By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK
With news coming over the last day or so that a ‘lost’ play by Shakespeare called Double Falsehood is to be published, I thought that today would be the perfect time to give you a little taster of a new book of ours that is publishing in the UK in a couple of weeks. Shakespeare, Sex & Love is the latest book by the pre-eminent Shakespearian critic Stanley Wells, Chairman of the Trustees of Shakespeare’s Birthplace and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. In it, Wells examines how Shakespeare portrayed sex and love in his writing and how this was shaped by the sexual conventions of his time. In the short excerpt below you can read about how sexual behaviour was implicitly recorded in public records.
Stanley Wells will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival this Saturday, March 20th, at 12 noon. Click here to see a video of Stanley Wells talk about his book.
It is in the nature of things that sexual behaviour that does not offend agreed norms makes no special stir. Even so it may be revealing. People masturbate, woo, marry, copulate, and give birth. Of these events the law requires only that 
marriages and, in Shakespeare’s time, baptisms rather than births be recorded. Analysis of such records may in itself illuminate the sexual mores of the period and, indeed, of Shakespeare and his family. We know, for example, that between 1570 and 1630 the average age for first marriage among men in Stratford-upon-Avon, calculated on the basis of 106 known cases, was between twenty and thirty, though legally they could marry from the age of fourteen, with the ‘greatest number of marriages (fifteen) taking place when the bridegroom was twenty-four’. There was a practical reason for this: it would have given time for the men to have ‘become settled in work at the expiry of their apprenticeship’, which normally lasted for seven years. On the other hand, women by and large married younger: though the average age of brides at first marriage, based on sixty known cases, was also twenty-four, the favoured ages were ‘either seventeen or twenty-one’. The youngest bride married at the age of only twelve—the earliest legal age for a woman, younger even than Shakespeare’s thirteen-year-old Juliet—though she did not have a child until she was sixteen, which may (or may not) mean that the marriage was not initially consummated. ‘The men of Stratford’, we learn, ‘rarely looked farther afield than the outlying hamlets of the parish and, provided it was agreeable to the family, their choice usually seems to have been dictated by mutual attraction. Arranged marriages were only for the rich.’
Marriage is not a prerequisite for births, and records of baptism sometimes reveal sexual irregularity, as in the entry in the Stratford register on 5 May 1592 of the birth of ‘John, son of Katherine Getley, a bastard.’ There is a slight Shakespeare connection, as the mother’s father owned the cottage in Chapel Lane, close to Shakespeare’s house New Place, and which Shakespeare bought in 1602.