Shakespeare on Love & Lust

Shakespeare on Love and Lust looks at the complex and sometimes contradictory expressions of love in Shakespeare's works - ranging from the serious to the absurd and back again - and argues that they arise primarily from his dramatic and theatrical flair rather than from a unified philosophy of love. Untangling his witty, bawdy (and ambiguous) treatment of love, sex and desire requires a sharp eye and a steady hand. In Shakespeare on Love and Lust, scholar Maurice Charney delves into Shakespeare's rhetorical and thematic development of this subject to reveal what makes his plays and poems resonate with contemporary audiences. The paradigmatic star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet, the comic confusions of couples wandering through the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello's tragic jealousy, the homoerotic ways Shakespeare played with cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage - Charney explores the world in which Shakespeare lived, and how it is reflected and transformed in the one he created.