Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Sex with Shakespeare

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Sex with Shakespeare,” a surprising look at how the Bard thought about gender and sexuality and how it influenced his works, with Abdulhamit Arvas, scholar and historian of sexuality and assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/sex-shakespeare .]

Before “gender” became a culture-war keyword, London audiences watched William Shakespeare’s plays with an open secret: Because women were barred from the public stage, every Juliet, Desdemona, and Rosalind was played by a boy actor.

What did that theatrical reality do to ideas of masculinity, femininity, desire—and to the plays themselves?

Hear such questions tackled in a talk that will use Shakespeare’s work as a vivid guide to a world whose assumptions about bodies, desire, and intimacy will seem both recognizable and surprisingly alien.

With sharp, accessible examples from Shakespeare’s plays and the histories around them, Dr. Arvas will trace how modern assumptions about gender and sexuality, as well as love, emerged over time. He’ll invite us to read Shakespeare not as a mirror of the present, but as a window to see how our thoughts about the body—and the meanings we attach to our body and its intimacies—all have a history.

Instead of treating Shakespeare as timeless, this talk will ask what his plays reveal about the historical ideas that once organized everyday life. It will discuss how bodies were classified, how difference was explained, what counted as normal, sinful, healthy, or “natural,” and why categories we take for granted today did not always exist in the same form.

We’ll look at whether Shakespeare’s world recognized anything like “sexual orientation” and whether the gender binary was as stable—or as important—then as it seems now. We’ll explore how religion, medicine, and law shape what people believed about sex and desire.

You’ll be invited to consider: What changed between then and now and why do those changes matter for how we read Shakespeare today? What was love back then? What is it today? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

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