So at least one might conclude from the centrality of wooing in Shakespeare’s whole body of work, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Lovemaking, not in the sense of sexual intercourse but in the older sense of intense courting and pleading and longing, was one of his abiding preoccupations, one of the things he understood and expressed more profoundly than almost anyone in the world.
