Podcast Summary: Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

Episode: How Sexy Was Shakespeare?

Host: Dr. Kate Lister
Guest: Anna Beer, cultural historian & biographer
Date: December 30, 2025

Episode Overview

Dr. Kate Lister sits down with cultural historian and biographer Anna Beer to peel back the covers on one of the most mythologized writers of all time: William Shakespeare. The duo dive into the Bard’s bawdiest jokes, gender play, and the oft-debated evidence for queerness and sexual intrigue in his works. They also take on popular myths about Shakespeare’s personal life, and the often overlooked context of Elizabethan attitudes toward sex, gender, and the theatre.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sex and Smut in Shakespeare's Works

• Sexual Puns Everywhere: Anna Beer asserts, "When does he not write about sexual... It just seems, it's everywhere." (04:30)
• Filthy Language in Disguise: Many sexual jokes and puns are overlooked in school, with "nothing" often being slang for the vulva.
  • Memorable Quote: “Nothing usually refers to female genitals… so Much Ado About Nothing, nothing is—what a fuss are you making about a woman’s bit?” (05:41)
• Filth in Tragedy too: Shakespeare can't resist sexual innuendo, even in his most serious works, though Anna draws the line at Cordelia’s “nothing” in King Lear. (06:33)
• Double Meanings Enhanced by Original Pronunciation: Modern performances often miss jokes only evident in original Elizabethan pronunciation; for example, "country matters" in Hamlet sounding more like "cunt-ry matters". (07:33)

2. Elizabethan Theatre and Gender Performance

• All-Male Casts and Gender Fluidity: Kate and Anna discuss how male actors played all roles, leading to layered gender jokes and a playful questioning of gender:
  • Anna: "Gender is completely... (up in the air)." (10:09)
  • Kate: “That’s like a big joke. But you forget that it’s actually a boy in the first place disguised as a girl, who's now pretending to be a boy…” (10:11)
• Queer Possibility and Homoeroticism: Cross-dressing and homosocial bonds are deeply woven into the fabric of both comedies and tragedies.

3. Queer Readings: Was Shakespeare Gay, Bi, or Just ‘Imaginatively’ Queer?

• Shakespeare’s real love life is deeply unclear due to a lack of personal documentation.
  • Anna: “There are no letters from him, there are no letters to him.” (12:46)
• Speculation About His Sexuality:
  • His sonnets are “inescapably addressed to a boy. Yes. It's not even ambiguous.” (27:38)
  • “I've seen every attempt to straighten out these poems and every single one of them fail.” (32:07)
• Male Bonding in the Plays: Biggest expressions of love are often between men, e.g., Hamlet and Horatio:
  • “[The students] admitted...the real love shown in that play is between Hamlet and Horatio, between two men.” (12:01)
• Explicit Homoeroticism:
  • Anna reads from Coriolanus, analyzing a passage with overtly erotic male-male undertones: “I have nightly since dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me... and waked half dead with nothing.” (16:49)

4. The Sonnets: Subverting Heteronormativity

• Poetic love and desire often clearly directed toward a beautiful young man:
  • Notable Reading: Anna reads Sonnet 20, referring to the male lover as the “master mistress” of the author's passion, with contemporary slang explained: “And by addition, me of thee defeated, by adding one thing to my purpose, nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.” (29:16)
• The sonnets’ language often blends desire and misogyny, suggesting complex sexual frustration and longing.
• Modern Use of Sonnets: Anna: “I chose one of Shakespeare's sonnets to read when my own husband died at his funeral … that love poem ... is screamingly gay as well.” (27:45)

5. Shakespeare’s Personal Life—Truth and Myth

• Sparse Hard Evidence: Besides marrying Anne Hathaway (not the actress!) and fathering three children, little is definitely known. (21:11)
• The ‘Second Best Bed’ in His Will: Historical interpretations range from insult to practical bequeathal; Anna dismisses the drama: “It’s a red herring. I think William and Anne are fine by the standards of their time, but it’s a really low bar for a happy marriage.” (26:52)
• His Relationship with Anne: There is no compelling evidence of deep marital strife or double life, nor is there proof that he was completely absent from his family.

