Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Sexy Was Shakespeare?

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

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.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. 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 betwixta 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 book. adults to other adults about adulty things in an adultery way covering a range of adults subjects and you should be an adult too right now we can crack on oh 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 by lovers withering as thy sweet self rowest You can throw many accusations at us here on betwixt, but you can't say that we're not fucking eyebrow after that. That was an excerpt from Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, 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, betwixtors, 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 home drum 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 the bard himself, William Shakespeare. And we're going to try and answer all of those questions and more. Oh, 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. 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? 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?

I'm very happy to be back. Thank you. You kidding me. I had so much fun talking to you 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. I can go lower. I can go lower. Well, we're definitely lower. Lower is good. That's where we're going for. And older, because we're talking about Shakespeare today. Yes, indeed. And you've invited me on 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. But you don't learn that at school. That comes to you, like, later on, if you go back to a university or a level, or if you watch a film or something, And then you suddenly realize how utterly filthy his plays are.

And they glossed over all of that in school, all of that for the betwixt, the twath and thou and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Nowhere did they point out that he's an absolute filth bag. Just last week, I was invited to talk to a bunch of primary school kids, year four. Oh, God, Anna, what did you do? 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 a very nice day. That's amazing. Anyway, so yes, primary school, Shakespeare. You just sat there just going. Shakespeare was a playwright. He wrote plays. He made things up.

He dressed up. And that's it. Full stop. 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? 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 going to stick with female genitals for the moment. And so much ado about nothing is what a fuss you're making about a woman's bit or countless, countless jokes about it. But those jokes are still made in some of the most serious moments of Shakespeare's tragedies. But... Can't help himself. 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 could you just go to Shakespeare trying to get a knob joke in at like the most serious honestly he does get a knob joke in whenever he can as it were I've never heard that nothing would 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 and deeply misogynistic thing that the vulva wasn't an organ in its own right it was a lack of a penis yeah because a cock is a thing and so shakespeare writes an entire sonnet about no thing nothing and thing oh my god he knows which one was it's thing It does. Yeah, it's this bizarre sort of talking about gentles that the vulva is just an absence of a penis.

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. Well, mine does anyway. One of the really interesting things that I found about Shakespeare, or I 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. I am liking that a lot because there's verbs that you read on the page like not acquainted with. And actually if you read it, not accunted 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 still? I am just a yes. 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's. 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. 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 fellows. When Othello is strangling Desdemonit, two fellows. And that must have given Shakespeare a bit of license to play around with other jokes that were going on there. 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 that comedies

he was writing at the end of the Elizabethan reign, 12th 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. He does that a lot, doesn't he?

Yeah. Yes, because there are loads of plays where girl characters dress up as boys. 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. 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. That makes me laugh because I do remember seeing somebody, some 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. Yeah, just no. Just absolutely no. I was desperately trying to find moments of,

of, as it were, lovely conventional, conservative home, family, man, woman, love moments. And they are very, very few and far between. I was thinking about that, 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 in to do a session on Hamler. I'm not going to say which school. I absolutely not, because they'd probably sue 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 were talking to each other. Or in fact, Hamlet was talking at Ophelia. Hamlet has 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.

That's interesting. 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. Okay. That is very interesting because Shakespeare is 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 conspiracy theories about, Oh, he didn't write any of it. It was actually Kit Malo. It was all blah, blah, blah. We don't know very much about the man himself. Yeah, correct.

Do you think he might have been gay? That's not a fair question. No, no, no. It's a really, really good point. Should we out him? We're going to out Shakespeare. Well, there's about 400 ways to answer that question, but I want to say two things,

or that grenade you've loved 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 of Middle England values and just wants to go home to Stratford? Or do we want to make him a kind of wild,

bisexual, crazy actor, a lovie 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. Just one line. We know fuck all. Next. 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 the work of genius such depth such complexity but he's pretty focused on the sex life of his mother who's not that old that is weird isn't he's really nasty and feel it he's got lots of theories about how terrible women are and he's got 101 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 scene through everything he wrote. I know that it's kind of trendy and interesting call 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. There is. There's a lot of it. 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. 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 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 brilliant studies of a very, very nasty older woman. Angers my meat, and I sup upon myself. This is a bitter woman. 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 burned to bed with. So manhug, yeah, this is actually better than my marriage. So that's just act one. Later on, let me twine my arms about that body where against my granid ash. It's a stick. My granite ash and hundred times broke 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 is 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 this nothing that I'm supposed to use. And there was a fisting reference in there as well.

