This monograph examines the love/lust binary as depicted in Shakespeare's plays, narrative poems, and sonnets in the context of Renaissance Anglican and humanist discourses, especially Neoplatonism and Petrarchism. It argues that love and lust are opposed for Shakespeare's contemporaries and in Shakespeare's early work, but that Shakespeare's later plays deconstruct the love/lust binary and challenge moral norms that rely on a strict separation of carnal lust and marital love. Its primary method is close reading, which it employs extensively to show how Shakespeare engaged with, adapted, and critiqued Christian humanist discourses about love and lust across his career. The book is written for a general audience and would be of interest to students, scholars in fields adjacent to Shakespeare studies, and those with a more general interest in Shakespeare.

The book's defining feature is its wide-ranging close readings. Hall weaves together evidence from all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays, the three narrative poems, and the sonnets as she traces themes, images, and recurrent phrases across Shakespeare's oeuvre. For example, chapter 4 argues that across his career Shakespeare became increasingly ambivalent about the constancy of romantic love. Hall supports this argument by tracing references to fancy and eyes in a number of plays, including The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Love's Labour's Lost.

Sexual Desire and Romantic Love in Shakespeare opens with a brief introduction that traces three key words for Shakespeare's exploration of the love/lust binary: will, affection, and friend. Chapters 1–3 focus on lust and its negative powers, especially in the sonnets written about the dark mistress and in the early plays. Chapters 4–7 treat the topic of love in relation to desire, including fancy, romance, marriage, and same-sex bonding. Here, Hall shows how Shakespeare troubles the binary opposition between love and lust and critiques the humanist fixation on idealized love. The final chapter considers how incest interacts with other forms of lust, love, and desire, especially in Hamlet, Coriolanus, and the late romances.

The introduction claims that the book “emphasizes differences, as well as commonalities, between Shakespeare's treatment of sexual desire and romantic love that builds toward marriage, and our own assumptions about these matters” (1). It accomplishes this goal only implicitly; while the book clearly and thoroughly analyzes Neoplatonic discourses and the love/lust binary in Shakespeare's work, it focuses narrowly on this one discourse and does not engage in depth with modern cultural productions that might illustrate our own culture's attitudes (one exception is brief readings of recent stage and film productions of Shakespeare's plays in chapters 7 and 8). This book also does not take into account queer theory's contributions to a fuller picture of attitudes toward love, sex, and desire in early modern England and in Shakespeare's work, and it does not add to scholarship in queer theory or sexuality studies. Its methods are instead anchored in close reading and traditional historicism. It is not likely to contain new information for Shakespeare scholars or scholars of queer and sexuality studies.

Even if this book does not accomplish what it claims in its introduction, it has a number of strengths, including the immense depth and scope with which it analyzes Shakespeare's language of love and lust. It is written in a straightforward style and is free of jargon, making it approachable and accessible for non-experts and students. For example, chapter 7, which analyzes same-sex relationships and how they influence cross-sex relationships in the plays, articulates the complexities of these dynamics through easy-to-follow close readings. Hall argues in this chapter that some same-sex relationships challenge hetero-marital closure or are sacrificed for this closure, yet others, such as Antonio and Bassanio's homoerotic bond in The Merchant of Venice, remain compatible with marriage. Here, Hall offers a clear, accessible explanation for a concept that is often difficult for a twenty-first-century undergraduate audience to grasp: that same-sex and cross-sex relations are not always mutually exclusive in Shakespeare. This clarity of style and argument remains a positive central feature of the monograph.