Books

SHAKESPEARE: sex and angels

Scholar Rosa Maria Martínez Ascaso presents the essay ’Sexpeare. Love and sex in Shakespeare’, in which she analyses the entire work of the bard

Rosa Maria Martínez As­caso’s pas­sion for Shake­speare began when she was 14 years old and her fa­ther gave her the Cata­lan ver­sion of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Then came Mac­beth, Ham­let, King Lear... “The char­ac­ters in that first work se­duced me be­cause they were very alive, they jumped off the page,” she ex­plains. Over the years, she has be­come such a fan that she has ac­cu­mu­lated a li­brary of more than 3,000 ti­tles by (or about) Shake­speare, makes a pil­grim­age to Strat­ford-upon-Avon at least once a year, and col­lects ob­jects re­lated to the au­thor.

Fol­low­ing on from her two pre­vi­ous works Diàri­a­ment, periòdica, sem­pre Shake­speare (UAB, 1985) and Shake­speare i la natura. In­spiració i sim­bolisme (Cos­setània, 2008), she now pre­sents Sex­peare. Amor i sexe en Shake­speare (Cos­setània), with a pro­logue by Genís Sinca, who high­lights the unique­ness of the book’s sub­ject mat­ter, even in the in­ter­na­tional arena.

Much has been said about Shake­speare’s sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, and doubts have been ex­pressed about whether he was the au­thor of all the works at­trib­uted to him. He was a lin­guis­ti­cally am­bigu­ous au­thor... All in all, akin to the sex of an­gels.

“I set out to com­pile this book in a very me­thod­i­cal way. I first wrote the ar­chi­tec­ture of the work, the sum­mary, six chap­ters and the cor­re­spond­ing sub-sec­tions,” Martínez As­caso ex­plains, and this can only be done in ad­vance with a thor­ough un­der­stand­ing of the ob­ject of study.

The six chap­ters, each with around five sub-sec­tions, are: 1. “Facets of love. From sci­ence to ex­pe­ri­ence”; 2. “War of the sexes. An un­sta­ble alchemy”; 3. “Con­flicts of love. Be­tween im­pulse and the norm”; 4. “Sex­peare­land. The uni­verse of a basic in­stinct”; 5. “Love with hu­mour. Eros’ smile”, and 6.”Sonets and poems. The po­etry of the senses”. Then we also have the epi­logue, the prac­ti­cal ono­mas­tic index and the bib­li­og­ra­phy.

Once she had de­signed the struc­ture, Martínez As­caso began the sec­ond phase. “I made a folder for each chap­ter, a phys­i­cal one, not on the com­puter yet. Then, as I re-read Shake­speare’s en­tire work – you al­ways dis­cover new things, even though you’ve read it so many times – I added a pho­to­copy of every frag­ment I found that co­in­cided with the theme of the in­di­vid­ual fold­ers.”

Her lengthy pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence as a li­brar­ian and doc­u­men­tal­ist served her well. “I was in­spired by the dec­i­mal rank­ing that the Amer­i­can Melvil Dewey cre­ated in 1876 and ap­plies to all li­braries around the world. Ten sec­tions that en­com­pass all human knowl­edge.”

One of the virtues of this rig­or­ous re­search, which has its fun mo­ments and is also ac­ces­si­ble for new­com­ers to Shake­speare, is that the au­thor al­ways pro­vides con­text, such as when she ex­plains what dil­dos were then and, among many other ex­am­ples, when she clar­i­fies that broth­els of the time were called danc­ing schools, be­cause danc­ing was syn­ony­mous with for­ni­ca­tion.

It took her about six months to reread the 36 Shake­speare works and six more months to write the final text. From Feb­ru­ary 2018 to Feb­ru­ary 2019. “The first idea was to study Shake­speare and love, which, to­gether with death, is the most com­mon theme in his work. Eros and Thanatos. But I re­alised that there is also a lot of sex... Some ex­plicit, but also cam­ou­flaged in words and am­bi­gu­ity. This is what makes William Emp­son say that Shake­speare is quan­tum, be­cause he was am­bigu­ous: an is, is an is not.”

What will the knowl­edge­able reader of Shake­speare’s work find in this book? “An essay with back­ground and form, very fo­cused on the lin­guis­tic game that led Shake­speare to use up to 20,000 dif­fer­ent words, when a great au­thor like Dos­toyevsky didn’t use more than 9,000. Also, of the words that Shake­speare in­vented, 2,000 are ac­cepted in cur­rent Eng­lish, 400 years after his death.”

And what might there be for new­com­ers, what might in­ter­est them in the book? “The theme, which is uni­ver­sal; in ad­di­tion, he touched on all facets of love and sex. And they will be es­pe­cially at­tracted by see­ing them­selves re­flected in Shake­speare’s works, whether they are more con­ser­v­a­tive or pro­gres­sive. Shake­speare’s theme was man’s strug­gle with him­self. We all have many char­ac­ters in­side that some­times talk with each other and, more­over, an­other thing that in­spired me for the book, as Sig­mund Freud said, love and sex are basic in­stincts. And every­one will find some in­ter­est in an au­thor who could be misog­y­nis­tic and a pro-fem­i­nist at the same time. He was com­plex and could not be la­belled,” Martínez As­caso sum­marises.

books

SEXPEARE. AMOR I SEXE EN SHAKESPEARE
Author:
Rosa Maria Martínez Ascaso
Publisher:
Cossetania Edicions
Pages:
248
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