Publishing
Publishing:2nd Jul '26
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 2nd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
“Of special interest.”—Sir Ian McKellen
In Shakespeare on Sex, readers will discover William Shakespeare as they have never seen him before: a rebellious playwright determined to challenge Elizabethan England’s sexual mores and champion the freedom of love. Drawing on the scandal of Shakespeare’s own shotgun wedding after he impregnated twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway when he was still a teenage minor in a time and place that prohibited premarital sex, this groundbreaking book reveals how sex was at the heart of his life and art.
Shakespeare filled his works with filthy jokes, lusty wordplay, and frank portrayals of sex and desire. But audiences today miss his peerless and purposeful smut, which flies by in iambic pentameter and Elizabethan slang. Shakespeare defied the restrictive laws of his day, giving voice to women, young lovers, and rebel hearts yearning for sexual liberation.
Shakespeare offered revolutionary counsel in play after play, advice that can still help us all. This bold book uncovers the untold story about Shakespeare’s mission to bring sexual liberation to the world’s stage; it also shows how his constant focus on sex formed the narrative arc of his career, linking his plays to documented facts about his life. The big reveal that ends the so-called authorship controversy is monumental.
“Of special interest.”
—Sir Ian McKellen
"If Norman Mailer—who had six wives, stabbed the second one, and went on to have four more—were with us still, he would relish and cherish Marc Berley’s speedy, elating, jubilating, dramatic excavations of Shakespeare’s daring ideas of chastity and fulfillment. Here is the living Bard far, far from the classroom and set on an intimate, vivid, and fearless stage."
—Cynthia Ozick, award-winning essayist and author of Trust, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers, and others
“A hilariously spicy journey through Shakespeare’s life and work. Berley’s thorough analysis is full of wit, plenty of spice, and a deep understanding of history and literature. Read with caution! You will never see Shakespeare the same again. This is the Shakespeare book the Bard himself would approve of.”
—Joe Gillard, author of The Little Book of Lost Words
“With clear and well-reasoned arguments, Marc Berley makes the case for Shakespeare not only as an advocate for liberation from the sexual restrictions of Elizabethan England, but as a man centuries ahead of his time on a wide array of issues relating to sex and sexuality. A fascinating read that shows a feminist Bard hiding in plain sight.”
—Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author
“In Shakespeare on Sex, Marc Berley challenges the centuries-old scholarly reflex of sanitizing the Bard, arguing that the central energy of Shakespeare's work is, quite simply, the smut. The book moves from play to play, restoring to each its erotic charge, often riotously so. Berley’s analyses are inventive and grounded...particularly about Will’s marriage to Anne Hathaway.... [Y]ou’ll find here a genuinely, eh, fresh take on Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre.”
—Jane Harrington, bestselling author of Women of the Fairytale Resistance
“The British catchphrase 'No sex please, we’re British' is a modern illusion. Berley's work reminds us that 400 years ago, Elizabethan audiences thought far more about sex than we like to admit, and that Shakespeare built that desire into language written for a Globe Theatre alive with smut, laughter, and sharp thinking!"
—James Cook, author of Authors in Type
ISBN: 9781510786462
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 455g
264 pages