Shakespeare used vile language about women in King Lear because he was bitter about contracting syphilis, a leading scholar has suggested.

The play is peppered with derogatory lines about women and Lear rages that beneath the waist "there's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulfurous pit", while wishing sterility on his daughter, Goneril, ad calling her "a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, in my corrupted blood".

In a discussion with Sir Antony Sher at the Cheltenham Literature Festival about Shakespeare's misogyny, Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, Oxford academic and authority on the Bard, said syphilis could be the explanation.

Sir Antony said the anti-female language in the play is "startling" and "graphic". "I don't believe that in a modern play you could write that now. And there's something so visceral in the way Shakespeare has Lear saying it, that I began to wonder if there was some autobiographic stuff there - whether he had some problem with women," he said.