And a throat reference, which, yes. Wow. Even like when you have to be careful that you're not reading things from a modern perspective, that still sounds quite gay to me. Yes, you'd get a bunch of scholars in the room and they would argue this one out. 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. It is really. 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, homeroticism,

and between women as well, but particularly between men. 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, excuse me, hello. 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, 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 traumatic life called two noble gunsmen. 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. Again, the language has got to do it all. Two generations later, you will get unpleasantly rape and exposure because you've got actresses are on stage and everybody likes seeing women take their clothes on. Is there any actual sex and 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? That is such a good question. and I'm not quite sure how to answer it, kind of the 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 Anthony and Cleopatra, I suppose. You get Cleopatra dressing up in Anthony's armour. What do we know about Shakespeare's actual sex life? Do we know anything? Because if 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? Short answer is no, except for, if we're looking at timelines, we know that 18-year-old Will is having sex with possibly mid-20s, Anne, in the summer of 1582. Really? 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 will 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. And they'll say, oh, he's traumatised, poor boy, it was a terrible marriage, he was forced into marriage, older woman, hag, hag even, 26, 27 to his young, sweet 18-year-old. Isn't it awful having three kids in two years and twins?

No wonder he had to escape. And so a play like Taming of the Shrew, good old James Joy. So I normally love, but he saw it as shrew-ridden Shakespeare, that Taming of the Shrew, which is deeply punitive and very unpleasant treatment of Katrina, who's a feisty woman, is Shakespeare working out his unhappy marriage. That then morphed more recently into not only escaping an unhappy, a forced marriage, 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 want to challenge some of his ideas that William, sweet, sensitive, intellectual, clever, William couldn't really find what he was looking for in Anne. 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 would be impressive. He married Anne Hathaway.

They had some kids and he ended up in London. That's really all we know. And again, good old archaeologists. We like archaeologists because they deal with facts. Do. 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 Strattford 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. I'll be back with Anna after this

short break. What was that thing that in his will he famously left her his second best bed? Yes. That like to modern ears sounds very peculiar. What is that? 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 patriarch 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 31-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 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. Oh, no, what Jerry Springer shit is this? Yes. A month after the marriage. 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 having marriage. I guess 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 players. is 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. Yes. 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 whole times fickle glass and 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? One of my favorites is that he likes imagining these things, but he would never act on it. Oh, that's fun. Yes. Yes. He's imaginary gay. 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, 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. And I'm not saying let's ignore the racism, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, 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 girls turn back into boys and then maybe back into things, 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 a totally filthy place. But you're saying I'll have a bit of that. Can I read one sonnet? Oh, please do, yes. Because it's the one with acquainted in it, which you'll remember, it means something else. It's the really, really famous one,

which is Sonnet 20, 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 a fashion, 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.

And I'm more bright than theirs, less false enrolling. 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, work thou first created. So the speaker 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, fellow doting. 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, by addition, me of the 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 a word pricked in here, which means exactly what you think it is. And by addition, me of thee defeated. But 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. 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. I think what's kind of very astonishing about them to me is it, I've been over them and looked at them. And when you read something like that from one perspective, you first start as 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 through a male lover, like maybe he was commissioned to write them or something. But then you're going 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.

Yeah, I totally agree. As I say, I've seen every attempt to straighten out these poems and every single one of them fail. Yeah. Interestingly, I've also seen attempts to kind of smooth out the misogyny, the extreme hatred, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Spirit is semen. It's pretty bad, in it?

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. Oh, yeah, that goes right back to the ancient world. I think I was a mind that's been hanging around for a while, as it were. So the expense of spirit, you ejaculate is a waste. But it also means the waste 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. It's horrible. He isn't nice to women, really, Shakespeare, is he? No. So if we accept it, like, the man writing to another man, He really fancies them.

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, oh, really love you, like, are women of shit to shag. I want to, and all that stuff. Like, does that change our view? I think the misogyny, nobody would have battered out.

Oh, no, no, nobody cared about that. The but, as it were, is that it's always, but I can't. I see. So many of you 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. I've never written to a friend like that. No, no.

And also with friends, there aren't relentless jokes about cocks and nothings. 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. That's kicked it up a notch in my book with something else then, I think. There is also humour. There's an amazing poem which has got a phrase in it, which I've thought of at the most inappropriate moments.

It's 14 lines joking about his name. Now, we know William Shakespeare wrote the sonnets, 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. Wow. 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, 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 Marla writing a play about Edward II 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 homerotic series of poems. But what both those examples do is they distance in some way. So at the second, it's history, people. There's a bit of space. Richard Barnfield, it's pastoral poetry. These are shepherds and it all happened a long time ago.

