Was Shakespeare gay?
NEW claims that Shakespeare was gay or bisexual have emerged this week from two of the Bard’s most prominent experts.
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s artistic director Gregory Doran has suggested that William Shakespeare might have been gay based on the fact that 126 of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are addressed to men.
Mr Doran expressed the views during an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme last weekend.
He was also critical of Victorian academics for attempting to cover up Shakespeare’s alleged homosexuality out of embarrassment because it was not in keeping with the iconic image of the world’s greatest playwright.
“'It wasn't somehow kosher for the great national bard to possibly have affectations for his own sex and therefore that process, to kind of whitewash through the sonnets began. I am just aware of how many times Shakespeare has gay characters, and how sometimes those gay characters are not played as gay, and I think in the 21st century that's no longer acceptable,” Mr Doran said.
The debate about Shakespeare's sexuality has been raised before and certainly within the last few years, this despite records showing the he married, aged 18, and fathered three children with his wife Anne Hathaway.
Sir Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust said this week: “Shakespeare was certainly not exclusively gay. He married Anne Hathaway and they had a daughter, Susanna, within six months, then twins - a boy, Hamnet and a girl, Judith. But he was pretty certainly bisexual, and actively so. The strongest evidence comes from the sonnets, in some of which he writes of a triangular relationship with a man and a woman. Some people claim that these poems are fictional, but I think this is an evasion. No. 135 begins ‘Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will’, and goes on to use the word ‘will’ 13 times, sometimes with lewd punning, in at least five distinct senses: the poet’s own name, desire, object of desire, vagina, and penis. Then No. 136 uses it five times and ends by explicitly saying ‘my name is Will.’ No 133 implies that he is involved in a triangular affair with a man and a woman; he writes of it with anguish and implies that both his male and his female lover have abandoned him in a manner that deprives him of his sense of identity: 'Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken.' So it seems pretty clear that he had at least one actively gay relationship.
In his plays, the most clearly gay couple are Patroclus and Achilles in the partly historical Troilus and Cressida. You can't avoid playing them as gay. In Twelfth Night, the sea-captain Antonio speaks of his desire 'sharp as filèd steel' for the young Viola's twin brother, Sebastian, which is pretty unambiguous, and in The Merchant of Venice another Antonio offers his life for the man he loves, Bassanio, who however is in love with, and marries, a woman, Portia. ‘Love’ doesn’t necessarily imply a sexual relationship, but it’s hard to avoid and most productions over the past half century have played Antonio as gay. A recent RSC production suggested that Bassanio reciprocated Antonio’s feelings and that Portia wasn’t at all happy about this."
