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Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare's Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

Notes and References

1. The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651 ed.), Partition II, ii, 3; 1932 ed., iii, 181.

2. See 2 Parnassus (c. 1599), III, i, 1006–55. When Gullio begins to woo a lady, Ingenioso predicts, correctly, ‘We shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatre’.

3. Sir Richard Baker, quoted in Bald, R. C., John Donne: a Life (Oxford, 1970), p. 72Google Scholar.

4. The phrase is adapted from All's Well, I, i, 169–70.

5. Orgel, Introduction, and p. 35: ‘Why, then, if boys in women's dress are so threatening, did the English maintain a transvestite theatre?’

6. Burton, op. cit., iii, 148.

7. Ibid., iii, 65.