The clue to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets

The question ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is not very rational. It might be a little like asking ‘Was Shakespeare a Tory?’. Some of his scenarios might coincide with later developments – Jaques trying to pick up Ganymede in As You Like It (gay), or Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical conditions are not there. No doubt there have been people keen on same-sex relations since the dawn of time. But the possibilities of a social identity embedded in the word ‘gay’ didn’t exist in the 16th century, nor the medical diagnosis from which the word ‘homosexual’ arose. Nor will ‘sodomite’ do. That describes some very different sexual tastes and practices through history.

Will Tosh uses the word ‘queer’, which will seem distasteful to many survivors of queer-bashing now. I think, too, that it has been rendered useless as a descriptive term by the recent tendency of any straight couple under 30 who have ever shared a bottle of nail varnish so to describe themselves. Probably what we can conclude is that, for early modern society, these were acts and not fundamental states of being – sins and temptations that people might be more or less prone to, and more or less given to indulging. Somewhere in that ‘more or less’, we might guess, lay Shakespeare. But we don’t know, and we don’t have a word for it.

Still, we know what we are talking about: same-sex desire. There is a fair amount of it in Shakespeare’s works; but there is no real suggestion, in the biographical traces, that he had a weakness in that direction. There are some bitchy comments by contemporaries about him, from Robert Greene’s ‘upstart crow’ to Ben Jonson saying he had ‘small Latin and less Greek’. One of them, surely, would have made a cutting remark about a fondness for boys.