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Twelfth Night offers Shakespeare’s most complex approach to the themes of gender and sexual desire. The play’s main character, a young woman called Viola, dresses up as a man called “Cesario.” Her chosen name can be read as a reference to the supposed bisexuality of Julius Caesar. As “Cesario,” Viola becomes a servant to Duke Orsino, who asks “Cesario” to help him woo the woman he loves, Countess Olivia. During the course of the play, Orsino falls in love with “Cesario,” though he is not able to declare his feelings until “Cesario” reveals that “he” is really a woman. As soon as Viola reveals her true gender identity, Orsino asks her to marry him. Viola is still dressed as a man when Orsino proposes, and he even continues to call her “boy” during his proposal. Countess Olivia falls in love with “Cesario” as well. Although she believes “Cesario” is really a man, she is attracted to “his” feminine looks and way of speaking. At the end of the play, Olivia marries Viola’s twin brother Sebastian, believing him to be “Cesario.” When she discovers her mistake, Sebastian tries to console her by suggesting that he, like “Cesario,” is ambiguously gendered: “maid and man.”
Shakespeare’s exploration of sexuality in his sonnets is highly unusual. Sonnet sequences were popular in the sixteenth century, and they traditionally featured a poet either wooing a woman of great beauty and virtue or else lamenting her coldness or lack of affection. Shakespeare undermines this tradition in the first sequence of 126 sonnets, which are intimate in tone and clearly written in the voice of a male narrator and addressed to a young male lover, a “lovely boy” (sonnet 126) who possesses great beauty yet lacks virtue. Many of the poems in the initial sequence are explicit in their same-sex desire, though none is more forthright than sonnet 20, where the poet refers to the young man as “the master-mistress of my passion.” In the final couplet of this sonnet the poet laments that since nature “pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,” the poet will have to resign himself to not having the youth for himself: “Mine by thy love and thy love’s use their [i.e., women’s] treasure.” Though the sonnet clearly expresses same-sex desire, these final lines deny that any sexual intimacy actually took place, which was important in a time when homosexual acts were punishable by death.
Following the 126 sonnets devoted to the fair youth, the sequence turns to a series of 26 sonnets about the poet’s sexually voracious mistress. This shift in focus is precipitated by a transgressive act on the part of the youth, who apparently slept with the poet’s dark-haired lady. More upset by the youth’s betrayal than by his mistress’s infidelity, the poet turns away from the formerly “sweet boy” (sonnet 108) and delves into his complex relationship with his mistress. The opening lines of sonnet 138 reveal that this relationship is tortured and emotionally difficult: “When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies.” By the end of this poem the poet resolves to remain sexually involved with this woman despite the fact that neither can fully trust the other: “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” In these closing lines the verb “lie” has a double function, meaning both “tell a falsehood” and “have sex with.” In this and other sonnets featuring the “dark lady,” sexuality is painfully bound up with deceit.
Sex could not be portrayed explicitly on the Elizabethan stage. Even kissing was considered risky, not least because a “heterosexual” kiss between a male and a female character was in reality a kiss between two male actors. Although Shakespeare frequently indulges in sexually suggestive wordplay, many of his plays emphasize pre-marriage chastity. For instance, Shakespeare’s romantic comedies often feature amusingly suggestive romps but nevertheless remain strictly chaste, with no actual intercourse happening before the young couples can marry. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two young couples, Hermia and Lysander as well as Helena and Demetrius, fall under a fairy spell and experience a wild night in the forest, lost in a comedic game of magic-induced desire and repulsion. The next morning Duke Theseus discovers the couples sleeping together on the ground just outside the forest. The couples lay together so suggestively that Theseus jokes, “Saint Valentine is past. / Begin these woodbirds but to couple now?” (IV.i.). The audience knows they have not begun to couple, but laughs at his inference nonetheless.
Whereas many of Shakespeare’s plays emphasize chastity before marriage, there are some instances that indicate the possibility of pre-marriage sex. The most famous example appears in the third act of Romeo and Juliet, when the young couple wakes up after having spent the night together in Juliet’s room. Shakespeare does not confirm that the couple had sex, but he does provide suggestive evidence. When Romeo says, “I must be gone and live, or stay and die” (III.v.), he means that he needs to leave before he is found and condemned to death. Yet the word “die” is also slang for orgasm, indicating that Romeo may be playfully referencing sex. Furthermore, the speech Juliet gives to Romeo appears in the form of an aubade, a type of poem about lovers parting at dawn. The use of this poetic form suggests that the couple may have engaged in sexual intimacy, but in itself the aubade is inconclusive and leaves the matter ambiguous. Another example of ambiguity appears in Hamlet. Although Shakespeare makes no direct reference to a sexual relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, when Ophelia goes mad she sings several popular folk songs about unmarried sex that imply they may have had sex: “Young men will do it / When they come to it” (IV.v.).
Despite the ban on portraying sex onstage, sexual language largely escaped censorship so long as it was comic, and sexual puns and erotic innuendos abound in Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s jokes are so explicit that they were removed from editions of his plays published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shakespeare mastered the art of making dirty jokes through the liberal use of puns and double entendres. Early in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio refers to Romeo’s affection for Rosaline as a “driveling love [that] is like a great natural that runs / lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole” (II.iv.). The phrase “lolling up and down” strongly implies sexual intercourse, as does the phrase “hide his bauble in a hole,” where “bauble” and “hole” are slang for penis and vagina, respectively. The use of slang and puns to refer to sex and genitalia appear virtually everywhere in Shakespeare’s comedies as well as tragedies and histories. Amusingly, Shakespeare may even have made the first “your mom” joke in history when he wrote the following exchange in Titus Andronicus :
CHIRON: Thou has undone our mother.
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Bawdy humor like this allowed Shakespeare to delight popular audiences without ever depicting sex directly.
Shakespeare is the most quoted author of all time. Most English-speakers regularly quote Shakespeare without even knowing it, because lots of his phrases have become everyday expressions, like “break the ice,” “faint hearted,” “foregone conclusion,” “in my mind’s eye,” “laughing stock,” and “the world’s my oyster.” Generations of writers have interwoven Shakespeare’s language with their own, in many different ways. For instance, the titles of hundreds of novels, plays, movies, musicals and albums are based on Shakespeare quotes, including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (from Macbeth ), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ( The Tempest ) and Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest ( Hamlet ). Politicians and other public figures have also drawn on Shakespeare’s writing. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his brother Robert commemorated him at the 1964 Democratic Convention by paraphrasing Juliet’s image of her doomed husband Romeo: "When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun." Here are the ten of Shakespeare’s most famous lines: