Anthony Esolen has a fascinating little article at First Things on how out-of-step Bill Shakespeare was with the sexual mores of his contemporaries.
Apparently, Elizabethan times were just as bawdy and lustful as our own, and while Shakespeare liked to make pelvic puns aplenty, he also held the virtue of chastity in much higher esteem than most other writers and entertainers of his day.
That gives me a bit of hope for our own day. All we need is another Shakespeare.
Hat tip to John C. Wright.
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Did he really, or did he just find it to be a really good source of tension and conflict for his plots? He was allegedly pretty good at that…better than many of his contemporaries, I hear.
At the moment I am reading (among other things) the diary of Samuel Pepys, who was a yuppie in London in the 1660s, a few generations after Shakespeare. He mentions going to see a production of “The Moore of Venice”–clearly a production of Othello, especially when he mentions that he could hardly hear the lines over the audience howling for the death of Desdemona.
Which just goes to show you what people thought about chastity in 1660, I suppose.