Shakespeare gay
gayest shakespeare sonnets: a selection
turns out all the sonnets are really gay but here is my list of the absolute gayest ones, because i was not prepared for how explicit these were going to be and it devastated me
sonnet 20 - this is the ‘master-mistress of my passion’ one
sonnet 22 - ‘Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain; / Thou gav’st me thine, not to offer back again.’
sonnet 23 - acting metaphors! the difficulty of expressing verbally what silent love hath writ! gazing at your love with your whole heart in your eyes!
sonnet 25 - rich and noble people have pleasure in honour and wealth and so on but turns out having bliss in being gay is way better than that - ‘Then happy I, that love and am beloved / Where I may not remove nor be removed.’
sonnet 26 - begins ‘Lord of my love’ and just gets gayer from there
sonnet 27 - for those nights when u can’t rest for staying up pining and thinking about him
sonnet 41 - this one’s sad bc his lover is Straying but also love btw a guy and woman is explicitly directly made analogous to the love between the speaker and the addressee so like. stop no-homoing the sonnets
sonnet 53 - compare ur bf to bo
Everybody knows Shakespeare.
You might’ve been forced to read Romeo and Juliet in elevated school English, or maybe your favorite movie is a modern adaptation of Julius Caesar…cough-cough, it’s Mean Girls. Regardless, the Bard permeates much of literature one way or another. However, perhaps not as well known to most is that beneath the surface, much of Shakespeare’s work surrounds ideas of gender and queerness. Many of the plays are concerned with cross-dressing, gender fluidity, and same-sex friendships that many scholars contain interpreted to be much more.
Last spring semester, I had the opportunity to take a class on a few of Shakespeare’s major works. Here are my takeaways on the best queer-coded characters after taking the class.
Horatio from Hamlet
In the play, Horatio is Hamlet’s closest partner and one of the only people to truly care about his well-being. Horatio’s loyalty is fixed to the point of many scholars believing it is more than just good-hearted friendship. But one famous line has sealed the deal for many scholars, and that is when Horatio bids goodbye to Hamlet with “Goodnight, sweet prince,” a tender farewell as if sayi
(Homo)sexuality in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The amazing actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male. Nevertheless none are explicitly homoerotic in the manner of some of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton, or for that matter of some contemporary poets such as W. H. Auden or Thom Gunn.
All those that are clearly addressed to or written about a juvenile man, or “boy,” are among the first 126 to be printed in the 1609 volume. Yet Number 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds accept impediment ….,” one of the most famous cherish poems in the language, is frequently read at heterosexual weddings. And other poems in the first part of the sequence – such as Number 27 – could even be love poems addressed to the poet’s wife.
Shakespeare’s most idealized sonnets descend among those that are either cle
Was Shakespeare Gay?
Image: Dedication in Shakespeare's Sonnets, discussed in this episode.
This week's guests (in order of appearance) are:
- Dr Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and Main Learning Manager at the SBT
- Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute
- Professor Sir Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the SBT
- Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Narrator: Jennifer Reid
Transcript
REID: Hello, and welcome to the seventh episode of “Let’s Talk Shakespeare”, a podcast brought to you from Stratford-upon-Avon by the Shakespeare Birthplace Confide in. I’m Jennifer Reid, and today we’re asking, “Was Shakespeare gay?”
So before we get started, just wanted to give you a wee trigger warning: although there’s nothing in this week’s content that’s meant to cause offence, it might raise some questions about some more senior themes, so you probably want to just grant it a whizz through before listening along with any young listeners. And in previous podcasts, I’ve played you lots of short clips from a variety of speakers, but this week I’m going to do it slightly differently, and play you fewer,
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