Sexuality and Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage

Abstract

It can hardly be denied that Renaissance drama, at least in its English manifestation, constitutes a body of plays as highly charged with eroticism and as profoundly concerned with questions of sexuality as any in historyincluding Restoration comedy, which is often thought of as obsessed with sex and dominated by lubricity. Considering the impressive range of notable dramatists (even if Shakespeare were to be artificially excluded) and the immense variety of human experiences and relationships staged in their tragedies, comedies, histories, tragicomedies, romances, masques, and other entertainments, it would be arrogant, not to say naive, to attempt more than the most speculative generalizations about the sexual attitudes that helped shape these productions. The principle holds even if we were to consider just a single facet of such a complex topic-the bent, predilection, or special inclination of particular playwrights, let us say, the commercial pressures on theatrical companies, the individual talents of actors or groups of actors, the expectations of audiences (some of them more specialized or elitist than others), or what we might nowadays call the psychosexual mind-set of the age. In addition, of course, there is the forbidding problem of evidence. Historians such as Lawrence Stone and social theorists such as Michel