Was Shakespeare gay?

Straight Acting, by Will Tosh

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 R Meager.)

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.

One foundational idea that Shakespeare would have learned at school comes from Cicero. De Amicitia describes the importance of very close male friendships, which were considered more precious than family life in some ways. The male friend should ideally be “another self”. You can see this idea at work in Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Merchant of Venice. These friendships, Tosh suggests, could develop into something more sexual. There is a risk of reading backwards from our own culture here, but along with the mass of other discussion Tosh makes a good case that sometime amicitia perfecta was sexualised, as readings of Merchant have suggested.

Another significant influence was Ovid, who tells of souls that remain intact while they take on different physical forms—an important idea for Shakespeare who was always having his characters take on new gender identities. The Metamorphosis was often described in virtuous terms, as if it were a set of cautionary tales, but it would have been obvious to readers like Shakespeare that it offered “a vision of sexuality infinitely more capacious” than that permitted by Protestant, Puritan, authoritarian English culture.

Being well-educated was almost the only way to get access to classical queer writing because reading classical texts was limited to a minority. But there was also plenty of ambiguity in English language and queerness in English culture.

“Lying with a bedfellow” could have multiple meanings, from the chaste to the bawdy, and there are accounts of people having to share beds for convenience and then engaging in queer sexual acts, consensual and otherwise. Male prostitutes were seen on the streets of London, and described by John Marston. (In Troilus, Shakespeare writes of a “masculine whore”.) Although sodomy was illegal, and described in vicious, hellish terms, no other sexual acts between men were illegal in England, unlike other countries. The word Ganymede was well-known, even to those without a classical education, and pubs were called the Eagle and Child, referencing the story in which Jove “burned with desire” for a boy.

A contemporary literary influence on Shakespeare was Lyly’s play Galatea in which a woman disguised as a man goes into the forest, meets another man and falls in love. Returning to the town they discover they are both women. Venus takes pity on them and turns one into a man, so they can marry. This was in 1592, early in Shakespeare’s career, and clearly influenced him in plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. Between then and 1642, when the theatres were closed, seventy-five plays (that we know of) involved a boy playing a woman who was dressed as a man.

The other influence was Marlowe, whose play Edward II picked up on the large contemporary interest in the relationship between Edward and Piers Gaveston. For many it was a story about corrupted leadership; Marlowe made it into a tragedy about the struggle to reconcile amiticia perfecta (with a sexual element) and the demands of kingship. In Richard II, Shakespeare develops this idea of the struggle to reconcile the personal and the public. Bolingbroke insinuates that Richard was “sinful” with Bushy and Green, and in Henry IV he calls Richard a “skipping” king who spent time with “beardless boys.”

A book like this will always have limits. We don’t know if the sonnets are poems a clef. Tosh dispatches the familiar (and frankly very dull) debates and then moves onto Richard Barnfield, who wrote the first openly queer sonnet, and is, other than Shakespeare, the only poet of the time to write love poetry addressed to another man. I would have liked a more detailed comparison between Barnfield and Shakespeare, but Tosh does a good job showing that Shakespeare was almost certainly influenced by Barnfield.

Straight Acting largely covers the pre-1600 period, which is what we have so-far focussed on here as part of our Shakespeare book club. I recommend the book. It is a swift account of this important side of Shakespeare’s work and the period. As Tosh says at the end, Shakespeare was probably bisexual, but what matters more is the queerness of the writing. He has neatly summarised a lot of academic work into a quick, readable, educative book.

The start of each chapter is a fictional vignette. These are boring and I skipped them after the first one or two. It’s a new trend in biographical and historical writing, which makes it acceptable to put invented material into a factual book—just so long as it is in italics! This reviewer made the point that the best parts of Tosh’s work as his incidental details and close readings, which is about right. Tosh knows a lot and that’s why you should read Straight Acting. It’s a good introduction to the topic.