Gay shakespeare
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His explicitly sexual sonnets, all concerned with a woman and all among the last 26 to be printed, suggest severe psychological tension in a man who has to acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it, at least in its current manifestation. It’s a difficult distinction to make, isn’t it, that distinction between when you physically desire somebody...
Antonio’s love for Bassanio is evident and painful as the merchant lends his young prodigy the money to go and woo the wealthy heiress Portia. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers. This is a huge subject, and it's something that there’s been a great deal of writing and research done on, so if it is something that interests you, I would encourage you to read further on it; but I hope that was a helpful and interesting introduction to the subject.
So thanks for joining us, and thanks to all the people who spoke to me today: we had Liz, Stanley, Michael, and Greg, and a huge thanks to the friends of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, without whom the podcast would not have been possible.
Don’t forget to join us next week for episode eight, where we’ll be asking “How much was Shakespeare worth?”
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– Shakespeare’s Many Moods of Love
New Perspectives on Gender and Desire in the Bard’s Work
London — For centuries, William Shakespeare has been celebrated as the pinnacle of English literature, his works dissected for their linguistic brilliance and timeless themes.
Though not, as you might imagine, in my production!
Exeter tells the King that the Duke of York commends him to his majesty and he says, “By his bloody side, / Yoke-fellow to his honour-owing wounds, / The noble Earl of Suffolk also lies.” Then he describes a really extraordinary scene. It’s not the ‘wrong’ thing to ask’
Disapproval loomed, of course, as well as hostility from the church, but social history research suggests that the more usual response to same-sex intimacy was a worldly shrug, as long as it didn’t frighten the horses (or challenge society’s rigid gender roles).
But I still feel a bit caught out when someone wants to talk about Shakespeare’s sexuality.
And Shakespeare knew that tension within himself.
is that because you genuinely love them? My own feeling is yes: Shakespeare was gay.
REID: Well, that’s all we’ve got time for in today’s podcast. It’s all very engaging and exciting and charged. It’s a brilliant description of homophobia. The only one which is absolutely clear, I suppose, is the one between Patroclus and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, and there that’s authenticated by Greek legend, on which the play is based.
Roughly 126 of these poems are addressed to a young man, known as the “Fair Youth,” using language brimming with adoration and longing. It’s also true that we now, in our society, have this idea that it’s women who form these very close, emotional friendships. Oscar Wilde certainly thought the Sonnets contained a secret, suggesting in his essay-masquerading-as-a-story ‘The Portrait of Mr.
W.H.’ that the fair youth was ‘none other than the boy-actor for whom [Shakespeare] created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself’ (his youthful good looks must have lasted the best part of fifteen years if the same boy created the female lead in Romeo and Juliet in 1594 and Cymbeline’s Imogen in 1609).
‘Our modern words for sexual orientation – gay, straight, homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual – are all nineteenth or twentieth-century coinages’
Wilde might have veered into fiction with his identification of Shakespeare’s lover, but many readers are still reluctant to discard the notion that the Sonnets offer a glimpse of the ‘real’ Shakespeare.
So, what that actually entailed [sic] people isn’t the equivalent of what a loving gay relationship is today.
So, whether or not Shakespeare was gay is a difficult question. “If a teenager today finds solace in thinking Shakespeare might have felt what they feel, that’s powerful.”
The Verdict: Ambiguity as Legacy
While evidence of Shakespeare’s sexuality remains circumstantial, the debate itself underscores his enduring resonance.
Academics like Dr. Alan Sinfield and Dr. Valerie Traub have analyzed his texts as sites of coded desire. [laughs] We would not call that sodomy today. But in a world increasingly embracing fluid identities, the question of who Shakespeare loved—and how—feels more alive than ever.
Was Shakespeare Gay? Scholars Explore Themes in Bard’s Sonnets (March 9, 2025)
We often read Shakespeare’s Sonnets as an account of the poet’s intense relationships with a beautiful young man and a bewitching ‘dark lady’.