Sexuality of William Shakespeare

The sexuality of William Shakespeare has been questioned numerous times over the years. Even though he married Anne Hathaway and had three children, Shakespeare's sonnets and plays sometimes suggest that he might also have taken an erotic interest in other males. The suggestion of a non-heterosexual Shakespeare has historically been controversial given his iconic status and a Western cultural tendency towards heterocentrism.

Elizabethan sexual identities

For the Elizabethans, what is today termed homosexual or bisexual was more likely to be recognised as simply a sexual act, rather than a sexual orientation. Just as today however, it is possible there was a spectrum of individual responses: from those engaging in homosexual acts who considered it irrelevant to their persona and simply a variation of both lust and love, to those who believed it marked them out as different. Sodomy was a crime in the period, but Phillip Stubbs in Anatomie of Abuses (1583), Edward Guilpin in Skialetheia (1598), and Michael Drayton in The Moone-Calfe (1605), all noted the prevalence of "sodomites" at theatres, which does imply a recognised group. A homosexual subculture which identified itself as separate, and which was centred around the Molly house, certainly existed in London by the mid-seventeenth century, and may well have existed in Shakespeare's time. (See History of Homosexuality).

Sexuality in the Sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets are the principal evidence for his attraction to males. The poems were initially published, perhaps without his approval, in 1609. One hundred and twenty-six of them appear to be love poems addressed to a beautiful young man (known as the "Fair Lord", and often assumed to be the same person as the enigmatic 'Mr W.H.', dedicatee of the sonnets). The identity of this figure (if he is indeed based on a real person) has been much debated; the most popular candidates are Shakespeare's patrons, the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke, both of whom were considered handsome in their youth; another theory, set out most notably by Oscar Wilde in a short story, holds that puns in the sonnets point to a boy actor called Willie Hughes as the beloved (there is no other evidence for the existence of such a person and Wilde's theory is avowedly fictional).Recent summaries of the debate over Mr W.H.'s identity include Colin Burrows, ed. The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 98-103; Katherine Duncan Jones, ed. Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Shakespeare, 1997), pp. 52-69. For Wilde's story, see 'The Portrait of Mr W.H.' (1889)..

The only explicit references to sexual acts and to physical lust occur in the Dark Lady sonnets, which unambigously state that the poet and the – equally mysterious – Lady are lovers. Nevertheless, there are numerous passages in the sonnets addressed to the Fair Lord that have been read as expressing desire for a younger man.^* In Sonnet 13, he is called "dear my love", and Sonnet 15 announces that the poet is at "war with Time for love of you." Sonnet 18 asks "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate," and in Sonnet 20 the narrator calls the young man the "master-mistress of my passion." The poems refer to sleepless nights, anguish and jealousy caused by the youth. In addition, there is considerable emphasis on the young man's beauty: in Sonnet 20, the narrator theorizes that the youth was originally a woman whom Mother Nature had fallen in love with and, to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism, added a penis ("pricked thee out for women's pleasure"), an addition the narrator describes as "to my purpose nothing." In some sonnets addressed to the youth, such as 52, the erotic punning is particularly intense: "So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special blest, By new unfolding his imprisoned pride." A complex relationship is hinted at in Sonnet 20: the narrator tells the youth to sleep with women, but to love only him: "mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure"; some have inferred from this line that Shakespeare ruled out sexual relations despite his love for the youth.

Not everyone has interpreted these passages as sexual, as they can be explained as referring to intense platonic friendship, rather than sexual love. In the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition, Douglas Bush writes,

"Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality… we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature". Pequigney, pp.64

Bush cites Montaigne, who distinguished male friendships from "that other, licentious Greek love" Montaigne, p. 138, as evidence for a platonic interpretation of the Sonnets.

Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical but fiction, so that the narrator of the Sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. Nevertheless, many readers and scholars take the "I" of the Sonnets to be Shakespeare, not least because this first-person narrator declares "my name is Will" (136), as well as punning on the name "Will" elsewhere. Many readers consider the Sonnets to be the closest we can get to Shakespeare's own voice, as opposed to the voices of the characters in his plays.

