William shakespeare is gay
William Shakespeare was bisexual, suggests new research
William Shakespeare’s persona has been forever mired in conjectures, and now new research has claimed that the playwright was bisexual. According to a report in The Independent, a set of fresh evidence which is about to be published in a book later suggests that during his 34-year long marriage to Anne Hathaway, the poet is believed to have had relationships with both men and women.
The report also cites an article in The Telegraph which further mentions that Professor Sir Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson had re-gathered Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets in the chronology they were written. They surmised that that frequently referred to “Fair Youth” and “Dark Lady” in probability referred to more people than what was assumed so far.
“The language of sexuality in some of the sonnets, which are definitely addressed to a male subject, leaves us in no doubt that Shakespeare was bisexual. It’s grow fashionable since the mid-1980s to think of Shakespeare as gay. But he was married and had children. Some of these sonnets are addressed to a female and others to a male. To reclaim the term pansexual see
Was Shakespeare Gay?
Image: Dedication in Shakespeare's Sonnets, discussed in this episode.
This week's guests (in request of appearance) are:
- Dr Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and First 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. I’m Jennifer Reid, and today we’re asking, “Was Shakespeare gay?”
So before we obtain started, just wanted to give you a wee activate warning: although there’s nothing in this week’s content that’s meant to produce offence, it might raise some questions about some more adult themes, so you probably long to just provide it a whizz through before listening along with any young listeners. And in previous podcasts, I’ve played you lots of quick clips from a variety of speakers, but this week I’m going to do it slightly differently, and act you fewer,
Was Shakespeare gay?
Was Shakespeare gay? It’s a popular question from students and audience members at public talks. Revealingly, it’s often posed in ways that draw attention to the debate: ‘I’ve been told that Shakespeare was gay – is that true?’ ‘I asked my teacher if Shakespeare was gay and he said no – what do you think?’
The answer’s more complicated than you might think.
It’s not that it’s exactly hard to find a homoerotic sensibility in Shakespeare’s works. Think of the ties of romantic friendship and erotic yearning that bind Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, or Antonio to Sebastian in Twelfth Night. That play is a queer fantasia, to be sure: Olivia loves Viola, thinking she’s ‘Cesario’, and ends up with Sebastian – who looks the same as Viola; Orsino falls in love with ‘Cesario’, not realising he’s a she, and seems absolutely delighted that she stays in her men’s clothing after he’s proposed.
We often read Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an account of the poet’s intense relationships with a beautiful juvenile man and a bewitching ‘dark lady’. Lots of people come across the poems simply too ardent, too obsessive, to be anything other than poetic autobio
Shakespeare’s Sexuality and How It Affects the Authorship Issue
by John Hamill
Originally published in The Oxfordian, v. 8, pp. 25–59 (2005) (repaginated PDF version here); republished on the SOF website Nov. 8, 2017, updated 2021.
In Shakespeare, whose works deal with every aspect of human life, we would expect to look much about sex, and indeed we do. Everything he wrote deals with it in some way. Even to events and relationships that are not inherently sexual he gives sexual overtones, or allows them to be so interpreted by his actors and directors. As the English poet laureate, John Masefield wrote, “Sex ran in him like the sea.” Few would dispute with this. But what exactly act his plays, poems, and sonnets announce us about Shakespeare’s own sexuality, and what role does it play in the on-going Shakespeare authorship challenge?
J.T. Looney’s ground-breaking book “Shakespeare” Identified (1920) began the modern era of the authorship controversy by interpreting Shakespeare’s works for clues to the author’s true self. With surprising ease he found that it was Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who reflected, not just some, but all the eighteen qualit