But before we get into the details of VD in Shakespeare's works it may be a good idea to prepare the way with a few related matters. It has been suggested, for one thing, that the bard's concentration on VD syphilis, almost exclusively implies that he had it himself but no evidence that he did. Shakespeare actually did not concentrate more on VD than he did on many another subject, such for instance as kingship, jealousy, or murder, or for that matter farm animals or wild flowers. In fact, if such a suggestion is to be taken seriously it would apply equally to me and to writers on VD whose names keep recurring in these pages. It is, at best, a non sequitur.

But while Shakespeare interested himself in everything that happened around him and VD was certainly one such thing! His focus on VD may well have been sharpened by another concern of his, or one facet of it. Even as an apostle of the High Renaissance, Shakespeare's attitude toward women and the whole range of matters sexual was extraordinarily advanced and Shakespeare on VD sympathetic; he was unmistakably and ardently anti Puritan just when Puritanism was a rising menace. Or say it another way: he was a great humanist (without being a professional philosopher), with a love of Man (who, as the old saw has it, embraces Woman) grounded in the broadest sort of comprehension which overlooked no defects or weaknesses which is not to suggest that he could rise above all the prejudices of his time.

The point is not limited to the periphery of our main topic of VD and is worth pursuing a little further. As far as literature is concerned neither before Shakespeare's time nor after him has anybody quite achieved his freedom in dealing with the subject of women and sex and romantic love and hence also with VD. It is known, but perhaps not widely enough, that the modern notion of love as expressed in literature is by no means timeless, having arisen as recently as the late medieval period. It was not at all encompassed in the Greek Eros or the Roman Cupid myths; nor is its modem form recognizable in Ovid. Its origins can be traced to the Arthurian legend, especially to the story of Tristram and Isolde ("courtly love"), and through Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. But even Shakespeare's immediate predecessors and contemporaries, among whom even Marlowe is hardly an exception, did not show the full flowering of Shakespeare's genius in this as in many better recognized respects. It is revealing to compare the pallid tale "Romeo and Giulietta" by Luigi da Porto (1525), one of a group of sources of Shakespeare's play, with what it became in his hands only some seventy years later. It remained for Shakespeare to give us the compassionate and clear eyed portrayals of women as people, from Doll Tearsheet to Hermione, from Rosalind and Beatrice to Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, from Juliet and her nurse to Mistress Ford. The Taming of the Shrew is obviously an exception, and a pretty piece of male supremacism. Elsewhere, including the early poems and the sonnets, Shakespeare seems to have been free, perhaps uniquely free, from the twin taints of puritanism and the nearly universal dogma of the natural superiority of males. Among all the luminaries who followed him, is there anyone of whom we can say as much?