Despite these alternative interpretations, numerous readers throughout the past four centuries have been disturbed by the poems' apparent homoeroticism. In 1640, John Benson published a second edition of the Sonnets in which he changed most of the pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly all of the sonnets were addressed to the Dark Lady. Benson’s modified version soon became the best-known text, and it was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms. Crompton, Louis, Homosexuality and Civilization, pp. 379

The question of the sexual orientation of the Sonnets was first openly articulated in 1780, when George Steevens, upon reading Shakespeare's description of a young man as his "master-mistress" remarked, "it is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation". Rollins 1:55 Other English scholars, dismayed at the possibility that their national hero might have been a "sodomite", concurred with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment, around 1800, that Shakespeare’s love was "pure" and in his sonnets there is "not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices." Rollins 2:232-233

Critics in Continental Europe were also surprised. In 1834, a French reviewer asked, "He instead of she?… Can I be mistaken? Can these sonnets be addressed to a man? Shakespeare! Great Shakespeare? Did you feel yourself authorized by Virgil’s example?"

The controversy continued in the 20th Century. By 1944, the Variorum edition of the Sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" (although he added that his sonnets were still not the poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the 16th century literature." Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy.

Sexuality in the plays

Some readers have found similar evidence in Shakespeare's plays . The most often-cited evidence is several comedies, including Twelfth Night and As You Like It, which contain comic situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device that exploits the fact that in Shakespeare's day women's roles were played by boys. While the situations thus presented are heterosexual in terms of the story, the stage image of same-sex wooing and kissing may well have been titillating to those of a homosexual orientation, and while other dramatists occasionally used the same device, Shakespeare seems to have had an exceptional preference for it, using it in five of his plays.

The unexplained melancholy of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is explained by some critics (for example Isaac Asimov in his Guide to Shakespeare) as caused by unrequited love for his young friend Bassanio; his self-sacrificing spirit then makes him help Bassanio find a wife. The relationship has been interpreted as a sexual/mentoring relationship between an adult male and a young man in which the adult helps his lover in the transition to adulthood, a relationship that culminates in helping him find a wife . The text of the play neither confirms nor denies these interpretations.

Biographical evidence

There is nothing in the surviving historical record to indicate Shakespeare's bisexuality. However, it has often been suggested that his marriage may have been forced or hasty, because he had made Anne pregnant. Though information is limited, it has been common to infer that despite their three children, he and his wife may not have been close. Shakespeare spent much of his life in London, away from her and the children. He and his Anne were buried in separate (but adjoining) graves. In addition, it has often been noted that Shakespeare's will makes no specific bequeath to his wife aside from "the second best bed with the furniture". This may seem like a slight, but many historians contend that the second best bed was typically the marital bed, while the best bed was reserved for guests. Even if this does suggest that Shakespeare was cold toward his wife, nothing is thereby proven about his sexuality.

If the sonnets are accepted as autobiographical, they imply that he had at least one extramarital heterosexual relationship. An anecdote recorded in 1602 by John Manningham also suggests that Shakespeare may have had a reputation as a womaniser:

"Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."A detailed discussion of the reliability of the Manningham anecdote.

In his will, Shakespeare left money to his colleagues John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell so that they could purchase memorial rings as a demonstration of their close friendship. It has been claimed that this was an unusual act, but in fact it appears to have been a normal convention in Shakespeare's company: in his own will, Heminges left money for every member of the company to buy a memorial ring. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26

Authorship doubters

Those who believe that Shakespeare's works were not written by Shakespeare (see Shakespearean authorship) but by a woman, such as Queen Elizabeth I, find the content of the sonnets compelling evidence. Professional scholars rarely take these theories seriously.

References

Additional reading

William Shakespeare

Sexualité de Shakespeare

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