In A.N. Wilson’s memoir about Iris Murdoch, he recounts a story when Murdoch and he were in the car with Murdoch’s husband John Bayley, a distinguished literary critic and Oxford don in English Literature. Murdoch said that it seemed obvious to her that Shakespeare was bisexual. Bayley pulled the car over, very hard, got out to relieve himself, and on the way back to the car put his face (distorted with crossness) to the window and snarled, “Shakespeare wasn’t a bloody queer.” A plastic bottle with a home-made gin and vermouth mixture was produced, peace restored, and the journey continued.
In his new book Straight Acting, Will Tosh, researcher at the Globe Theatre, has written a new account of queer Shakespeare. At he says in the opening, “the un-gaying of Shakespeare has a long history.” John Bayley was hardly the only one. Coleridge worried about Shakespeare’s “disposition”; Shelley said the same-sex writing was “divested of any unwanted alloy”; a 1640 edition changed “sweet boy” to “sweet love”. And so on.
I must confess, as an undergraduate I assumed, quite blindly, that queer theory was a distraction, another morphing in the long trail of literary theories more concerned with the theory than the literature. But it’s perfectly obvious that Shakespeare is a major writer of queerness. Once you see that, for example, as I wrote recently, you could change the genders in Romeo & Juliet and almost none of the language seems out of place, you have seen something very important about Shakespeare. (The actor Emma D’Arcy has said they found the experience of playing Romeo as a woman important in understand their own non-binary gender—you can see a picture of the production here. h/t .)
Tosh starts and ends with the question “was Shakespeare gay?” We don’t, and never will, know Shakespeare’s sexuality: the sonnets are largely addressed to a male lover, and seem like his most personal writing. But we should remember, as Tosh points out, that we cannot deduce anything about Shakespeare from his plays: it is hopeless looking for hints about his marriage from the plays because there is no consistency between the couples he portrays. He is far more than a personal writer. Shakespeare is a writer of the largest imaginative ability. All life is there!
So while it seems little more than common sense to say that Shakespeare was bi-sexual, the more important thing to realise is that he was a great writer of queerness because he was a great writer of many different sorts of sexuality. Yes, it is important that when we read Shakespeare’s sonnets at our weddings we forgot they were often addressed to a man, but that is more interesting as a way of thinking about the work than the man.
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