Husband, I Come

      The Big Man in Shakespeare studies, Stanley Wells, has a new book out that examines the rather blinkered and fetishistic tendency to asperse sexual dimensions to just about every whim and word of Shakespeare. Certainly sounds like it's worth reading, as this review from The Telegraph posits. Oh, we've become a gossipy, leering lot, haven't we, when every unattached male character is figured as a latent homosexual and Cleopatra's death is accompanied by a Freudian little death. It's sad reading a lot of contemporary Shakespeare criticism because it's not really criticism but licentiousness earnestly guised as scholarship.