6. The “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets: Fact or Fabrication?

• The infatuation with the “dark lady” is largely a construction:
  • Anna: “The word dark is only used once in the sonnets, and it might not even refer to the woman. And the word lady is never used. So the dark lady, as an idea, is a complete destruction of what white critics...” (35:59)
• Some believe she may have been a real sex worker, but Anna is skeptical: “I really, really don't buy the whole thing that Shakespeare would write in... oh, he has venereal disease... and that's what the word ‘stain’ in Sonnet X means.” (35:56)

7. Sex Work and Theatre Life

• Kate notes theatres were known as meeting places for sex work:
  • “The sex and theater industry are absolutely symbiotic, no question about that at all.” (42:46)
• Cross-dressing on stage was controversial and thought likely to “encourage unnatural lusts in the audience.” (42:46)

8. Elizabethan and Jacobean Attitudes Toward Sex

• Paradoxically unprudish—classics were read in explicit versions; lines between friendship, love, and sex were blurred by modern standards.
• Literary smut was annotated, and the elite circulated both clean and “uncut” versions of erotic classics.
  • Anna: “Ben Johnson...collected that kind of classical literature, Latin literature, that was unadulterated filth…” (47:16)

9. Favourite Shakespearean Sex Jokes

• Anna struggles to pick a favorite: “So many of them are so nasty and they make me sad.” (49:33)
• Ultimately, she enjoys the playful “will in over plus” wordplay, and a penis joke from Philip Sidney.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Shakespeare and sexual puns:
  • Kate: “He cannot resist putting filth into his plays... a fascination with sex and gender that runs like a seam through everything he wrote.” (15:00)
• On queer readings:
  • Anna: “Queer sex, no, no, no, no... Shakespeare makes it easy to say no, no, no, because he tends to give us utterly heteronormative endings.” (15:10)
• On the ‘dark lady':
  • Anna: “The dark lady, as an idea, is a complete destruction... The word lady is never used.” (35:59)
• Summing up Shakespeare’s sex life:
  • Anna: "The only thing I can say with certainty is that Shakespeare had sex with Anne Hathaway and they produced three children between them. Beyond that, I cannot say anything." (21:11)
• On projection and interpretation:
  • Anna: “Into that vacuum, into that space, into that nothing, we all project what we want Shakespeare to be like.” (12:48)
• On why Shakespeare endures:
  • Anna: “It’s this lovely blank canvas where we can project all our Shakespeares... all our own society’s questions about these things.” (44:17)

Segment Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp (MM:SS) | |-------------------------------------------------------|----------------------| | Shakespeare's sauciness & "nothing" as vulva slang | 04:30 - 06:33 | | Gender performance and cross-dressing on stage | 09:39 - 10:49 | | Queer love in the plays (Hamlet & Horatio, others) | 12:01 - 15:00 | | The sonnets and homoeroticism | 27:38 - 32:15 | | Shakespeare's real sex life (marriage, evidence) | 21:11 - 23:16 | | The “second best bed” and family drama | 25:25 - 26:52 | | The myth of the “dark lady” | 35:56 - 40:07 | | Sex work & theatre culture | 42:30 - 43:11 | | Favourite Shakespearean sex joke | 49:33 - 50:47 |

Tone and Style

• The tone is warm, witty, irreverent, and packed with good-natured scholarly banter.
• Both host and guest delight in rude jokes and underexamined filth, but also bring serious historical perspective and nuance to their discussion.
• Self-deprecating academic humor is frequent (e.g., Anna’s “deeply unprofessional of me as an academic”).

In Summary

This episode lays bare Shakespeare’s deep engagement with sex, sexuality, and gender, underscoring just how much modern audiences have sanitized or minimized his bawdiness. Lister and Beer emphasize how little concrete is known about Shakespeare’s real love life, but how much is implied—gleefully, publicly, and often queerly—in his works. The takeaway: Shakespeare’s centuries-old smut and sophisticated explorations of gender and desire still unsettle, amuse, and spark debate now as they did then.

For further reading and updates from Anna Beer, find her on Twitter (@narosebeer).