Sexuality of William Shakespeare

[5][6] The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times.

[13] Other evidence to support this belief is that he and Anne were buried in separate (but adjoining) graves and, as has often been noted, Shakespeare's will makes no specific bequest to his wife aside from "the second best bed with the furniture".

[15] A bed missing from an inventory of Anne's brother's possessions (removed in contravention of their father's will) allows the explanation that the item was an heirloom from the Hathaway family that had to be returned.

[16] The law at the time also stated that the widow of a man was automatically entitled to a third of his estate, so Shakespeare did not need to mention specific bequests in the will.

One anecdote along these lines is provided by a lawyer named John Manningham, who wrote in his diary that Shakespeare had a brief affair with a woman during a performance of Richard III.

This is introduced with a short explanatory passage: W.S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recovered ... he [Willobie] determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, than it did for the old player.The fact that W.S.

[23] Other possible evidence of other affairs are that twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the so-called 'Dark Lady').

In addition, there is considerable emphasis on the young man's beauty: in Sonnet 20, the narrator theorises that the youth was originally a woman with whom Mother Nature had fallen in love and, to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism, added a penis ("pricked thee out for women's pleasure"), an addition the narrator describes as "to my purpose nothing".

However, given the homoerotic tone of the rest of the sonnet, it could also be meant to appear disingenuous,[28] mimicking the common sentiment of would-be seducers: 'it's you I want, not your body’.

In the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition, Douglas Bush writes: Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality (a notion sufficiently refuted by the sonnets themselves), we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature.

Dutton comments:Rowse’s conviction on this point remained unshaken to his death, which is odd, not least because he himself was widely understood to be homosexual and wrote openly about writers like Marlowe and Wilde.

[33] Other scholars concurred with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment, made around 1800, that Shakespeare's love was "pure" and in his sonnets there is "not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices".

"[35] Oscar Wilde addressed the issue of the dedicatee of the sonnets in his 1889 short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." in which he identified Will Hughes, a boy actor in Shakespeare's company, as both "Mr W. H." and the "Fair Youth".

In the year after "the law in Britain decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting males over twenty-one", the historian G. P. V. Akrigg published the first extended study of the Earl of Southampton, "who he had no doubt was the 'fair youth' of the sonnets."

"[1] Literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt, in writing about sexuality within Southampton’s world, "assumes that something went on—'whether they only stared longingly at one another or embraced, kissed passionately, went to bed together'".

[37] Stanley Wells also addressed the topic in Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (2004), arguing that a balance had yet to be drawn between the deniers of any possible homoerotic expression in the sonnets and more recent, liberal commentators who have "swung too far in the opposite direction" and allowed their own sensibilities to influence their understanding.