Today we are going to talk about how William
Shakespeare was super bisexual.
William Shakespeare- love him or hate him,
you know who he is.
This guy.
The Bard of Avon.
England’s National Poet.
Good ole Billy Shakes.
Willy “Dick Joke” Shake-a-Spear.
He’s sort of a big deal.
He was also super into dudes AND ladies.
So before we go any further, I do want to
quickly address an important point- as I mentioned
briefly in my Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman
video, discussing the sexual orientation of
historical figures can be tricky.
Modern terms and understandings of sexuality
and sexual orientation are, well, modern.
The word “heterosexual” wasn’t even
coined until 1892.
So, keep that in mind.
If you were to ask Shakespeare if he was bisexual,
he wouldn’t have known what that word meant.
So I’m not going to argue about whether
or not Shakespeare would have personally identified
with the label bisexual, or if he would have
prefered pansexual or queer, or whatever,
were he alive today.
Rather, I’m going to argue that, from the
evidence we have, Shakespeare seems to meet
our modern definitions for bisexual- someone
who is attracted to two or more genders, someone
who is attracted to their own and different
gender or genders, someone who is attracted
to both men and women (and nonbinary people.)
We’re also going to be approaching this
topic with the deliberate intent to disregard
heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity is an attitude which presumes
heterosexual is the normal, default, and expected
sexuality and that to assert anyone is anything
else requires us to disprove beyond a shadow
of a doubt that they are NOT straight first.
We will not be doing this.
Instead, we are approaching the topic from
a neutral standpoint.
With ALL of the evidence, which modern label
most closely matches what we know about Shakespeare,
treating all labels as inherently likely.
So no, we’ll never be able to say with 100%
certainty which label Shakespeare would have
used for himself had those labels existed
then, but we can talk about which label he
would most likely fit today using what evidence
we have.
So With that, let’s first talk about who
William Shakespeare is, what we know about
him, and the evidence we have that he was
playing for more than one team.
-
William Shakespeare was born in late April
1564 in Stratford upon Avon.
He was baptized on the 26th, so he was probably
born on the 23rd or 24th, but we can’t be
sure.
He was the son of a glover and was educated
at a public grammar school.
When he was 18, he married the 26 year old
Anne Hathaway, who was already 3 months pregnant
with their first child, a daughter named Susanna.
2 years later, the couple had a set of twins,
a son Hamnet and a daughter Judith.
Hamnet would die of unknown causes when he
was 11, and inspire the tragedy Hamlet in
some ways.
By the 1590s, Shakespeare had moved to London
and took up acting, writing,and directing.
He wrote 38 plays (some of which have contested
authorship) and 154 sonnets.
We aren’t totally sure about when all his
plays were written, and there are multiple
different versions of each play in existence
(collected in what are called quartros and
folios.)
There is a whole interesting history about
the publication of these plays that we won’t
go into now.
He died April 23 1616 of unknown causes, leaving
the majority of his estate to his daughter
Susanna.
Shakespeare was well respected in his craft
at the time, but was certainly not the legendary
figure he is today.
(And the fact that he is so worshipped today
would make poor Christopher Marlowe just as
mad as a bee hive) His plays appealed to members
of all classes in society, exploring themes
of nobility and the nature of the soul right
along side fart jokes and fat jokes and dick
jokes.
A lot of dick jokes.
Now, despite all this, we don’t really know
a whole lot about Shakespeare’s personal
life.
He didn’t keep a journal as far as anyone
knows.
Aside from some very basic legal documents,
like his baptism, marriage, and death records,
we don’t have a lot of contemporary sources
about him.
He wasn’t rich or noble, so despite his
notoriety, no one was documenting his life
very carefully.
He wasn’t even consistent with how he spelled
his own name (English spelling hadn’t been
super formalized yet, and wouldn’t be until
Samuel Johnson wrote his very popular dictionary
in 1755.)
We know he was married, when he lived and
died, when his plays were released for the
most part, and what general times he lived
in London (leaving his wife and children back
in Stratford)
-
So, how can we speculate about the personal
life and desires of a man who died 400 years
ago if we don’t even have as much as a journal
to work with?
His plays don’t help much- even if we accept
that events in his personal life can and did
impact his plays, such as Hamnet’s death
being an influence on the play Hamlet, his
plays are often based on earlier stories or
historical events, and are too fantastical
to base much biographical meaning on.
Quick Shout out though to As You Like It,
which has a woman disguised as a man, using
the name Ganymede, and then dressing up as
herself to fake date the guy she has a thing
for.
And Twelfth Night which has even more cross
dressing.
And Merchant of Venice.
And remember, that all the actors would have
been men and boys originally.
So, what I’m saying is that Theatre has
always been pretty queer.
And Shakespeare definitely had a penchant
for exploring queer themes in his works at
times.
And, well, it’s not impossible for straight
dudes to write queer characters or explore
queer themes.
But...it is something to remember.
However.
We do have his 154 Sonnets.
Poetry, my friends.
Poetry is key.
And I’m going to read you some of his poetry
in this video.
I’ll do my best.
The sonnets deal with love, and desire, beauty,
and the passage of time.
They all read as highly personal.
And of those 154, The first 126 sonnets are
addressed to a young man; the last 28 to a
dark skinned woman.
These are referred to, respectively, as the
Fair Youth, and Dark Lady sonnets.
The poems are all dedicated to "Mr. W.H."
(called the sole begetter of the poems, whatever
that means), and who WH is, and whether or
not he is the Fair Youth, or just a patron
is the source much speculation and controversy.
Is Shakespeare himself the speaker, or is
there an imagined speaker?
Again, we don’t know for sure.
