William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright who has a reputation as one of the greatest of all writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists.

Shakespeare's sexuality

The content of Shakespeare's sonnets has raised the question of whether he may have been bisexual. This question has caused controversy given Shakespeare's iconic status.

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Early controversy

Shakespeare's Sonnets are the principal reason for suggesting that he may have been bisexual. The poems were initially published, perhaps without his approval in 1609. One hundred twenty-six of them are love poems addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"), and twenty-six to a married woman (known as the "Dark Lady"). This edition does not seem to have sold well, and may have been suppressed or perhaps simply disliked by its readership.

Related Topics:
Shakespeare's Sonnets - 1609 - Fair Lord - Dark Lady

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The apparently homosexual content seems to have disturbed at least one seventeenth century reader. In 1640, John Benson published another edition 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 was mass-produced and soon became the best-known text. It was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms in his widely-distributed edition. {{ref|crompton}}

Related Topics:
1640 - John Benson - 1780 - Edmund Malone

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Debate over the Sonnets

There are numerous passages in the Sonnets that can be read as homosexual or bisexual. During Sonnet 13 Shakespeare calls the young man "dear my love" and in 15 announces that he is at "war with Time for love of you". In Sonnet 18 he says "shall I compare thee to a summer?s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate", followed by Sonnet 20 in which he says that the man is his "master-mistress". The questions raised by scholars for the past two hundred years are: are these passages really intended this way? And if so, are the Sonnets autobiographical or mere fiction? By 1944, the Variorum edition of his Sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators.

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The controversy was first articulated in 1780 when George Steevens, upon reading Sonnet 20 where Shakespeare describes his young male friend 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". {{ref|steevens}} Other English scholars, who were dismayed at the possibility that one of their national heroes may 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" {{ref|coleridge}}.

Related Topics:
George Steevens - Sodomite - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1800

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Critics in Continental Europe added more to the debate. In 1834, a French reviewer in 1834 saying "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?"

Related Topics:
1834 - Virgil

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Those who reject the notion of Shakespeare's bisexuality usually explain these passages as referring to intense friendship, not sexual love. Douglas Bush in the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition writes,

Related Topics:
Friendship - 1961

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:"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". {{ref|bush}}

Related Topics:
Montaigne - Sir Thomas Browne - Renaissance literature

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Bush cites Montaigne as evidence of a platonic interpretation, but he said his male friendships were distinct from "that other, licentious Greek love". {{ref|montaigne}}.

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However, not all scholars are convinced by this argument. C.S. Lewis writes that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" and that he has "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature" {{ref|lewis}}. Shakespeare says that his love for the youth gives him sleepless nights and causes sharp anguish and fearful jealousy. There is considerable ephasis on the young man's beauty. In Sonnet 20, Shakespeare 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") to, which Shakespeare describes as "to my purpose nothing". Later in the same sonnet he tells the adolescent to sleep with women but only to love him — "mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure." Some have interpreted this line to infer that he ruled out sexual relations while openly saying that he was sexually aroused by the youth.

Related Topics:
C.S. Lewis - Lesbianism

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The plays

Similar evidence — or at least fuel for controversy — exists within the plays. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, the characters Bassanio and Antonio have a close friendship which some have interpreted as paederastic, that is, as a sexual/mentoring relationship between an adult male and a young man, in which the adult helps his lover transistion to adulthood, including finding a wife; Bassanio enlists Antonio's help in courting the female Portia. Likewise, several plays such as Twelfth Night contain comedic situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device exploiting the fact that in Shakespeare's day men or boys of the theatrical troupe played women's parts. As Isaac Asimov notes in his Guide to Shakespeare, this permits situations in which men playing women posing as men allow other men playing men to practice the art of wooing upon them.

Related Topics:
The Merchant of Venice - Paederastic - Twelfth Night - Comedic - Isaac Asimov

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Shakespeare was able to joke about homosexuality. In Hamlet, the title character indulges in a gloomy discourse on human shortcomings before his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This speech, in Act II, scene II, begins with Hamlet saying, "I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth". After several lines of melancholy exposition, Hamlet says, "Man delights not me — no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

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Conclusion

It must be kept in mind that if Shakespeare had openly engaged in sexual relations with other males, he risked prosecution under sodomy laws of the time that could have resulted in the death penalty. However, in Elizabethan times, as today, an interest in one gender did not preclude an interest in the other, and the question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" in a modern sense is anachronistic, as the concept of homosexuality did not emerge until the nineteenth century. While sodomy was a crime in the period there was no word for an exclusively homosexual identity (see History of homosexuality). One of Shakespeare?s greatest role-models, Christopher Marlowe, has also been claimed to have been homosexual.

Related Topics:
Nineteenth century - History of homosexuality - Christopher Marlowe

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