Sexuality of William Shakespeare - Possible Homoeroticism

Possible Homoeroticism

Shakespeare's sonnets are cited as evidence of his possible bisexuality. The poems were initially published, perhaps without his approval, in 1609. One hundred and twenty-six of them appear to be love poems addressed to a young man known as the 'Fair Lord' or 'Fair Youth'; this is often assumed to be the same person as the 'Mr W.H.' to whom the sonnets are dedicated. The identity of this figure (if he is indeed based on a real person) is unclear; the most popular candidates are Shakespeare's patrons, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, both of whom were considered handsome in their youth.

The only explicit references to sexual acts or physical lust occur in the Dark Lady sonnets, which unambiguously state that the poet and the Lady are lovers. Nevertheless, there are numerous passages in the sonnets addressed to the Fair Lord that have been read as expressing desire for a younger man. In Sonnet 13, he is called "dear my love", and Sonnet 15 announces that the poet is at "war with Time for love of you." Sonnet 18 asks "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate", and in Sonnet 20 the narrator calls the younger man the "master-mistress of my passion". The poems refer to sleepless nights, anguish and jealousy caused by the youth. In addition, there is considerable emphasis on the young man's beauty: in Sonnet 20, the narrator theorizes that the youth was originally a woman with whom Mother Nature had fallen in love and, to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism, added a penis ("pricked thee out for women's pleasure"), an addition the narrator describes as "to my purpose nothing", which Samuel Schoenbaum interprets as: "worse luck for heterosexual celebrant". In some sonnets addressed to the youth, such as Sonnet 52, the erotic punning is particularly intense: "So is the time that keeps you as my chest, Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, To make some special instant special blest, By new unfolding his imprisoned pride.' In Sonnet 20: the narrator tells the youth to sleep with women, but to love only him: 'mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure".

However, others have countered that these passages could be referring to intense platonic friendship, rather than sexual love. In the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition, Douglas Bush writes,

Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality (a notion sufficiently refuted by the sonnets themselves), 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.'

Bush cites Montaigne, who distinguished male friendships from 'that other, licentious Greek love', as evidence for a platonic interpretation of the sonnets.

Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical but fiction, another of Shakespeare's "dramatic characterization", so that the narrator of the sonnets should not be presumed to be Shakespeare himself.

In 1640, John Benson published a second edition of the sonnets 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 soon became the best-known text, and it was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms.

The question of the sexual orientation of the sonnets' author was openly articulated in 1780, when George Steevens, upon reading Shakespeare's description of a young man 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". Other English scholars, dismayed at the possibility that their national hero might 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". Robert Browning, writing of Wordsworth's assertion that "with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart", famously replied in his poem House, "If so, the less Shakespeare he!" The controversy continued in the 20th Century. By 1944, the Variorum edition of the sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. Stanley Wells addressed the topic in Looking for sex in Shakespeare (2004), noting that a balance had yet to be drawn between the deniers of any possible homoerotic expression in the sonnets and more recent, liberal commentators who have "swung too far in the opposite direction" and allowed their own sensibilities to influence their understanding.