We feature on this blog Shakespearean sonnets written to a man.  For these posts (and photos), CLICK the RSS button in the right sidebar and search on Shakespeare.

So was Shakespeare gay or bi?

The answer partly depends on who Shakespeare was.  It could be that “Will” Shakespeare—the married fellow from Stratford Upon Avon—also had a love for men, particularly reflected in his sonnets (but also found in some references in his plays).  After all, Will was away from Stratford a lot working on his plays at the Globe Theater in London.  The drama scene—then as now—appears to have been more open to sexual expression than, perhaps, the rest of English society thought proper.

But most of this is speculation.  Whatever his sexuality, Will Shakespeare likely directed the plays credited to him.  The actual playwright and poet, however, appears to have been a culturally privileged, more educated man at Queen Elizabeth’s court—the aristocrat Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the Earl of Oxford. Lending credence to the view that de Vere was Shakespeare’s ghost writer is poetry he wrote earlier that reflects the same “Shakespearean” style we find in the plays and sonnets.  The earl also traveled extensively Italy, settings for Shakespearean plays—Venice, Verona and elsewhere, places not visited by Shakespeare.

As one commentator puts it: “Edward de Vere, the true author of the plays, was homosexual, or at least bisexual, but this was a good 400 years before the notion of gay pride, so writing plays with openly-gay characters would have been a risky proposition. Instead, de Vere used cross-dressing to blur the line between genders and hint at the idea of homosexual love. It’s a device he uses in numerous plays, including the “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Knowing de Vere’s sexuality also gives more insight into works like “The Taming of the Shrew,” where marriage is seen as little more than a financial partnership, hinting at the nature of de Vere’s own marriages.” See }http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/ 

Further Thoughts:

We find beauty in the homoerotic poetry attributed to Shakespeare (nom de plume of Edward deVere, the well-educated aristocrat, the Earl of Oxford).  Did you see the recent movie Anonymous?  Although the film passes over Shakespeare’s/de Vere’s sexual orientation, it takes the stand we also adopt here—that the poet and playwright were de Vere, not Shakespeare.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of resistance to abandoning the wonderful myth of the commoner, Will Shakespeare, from Stratford Upon Avon.  How democratic to think that an uneducated 15th-century, small-town boy could write such stuff! Let’s get real!

Among other things, de Vere had traveled to continental Europe—location of a number of “Shakespeare’s” plays.  As for Will, there no evidence he ever went further from Stratford than London where he probably was an actor, perhaps director and producer of plays that bore his name. In this he did de Vere a favor.  The politics and other themes in his plays could have upset the Elizabethan court of which de Vere was a part—perhaps sending him to the Tower or worse.  Capital punishment was pretty big back then!

If you wonder whether Shakespeare (de Vere) is really gay or bi, then start with Sonnet 20 below.  He tells us he is in love with this younger man, the “master-mistress of [his] passion.” Women can bring him offspring in their love for him, but Shakespeare (or deVere) can love him as a man.

Maybe none of this matters to you—that who Shakespeare really was can be set aside as unimportant.  I disagree for at least two reasons.  First, to understand the deeper meanings of what is being said, it is helpful to know as much as we can about the writer.  Second, we can take gay and bi pride in knowing that the most celebrated figure in English (and by transference, American) literature is a man with orientations most of us know only too well!