Swindon Literature Festival - Stanley Wells

Stanley Wells, Swindon Arts Centre, Fri May 7, 2010

Doyen is the word for Prof. Stanley Wells. Approaching his eightieth birthday, he is still at it at the forefront of Shakespeare Studies.

His talk here explained the motivation behind, and methods involved, in the writing of his latest book, Shakespeare, Sex and Love. The main motivation was an irritation with studies that have gone 'over the top' in their readings of Shakespeare, finding references where none would have occured to the dramatist. He queried Jonathan Bate's assertion that the recent edition of the Complete Works, was the 'filthiest' yet, including all the most salacious readings of the texts, as if to advertise it as such. Wells is no prude, though. He just wants to get the balance right. In the same way, his Stratfordian crusades against the Oxfordian and other campaigns in the authorship debate, come from a deep vexation at the improbable proposals from those quarters. But Wells doesn't come across as particularly irascible in person. His lecturing style is comfortingly olde worlde and well-prepared and one can listen to him imagining oneself at Oxford, sometime perhaps in the 1950's, the boat chaps looking forward to a bit of a rah-rah with the rugger men and the frogging of some oiks after a few hearty pints in the pub, don't you know.

Wells' method involved scrutiny of the records of the Ecclesiastical Court, the 'bawdy' court, for details of sexual offences in Stratford in Shakespeare's time. Held in Holy Trinity Church, his findings there and elsewhere in the contemporary record came as a bit of a surprise to me, with Shakespeare's 'shotgun' marriage being a rarity and punishment for sexual 'incontience' quite common.

But most of the talk, and the book, concern love and sex in Shakespeare's plays rather than in his life. Wells considers the apparently homoerotic content of the Sonnets, the particular poems in question being dated 1593-5, in the context of similar poems by Barnfield, Marlowe and Drayton as if these professional writers were merely catering for a demand rather than writing from their lives. Well, possibly. So, although Wells is open to the possibility of extra-marital activity in London, and quoted the William the Conqueror came before Richard III story, he sensibly wasn't prepared to bet on specifics.

The book devotes a whole chapter to Romeo and Juliet, which is where Wells sees the most definitive exploration of the difference between love and lust and he illustrates how Shakespeare appreciates the 'transfiguring' effect that love can have on sex. And, so, sensibly not stretching credibility as some studies do but not being as dogmatic as some doyens might tend to become, this was a laudible and enjoyable performance with numerous references included to follow up for those with a will to do so.