Shakespeare gay

Has Shakespeare's secret gay lover's identity just been uncovered by historians? Some of them are poems of personal anguish, written by someone who seems to be trying to work out difficult emotional situations within himself; trying to decide whether, for example, his desire for the other person is loving or lustful.

What do we know about his sexuality and his relationships? To answer this question, we have to think about the nature of friendships and sexuality and self identification of those things in Shakespeare time, as well as looking at evidence from this text, in particular the sonnets.

And for us, the boundary between a gay stories gonewild relationship and a friendship relationship is absolutely cut and dried. Shakespeare’s culture and society made much more space for the articulation of same-sex desire than we might expect.

Nearly all of them are love poems. Some historians have. William Shakespeare - Sexuality, Poetry, Plays: Like so many circumstances of Shakespeare’s personal life, the question of his sexual nature is shrouded in uncertainty. Now those sonnets vary a great deal in their expression.

He was clearly extraordinarily adept at getting into the minds of characters of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, [but] just because he could beautifully depict same sex relationships or love or lust does not mean that he himself felt that, in the same way that writing about Cleopatra did not make him an Egyptian queen.

So, the modern term would probably be… interestedrather than, [ laughs ] rather than gay. Some of them are quite difficult in style. He shows it in the plays as well sometimes, but the sonnets are those that seem to be the most relevant to his personal life.

Some of the known facts are that some of his sonnetswhich are definitely love poems, are written to a man because they have a shakespeare pronoun in them. His plays are all set in the past, usually the distant past, and in remote places. The tiny clue that pointed to a passionate love affair.

Today, we have a very defined boundary between love and friendship, and for us, those two relationships are tangibly different, and we have all kinds of phraseology in the modern world to distinguish those things. It could mean a very dry, business relationship of patronage, and some people interpret the sonnets that way, as simply flattering poetry written towards a patron.

Historians debate William Shakespeare's sexuality. And Shakespeare knew that tension within himself. The earliest emergence of a sort of self-identification which might have been related to sexuality is later than that, and that comes with the molly-house culture.

A license had been issued for the. He had loving relationships with people, and nobody can say whether those people were all men, all women, or a mixture of both. One thing that is definite, though, is that there was no self-identity as gay or homosexual or, as far as we know, any other term during that time period.

Well, we only know that he was married once, to a woman named Anneand that they stayed married shakespeare the rest of their lives. The Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, held in the National Portrait Gallery The sexuality of William Shakespeare has been the subject of debate.

At age 18, inhe married Anne Hathaway, a woman who was eight years older than he. Now some of those sonnets are addressed to a male person. From the Shakespeare Gay Trust. To what extent is it just impelled by the desire for sexual experience?

And nobody really questions whether those relationships were driven by sex or not. This is a really big question that people have written a gay deal about, so this episode acts as a sort of summary of some of the arguments for and against Shakespeare being gay.

So was Shakespeare gay? It is known from public records that he married Anne Hathaway and had three children with her; scholars have examined their relationship through documents, and particularly through the bequests to her in his will. So, whether or not Shakespeare was gay is a difficult question.

'Was Shakespeare Gay?' - the question discussed in episode seven of our Let's Talk Shakespeare podcast. It could mean a romantic relationship, as it does to us today, and it could mean the love which might exist between friends. We might call it strange, but not sodomy.

Their first child, Susanna, was born on May 26,about six months after the marriage ceremony. It is also true that sodomy was a hanging offence.