Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, has of recent years become as popular a recitation at weddings as recitals of Frank Sinatra’s My Way at funerals.
If wide notice is taken of a current spat over what we can read about Shakespeare’s sexuality into the sonnets in the correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement, Sonnet 20 may be a future favourite at civil unions. The opening line, to remind you, is A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion.
And the end couplet is: But since she [Nature] prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
The two TLS spatters are Sir Brian Vickers, wholly sceptical, and Stanley Wells – inclined to read Shakespeare’s own gay feelings into the poems. Vickers’s countering line is that one should assume the poet is the “poet’s persona”, no more Shakespeare than Hamlet is Shakespeare. Wells thinks the sonneteer is, indeed, Shakespeare himself in propria persona (this is, remember, the TLS, not saloon bar at the Dog and Duck).
These distinguished scholars’ interest in sex and the sonnets is, one may suspect, wholly academic. They are well into that stage of life in which Shakespeare says (rather unkindly) the “heyday in the blood is tame”. There is something rather touching about two greybeards, well into their Polonius years with a combined age of 155, speculating about what was bubbling up in the Bard’s twentysomething gonads and whether it spurts into the poems.
Sonnets, one should note in passing, are hard to read – particularly as they move on to the “sestet”, or last six lines. They are also particularly hard to write in English. As George Orwell noted, the cross that English poets have to bear is too few rhyme words (how many for “love”? glove / dove / above – that’s it). There are infinitely more in Italian – the home of the sonnet.
Although it has supplied some “slow news day” fodder the Shakespeare-sex-and-sonnet issue is by no means new. Victorians were well aware of it; Oscar Wilde cited the sonnets in his doomed trial. It didn’t help.
“Sodometries” – particularly in Renaissance (now renamed Early Modern) literature – has been around as a critical approach ever since the rise of the queer theory in the 1970s. Shakespeare’s likely bisexuality has been factored, unexcitedly, into modern biography. In one of the best of the recent ones (Shakespeare Unbound, 2007) René Weis has a cool and illuminatingly open-minded analysis of whether the earlier sonnets (including 20) are directed at the young and glamorous Earl of Southampton, the poet’s patron and possible love object. Weis also discusses whether, in their “madcap twenties”, Shakespeare and the more overtly gay Christopher Marlowe had an affair.
Was Shakespeare gay? Was he bisexual? Was he either or both of the above at different times of his life? Would he have divulged the fact? Buggery was punishable by hanging until 1861. And, the biggest question of all: does it matter?
I think it does because Shakespeare is a “living” author and how we read him affects how he is performed. Should one make Osric in Hamlet openly gay (and what about Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern)? Should a director accentuate a gay theme in The Merchant of Venice (Weis thinks yes), or in the transvestite subplot in Twelfth Night? Was Shakespeare bisexual? I’d risk Vickers’ wrath by thinking probably yes. Take another look at Sonnet 20.
