Gay shakespeare
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As a sonneteer, he was able to imagine a complex and anguished affair with a young man, as well as an obsessive, even controlling, relationship with a woman. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers.
Was Shakespeare Gay?
Image: Dedication in Shakespeare's Sonnets, discussed in this episode.
This week's guests (in order of appearance) are:
- Dr Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and Primary Learning Manager at the SBT
- Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute
- Professor Sir Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the SBT
- Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Narrator: Jennifer Reid
Transcript
REID: Hello, and welcome to the seventh episode of “Let’s Talk Shakespeare”, a podcast brought to you from Stratford-upon-Avon by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Academics like Dr. Alan Sinfield and Dr. Valerie Traub have analyzed his texts as sites of coded desire. It could mean a very dry, business relationship of patronage, and some people interpret the sonnets that way, as simply flattering poetry written towards a patron. As Dr. Edmondson reflects: “Shakespeare’s genius lies in his ability to articulate the universality of desire.
The other two most intimate male-to-male relationships in the plays are between Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night – where Antonio expresses love for Sebastian; talks about his desire, sharper than “filèd steel”, which is a very phallic image, I think – and the other one is The Merchant of Venice, where the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio [is] a very, very loving, close relationship, where Antonio actually shows himself willing to give his life for Bassanio, that is often interpreted [that way] – although is not actively explicit from the text.
So, in other words, we don’t know for certain, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that Shakespeare was sometimes in a relationship, as we say, with men and also with women other than his wife.
REID: My final clip on this episode is a long one; it’s about ten minutes long, and it’ll round off the episode, and it comes from Greg Doran, who’s the artistic director at the RSC.
And Greg begins by highlighting how people like to cast Shakespeare in their own image. It’s all very engaging and exciting and charged. We’ve covered in an earlier podcast Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife Anne, so, although she comes into this week’s discussion, she isn’t the main focus.
So my first clip comes from Elizabeth Dollimore, who is the manager of Outreach and Primary Learning at the SBT, and she’s going to set us off exploring this question with a discussion on the nature of Tudor friendship and relationships.
DOLLIMORE: I don’t know whether Shakespeare was gay or not, because he didn’t leave any personal record.
Sexuality wasn’t so much about the gender of one’s object of desire, but about the degree of license, debauchery and sinful abandonment that an individual permitted oneself. Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and Sonnet 20 (“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted”) have drawn particular scrutiny. Shakespeare’s Sonnets transcend the boundaries of sub-divisions of human experience to encapsulate the very essence of human love.
Featured image: William Shakespeare statue.
And nobody really questions whether those relationships were driven by sex or not.
It is also true that sodomy was a hanging offence. It could mean a romantic relationship, as it does to us today, and it could mean the love which might exist between friends. Both the Antonio: the eponymous merchant of Venice and indeed, Antonio in Twelfth Night.
There's a lot of debate about whether anybody was gay, in any of the modern sense, in Elizabethan culture, or whether there were just certain things they did, sometimes, that didn’t actually define a particular set of identities. And we know for a fact that Shakespeare read these writers.
So he may or may not have been gay, but he definitely read gay literature – and that’s a lesson we can all appreciate during LGBT History Month.
Plays, Poems & New Writing
Just good friends?
However, it’s not impossible, in my view, that Shakespeare did have sexual relations, actually with both females (other than his wife) and with males.
He doesn’t portray homosexual relationships very clearly in his plays. That includes desires that defy easy labels.”
For now, the Bard’s secrets remain buried with him in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The earliest emergence of a sort of self-identification which might have been related to sexuality is later than that, and that comes with the molly-house culture. Stanley Wells, a renowned Shakespearean scholar, notes that the Bard’s plays also subtly challenge gender norms. One thing that is definite, though, is that there was no self-identity as gay or homosexual or, as far as we know, any other term during that time period.
Yet one question continues to spark fervent debate: Was Shakespeare gay?
While definitive answers remain elusive, a growing wave of scholars and LGBTQ+ advocates are re-examining the Bard’s life and writings through a queer lens, arguing that his work—particularly his sonnets—hints at a complexity of desire that transcends heteronormative interpretations.
The Sonnets: A Window Into Shakespeare’s Heart?
The heart of the debate lies in Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, published in 1609.
When we queer the whole Renaissance, we obscure genealogy. So, what that actually entailed [sic] people isn’t the equivalent of what a loving gay relationship is today.
So, whether or not Shakespeare was gay is a difficult question. And a number of the sonnets addressed to a male are deeply passionate if idealized love poems which one can easily imagine being addressed to a young man with whom the poet was having a physical as well as a spiritual relationship.