This is what shepherds do. What is really interesting about Shakespeare. 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. We may not like what we're reading,

but it's happening here and now. These aren't shepherds and other shepherds. So tell me about the other notorious figure in these sonnets that's 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. Yeah.

I'm going to really spoil things, by saying, go on. 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 instruction of white critics. Yes, I know, I know. It's shocking 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, Amelia Bassano, who became Amelia Lanya, 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 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 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 and a completely different way. Who she was, I have absolutely no idea. And I really, really don't buy the whole thing that Shakespeare right into the thing is,

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 a real woman behind these sonnets. What I do think is that there's got to be,

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. 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, I've just imagined all of this? Have I hallucinated the whole thing? No, no, no. There are loads of sonnets towards the end of the sequence addressed to a woman.

Oh, thank God. I thought I'd had some kind of Shakespearean breakdown. My mistress's eyes and nothing like this like, yeah, my mistress, my mistress. Her, yes. 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? One of my favorite 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, was my black bet, or black loose, 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. 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 Shakespeare represents the sex industry in his plays. That's not me, I'm afraid. No, actually, no, I did write that. That's totally me. It's not. Yeah. 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, 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 doesn't matter this really is London, which is exactly what's going on in London at the time in 604. 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 fucker? I think an educated guess, and this is the problem is it's all guesswork, but I would be very,

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 buy in sex, weren't they? Yeah, I mean, the sex and theatre industry are absolutely symbiotic. No question about that at all. You haven't yet got the actresses being sex workers, cultured sounds, whatever we are 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.

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 no, that isn't what that word means and prick meant something completely different back then. It's an absolute smutfest. and yet we know so little about the man who actually wrote it next to nothing at all. 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 100 volumes of letters? For example, one of his contemporaries, one of the guys he worked with, Edward Alain, 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. Maybe that's an interesting point.

If suddenly you had the answers to everything, if it was just writing home to Anne about, you know, and explaining, oh, don't really fancy boys, I just got commissioned to write this thing. Yes. Maybe you're right. Maybe that would suddenly become quite dull, wouldn't it? 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 society's questions about these things. But I do need to come back to another. tender for the young man in the sonnets and then later on as the dedicatee for the sonnets when they were published. So they were written early in Shakespeare's career, 1590s and published 20 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. He's an earl, for goodness sake. That means he's got, you know, power, patch, patch, or rest of

bit. He's also profoundly, I want to say, feminine. There's a portrait of him that was only revealed to be of him in 2002. 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 increase to the Earl of Southampton. So you've got this connection. The only trouble is, this is where it gets a bit boring, is that a fantasy? I could dedicate my next book to you and hope for the glittering prizes that might fall

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. So 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, is 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. Oh, now that's just silly. So Earl of Southampton fits this template that you're talking about. He's sort of hiding in plain sight as a young man, master mistress, but as he gets older, it becomes more and more establishment. And Shakespeare, or whoever put out Shakespeare 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 Earl becomes too straight, too boring? or is it just because Shakespeare was running with a particular crowd in the early 5090s who were into their cross-dressing and trying to get a bit of patronage? 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 favourite note 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, that was unadulterated filth, explicit. it. And he had uncut versions. There were the cleaned up versions that the schoolboys had and then the uncut versions, always the same in culture. So he's got uncut Marshall and epigram 2.28, if you want to

look at 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. Yeah. Okay. I see. 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, philator and cunning. 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.

My favourite part about that entire story is the idea of somebody annotating their porn. I love it. That is Ben Johnson. That porn annotator. It's making little notes. You do it today. I'm just like, that's not what a builder looks like. He would never fix a washing machine without 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 favorite Shakespearean sex joke? What's the one that you might even laugh at? You know if you go and watch your 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 what's your favourite proper Shakespeare joke that would actually make you laugh? That is a curveball because so many of them are so nasty

and they make me sad. You laugh and then you go, oh, I'm horrible. Yeah, I'm a horrible, horrible person. I think I've already mentioned one them. I do love the sonnet about Will in Overplus. That'll do for me. But I think the fact that I'm really struggling with this, am I allowed to bring in another author? Yeah, yeah, you are absolutely. 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 tale of me. And for years I thought, oh, how beautiful the tale of me. It's my story.

Listen to me. And then I realised tail is penis. So have pity on my cock. And so I like that. If somebody used that line on me, it would work. Yes. That's that. Deal done.

Anna, you've just been amazing. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me on Twitter at Anna Rose Beer. Thank you so much for coming on and telling me all about rude Shakespeare. This has been amazing. Thank you very much indeed. But you've made me think, I need to find a joke that I actually think is funny. You need to find your favourite joke.

That is your homework assignment. Okay, thank you. 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 betwixt at history hit.com.

This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.