Exploring an Enigma: Shakespeare’s Sexuality

Much about the Bard’s life is an enigma, and nothing is more ambiguous than the question of his sexuality.

What? I hear you say. Wasn’t he married with three kids? Surely there aren’t any doubts that he was anything other than a straight male?

Well, yes. Except that there are some very intriguing clues that suggest our Will might have had at least some leanings in the other direction. True, his plays include some of the greatest heterosexual romances in the canon, and in others he explores sexual tension between men and women in the most brilliant of ways. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything; Shakespeare was, after all, a creative and imaginative writer, and there are plenty of modern male writers and playwrights who have achieved similar feats of imagination while being themselves, er, gay.

Of course, sexuality itself is a slippery concept when we are talking of the sixteenth century. Attitudes towards same-sex attraction were very different, and in a society where congress between the sexes before marriage was limited, very intense relationships between men were not at all uncommon. While the physical act of sodomy was condemned by church and state (whether between males or between a man and a woman), close emotional bonds were not, and friendships between men were expressed in much more extravagant terms than would be common today. And literary men like Shakespeare were used to using flowery language in their poetry and letters. So we do have to be careful in over-interpreting what written evidence he and his contemporaries have left behind when looking for clues about their own real natures.

Let’s start by considering his marriage to Anne Hathaway.

Shakespeare was a little unusual in that, in an age when most men delayed marriage until their mid to late twenties, he got hitched when he was just eighteen, and he married a woman eight years his senior – also unusual given that most marriages worked the other way round. The suggestion is that it was a pitchfork wedding, forced on the young fellow by Anne Hathaway’s angry relatives. There isn’t much solid evidence for that, but it is true that their first child was born only six months after the marriage bans were read. The other two children were born as twins, two years later. But after that, the couple had no more progeny, and, as is well known, Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet died at the age of eleven. In an age when large families were the norm (Will’s own mother produced eight children), it does seem odd that Anne never again got pregnant to her husband.

It is possible that she simply was not physically able to conceive again. Or that what physical passion they had for each other ended for any one of a myriad of reasons (one of which might well have been the psychological shock of Hamnet’s death). Neither would be unusual, and the fact that Shakespeare was so invested in his home town that he bought one of Stratford’s largest houses once he was affluent enough to do so suggests that keeping Anne and his children in some style was important to him. One might even imagine it as a kind of compensation for his frequent absences in the capital.

And yet…

There are those sonnets. As well as his plays, Shakespeare wrote two long narrative poems, and 154 sonnets. Short fourteen-line poems, sonnets were most commonly love poems, missives sent to woo a lover. But they could also be used to express all sorts of feelings and emotions, and not just between men and women.

Shakespeare’s sonnets include a very long sequence – 126 of them in fact – that are addressed to a young male figure, usually referred to as the ‘fair youth’. That’s a lot of poems expressing deep affection and admiration for this unnamed male, and suggests a relationship that could have been a good deal more than a simple friendship. In fact, the language and themes used in these sonnets often depict intense emotional connections, jealousy, and expressions of love, themes traditionally associated with romantic relationships.

Read as a sequence, the sonnets tell a narrative tale that is something like this: the poet (Shakespeare) urges the young man to marry and father children (sonnets 1–17); their friendship develops with the poet’s loving admiration, which at times is homoerotic in nature; then there are a series of betrayals by the young man, as he is seduced by a Dark Lady (who is the subject of the second major sequence of poems), and they maintain a liaison, all of which the poet struggles to deal with. It concludes with the poet’s own act of betrayal, resulting in his final independence from the fair youth (sonnet 152).

You won’t be surprised to learn, though, that there is one big problem with this neat formulation: it is by no means certain that this was the sequence in which the sonnets were actually written, only that in which they were published. Modern scholarly analysis has suggested that they may have been written in quite a different order, with the Dark Lady poems coming first, and the Fair Youth sonnets much later, when Shakespeare was approaching middle age. That would give a different complexion again to the Fair Youth sequence.

And there is something else. It was usual for collections of sonnets to be dedicated to someone, generally a female muse of some kind. In Shakespeare’s case the poems when they were published in 1609 (importantly, while he was still alive) carried a dedication to ‘Mister W.H.’ – clearly not a woman. The identity of the dedicatee is a mystery, with the William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, as the leading candidate, though quite why the poems might have been dedicated to him is hard to explain.

But whichever way you look at it, the sonnets are powerful evidence that Will Shakespeare was at least susceptible to some kind of same-sex attraction, though that attraction may well have been entirely platonic and given expression using the literary conventions of the time which, as I noted above, are certainly more florid in form than we would use today.

What other evidence do we have that his sexual tastes might have been less than conventional? One argument that has been advanced is a bit like Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark: the fact that we have no letters and indeed almost nothing written in Shakespeare’s own hand. This is a source of frustration to every Shakespearean scholar, but it has been suggested that he (or perhaps Anne) deliberately destroyed his papers so as to remove any evidence of unorthodoxy. He wouldn’t be the only gay man in history to have wanted to hide his sexuality in this way, but given that the sonnets are pretty out there, and that he sanctioned their printing and publishing, the notion that he wanted to destroy his private papers to hide his sexuality is a bit far-fetched for me. Still, it is a possibility.

And remember, he worked in the hothouse world of London’s theatre scene, an entirely male world in which young boys and youths played the female parts on stage. It would hardly be surprising if a lascivious kiss proffered to an onstage ‘woman’ turned into a more sexual affair once off it. Most London companies travelled, too – which meant shared beds in roadside inns.

So, what to make of it all? Personally, I am inclined to the view that the sonnets do indeed point to him having had at least one powerful attraction towards another man at sometime in his life, and perhaps several others of lesser intensity. England had not yet that horror of homosexuality that was bequeathed to the nation by the Victorians, and such liaisons would probably not have attracted too much disapproval, provided that they were discreet. And what little we do know about Shakespeare suggests a character of considerable restraint and caution.

None of that means he didn’t love his wife and children. In fact what evidence we have suggests a lifelong affection and attachment to his family back in Stratford (notwithstanding the often misunderstood reference to his leaving Anne the ‘second-best bed’ in his last testament). Indeed, as Stanley Wells suggests, it isn’t hard to imagine that he spent quite long periods of time there, working quietly away in his study, far from the hurly-burly of London, to which he might have returned only as the demands of actually performing required. Quite the reverse of the usual idea of him living most of the time in the capital.

So in this, as in everything else, our beloved Will Shakespeare is an enigma, a blank slate upon which we can scrawl our own ideas. Readers of my second Shakespeare novel, The Queen’s Player, will of course know where I have landed, but you can, as the saying goes, pay your money and take your pick.