The key to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets

The question “Was Shakespeare gay?” is not a very rational one. It is perhaps a bit like asking “Was Shakespeare a Tory?” Some of his scenarios may correspond to later developments – Jaques trying to tear Ganymede apart in As you Like It (gay) or Ulysses’ speech about the degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical conditions are not there. There have undoubtedly been people interested in same-sex relationships since the beginning of time. But the possibilities of social identity embedded in the word “gay” did not exist in the 16th century, nor did the medical diagnosis that gave rise to the word “homosexual.” Nor will “sodomite” fit the bill. That describes some very different sexual preferences and practices throughout history.

Will Tosh uses the word “queer,” which many survivors of queer-bashing today might seem distasteful. I also think it has become useless as a descriptive term, since every heterosexual couple under 30 who has ever shared a bottle of nail polish has been referring to themselves that way lately. We can probably conclude that in early modern society, these were actions rather than basic states of being—sins and temptations that people were more or less inclined to and gave in to more or less. Somewhere in that “more or less,” we might suspect, lay Shakespeare. But we don’t know, and we have no word for it.

Still, we know what we’re talking about: same-sex desire. There’s quite a lot of it in Shakespeare’s works; but there’s no real evidence in the biographical record that he had any weakness in this respect. There are some caustic comments about him by contemporaries, from Robert Greene’s “upstart” to Ben Jonson’s saying he had “little Latin and less Greek.” One of them would surely have made a caustic remark about his preference for boys. To find anything like evidence, we have to look to the plays and poems.

Tosh has written a well-written book that places these expressions of desire in two contexts. The first is the historical one – where same-sex society flourished or was tolerated. The second is the literary one – the points in the late 16th century when literary fashion encouraged the expression of same-sex feelings or where performance conventions permitted a more explicit depiction of the forbidden practice than we understand today or than was permitted off-stage at the time.

The moments in the plays where it appears have been covered at length by more recent writers. Some of them seem quite implausible to me, and Tosh also seems to overemphasize intense male friendships – like those of Romeo and Mercutio – as same-sex desire. The Renaissance was keen on intimate friendship, as praised by Cicero. What it really was was friendship. These treatises were not written in bad faith, and the devotion we see in The Two gentlemen from Verona is not a romantic passion. (In fact, the devoted friendship between heterosexual men may be the most neglected form of love that exists today.)

But there are signs of same-sex desire, some of them classic, when Thersites scourges Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida; some more original, in Othellowhen Jago, feeling uneasy, invents his own rape by Cassio when they shared a bed. When Jaques finished the fourth act of As you Like It When she says to Ganymede, “I pray you, handsome youth, let me know you better,” we are certainly seeing a sullen and unsociable queen trying out a very ineffective pick-up line. One might also observe that relationships in some modern plays have been given a strong homoerotic tinge without violating existing psychology. The rivalry and passion between Coriolanus and Aufidius, for example, works very well on stage when there is a hint of sexual tension.

It may be that the homoerotic thrill was also heightened by the fact that the love scenes between heroes and heroines, who were often disguised as boys, were in reality a man kissing a boy on stage. This becomes an acute point in Twelfth Night And How you I likewith a marriage ceremony between two actors, both in men’s clothing. Tosh is good at digging up works by contemporaries that take Shakespeare’s inventions further in this direction. I wish he had mentioned Jonson’s extraordinary play Epikoänin which a grumpy old man is persuaded to marry a taciturn woman who turns out to be incredibly talkative. Only at the final curtain is the woman’s wig ripped from her head and the audience informed that they have not been watching a boy playing a woman; the main character has been tricked into marrying a boy disguised as a woman.

Some of it was the product of a literary fashion. Tosh explains well how the sex comedy of disguise relates to mythical dramas like John Lyly’s. Galatea. The decidedly lascivious descriptions of the charms of Adonis (as opposed to those of Venus) in Shakespeare’s most popular narrative poem are conveniently surrounded by a number of other pretty mini-epics in the Ovidian style.

Where fashion fails is when we come to A in the case of Shakespeare, who was gay: the sonnets. They are decidedly different from other erotic sonnet cycles of the time – not classical roles, as in Richard Barnfield’s raunchy boy-on-boy novel “The Affectionate Shepherd.” (Barnfield is the only writer who seems to have paid a price for his inclinations. Tosh argues convincingly that he was sharply dropped by his patrons and disinherited by his rich father for this reason.) Shakespeare’s sonnets are not conventional exercises, like Venus and Adonis. The only explanation for this seems to be that they are statements of personal experience, like Donne’s love poems. This experience is irretrievable; but the impression that these were written by a man who had overwhelming feelings for another man cannot be denied.

This is an interesting book with many useful references to works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, both of whom are very well known (Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.) and forgotten today (Thomas Peends Hermaphroditus and Salmacis). However, I think this case is heavily influenced by our concerns today, and I remain unconvinced that early modern playwrights have anything to contribute to the current transgender debate. It is true that characters frequently dress up as the opposite sex. But they also dress up as walls (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and occasionally turn into trees, clouds, or showers of gold. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed many strange things. For example, they thought that bears are born as unfinished lumps that their mothers must lick in bear form. Shakespeare evidently believed that Bohemia had a coast, that the ancient Romans had clocks and billiard tables, and that identical twins did not have to be the same sex.

Still, I see no indication that he or anyone at the time seriously believed that someone born a man could really be or become a woman. It could be a way of talking – like Lady Macbeth asking to shed her feminine characteristics to become more ruthless. Or it could just be a fantastical event, like the descent of the gods. None of this has anything to do with today’s bundle of labels that label LGBTQIA+ versus same-sex activity, and it shows a certain historical solipsism in flattening the past to make it more suitable to our interests. What you want from a book about Shakespeare is not an explanation of how much same-sex desire in the 1590s resembled ours on a Friday night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Rather, you want to be shown how strange and oddly different it might have been.

Nevertheless, this is an exciting, enthusiastic and informative book about a long-denied or ignored facet of the most interesting and versatile of all great writers.