Though it does seem that the speaker and the
subject are consistently the same for the
first 126 sonnets, then the subject changes
for the last 20+ poems with the same speaker.
And yall, these Fair Youth Poems are something
else.
Don’t let the haters tell you these are
platonic.
One of these Fair Youth poems?
You’ve probably heard of it:
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his
shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee.
This is written to a man.
And it’s very romantic.
Or look at Sonnet 20, when he clearly laments
that the fair youth isn’t a woman.
This one is so great, I want to share with
you the No Fear Shakespeare paraphrase of
it.
Because its a little easier to understand.
Your face is as pretty as a woman’s, but
you don’t even have to use makeup—you,
the man (or should I say woman?)
I love.
Your heart is as gentle as a woman’s, but
it isn’t cheating like theirs.
Your eyes are prettier than women’s, but
not as roving—you bless everything you look
at.
You’ve got the good looks of a handsome
man, but you attract both women and men.
When Mother Nature made you, she originally
intended to make you a woman, but then she
got carried away with her creation and screwed
me by adding a certain thing that I have no
use for.
But since she gave you a prick to please women,
I’ll keep your love, and they can enjoy
your body.
That’s just beautiful.
I also want us to quickly enjoy Sonnet 52,
which enjoys an excellent dick pun.
So look at this one for just a moment.
Pfffft.
his imprison’d pride.
Yeah.
That means what exactly you think it means.
And yall, the poem I read to my husband at
our wedding is one of the Fair Youth sonnets,
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height
be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips
and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
Side note: Sonnets traditionally end in a
rhyming couplet.
You will notice that proved and loved do not
rhyme though.
They used to.
The pronunciation of proved has changed in
the last 400 years.
From provd to proved.
So provd and loved do rhyme.
There’s actually a lot of examples of this
in Shakespeare- rhymes and puns that break
because of modern pronunciation.
But yeah.
I love that poem.
I love it and recited it at my wedding.
And Shakespeare wrote it for his secret London
boyfriend.
Probably, ya know.
Now we need to talk about the Dark Lady.
Based on the descriptions we have in the poems,
we can conclude that this lover was a black
woman, though like the Fair youth, her identity
remains a mystery.
This sequence of poems is not only romantic,
but also much more explicitly sexual.
Yes, more sexual that the repeated dick references
we’ve already seen.
Sonnet 151 talks a lot about his erection,
for example.
Yeah take a moment to read this.
Yeah, so his flesh is pointing out his triumphant
prize.
Jeez, Billy.
Calm down.
Also, the famous Sonnet 130 is written to
the Dark Lady.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are
dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her
head;
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some pérfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the
ground.
  And yet, by heaven, I think my love
as rare
  As any she belied with false compare.
And this is a really sweet poem.
It’s all about how even though the Dark
Lady isn’t some idealized goddess- coral
red lips and snow white skin and perfume breath-
rather she has brown skin and wiry hair, even
though she is a normal person unadorned by
hyperbole, he finds her rare and beautiful
and lovely all the same.
I also want to take a minute to appreciate
Sonnet 135, simply because it is SO RAUNCHY.
Yall.
Her “will” is so large, that he wants
to put his “will” into hers.
…like...God damn.
Not only is that a pun on his OWN NAME, it
is also very dirty.
Ok, so that’s a lot of poetry I just threw
at you.
I could probably go all day.
I love the sonnets.
But let’s move on.
Now, when the sonnets are brought up in the
great Sexuality Debate, detractors will often
go to this argument that we can not know if
Shakespeare himself is the speaker, or if
this private collection of over 150 poems
is an extended exercise in dramatic storytelling-
the speaker being an invented character who
has no reflection on Shakespeare himself.
To address that, I will turn to the Scholar
Arthur Freeman who answers more succinctly
than I can.
“I cannot think of any responsible editor
who would dismiss the premise of homosexual,
as well as heterosexual passion pervading
[the sonnets],” Mr Freeman has written.
“Why should Shakespeare alone be thought
so committed to the ‘negative capability’
of his dramatic craft that all his most personal
writings are treated as potentially artificial?
“And even if we insist on regarding the
sonnets, wholly or in part, as a kind of long-term
dramatic narrative...
Why on earth would Shakespeare choose so often
to impersonate a pathetically ageing, balding,
lame and vulnerable bisexual suitor, abjectly
whingeing about rejection and betrayal — unless
the self-humiliation that surfaces again and
again through these particulars were both
genuine and cathartic?”
I will also turn to Professor Wells, who said:
“When a poet whose name is William writes
poems of anguished and unabashed sexual frankness
which pun on the word ‘will’ — 13 times
in [Sonnet] No 135...
It is not unreasonable to conclude that he
may be writing from the depths of his own
experience.”
So, remember that we are working from a non-heteronormative
starting place here.
Taking all of the evidence we have, with all
the needed grains of salt, what is the most
likely explanation for all of the assembled
evidence?
We have a poet who often wrote about cross
dressing characters in his plays, exploring
queer themes, who wrote over 100 love poems
to a man, dozens to a woman, was married,
and to some extent did seem to be drawing
on his personal experiences in his poems?
Well.
Bisexual.
He was most likely bisexual.
Which is awesome.
Glad to be in good company.
Now, Hollywood.
Give me a buddy comedy about Gay Christopher
Marlowe and Bisexual William Shakespeare being
snarky best buds and causing mischief in Elizabethan
England.
Bonus points if Marlowe is a Crown Spy.
I will give you all my money for this.
Thanks for listening!
I’ll be sure to see all of yall down in
the comments.
If you enjoyed listening to this queer millennial
feminist with a BA in English ramble for a
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