Anne Shakespeare and the Question: Was William Shakespeare Gay?
Was Anne Shakespeare’s husband, William, gay? There is certainly a number of Shakespearean scholars who hold to this belief based on seeing the Sonnets as an autobiographical account of William as author. In this scenario, the first 126 sonnets are assumed to be addressed to a young man whom, it is alleged by critics, William was having a homosexual affair with. But to complicate the gay narrative, it is then assumed that in sonnets 127-152 William is describing his affair with a “dark lady”; a lady of dark complexion (and even darker morals!).
However, this autobiographical account falls to pieces when we substitute Anne as the real author of the Sonnets (and also of all the other plays and poems bearing William’s name). The Sonnets are, in fact, an autobiographical account but not of William. Rather it is the lived experience of Anne putting into verse an account of her life from ~1580-1609. From falling hopelessly in love with a young and beautiful (in her eyes, at least) William Shakespeare through to when she had the Sonnets published in 1609 (with William’s vastly inferior poem A Lover’s Complaint attached).
Returning to the issue of whether we can say William was gay, based on the evidence in the Sonnets, the answer has to be “no”. And as to whether he was bisexual based on the generally held opinion that he was supposedly having an affair with both a young man and a dark lady, again, based on the evidence in the Sonnets, the answer has to be “no” as well. In Summers (2021, pp. 213-214) I presented two possible triangular sets of relationships between, firstly, William, the young man and the dark lady. Secondly, given that Anne is the real author, then the triangular relationships include Anne and William and the dark lady.
If we were to take this triangular set of relationships for William, then it would be possible to draw the conclusion that he was indeed bisexual, having an affair with both the young man (sonnets 1-126) and then embarking on an affair with the dark lady (sonnets 127-152). However, if we take Anne as author then the triangular relationships change dramatically.
The relationship that Anne has to both the dark lady and to William, indicates that William and the dark lady are in a relationship while Anne, at the apex of the triangle has a relationship with both William and the dark lady. Her relationship with William is that of marriage, while her relationship with the dark lady has twin aspects; one, because the dark lady is in a relationship with her husband (William), but secondly, because of this relationship/affair the dark lady is having with William, then Anne has to also engage with her in order to try and break up that relationship. Additionally, it would appear that Anne knows this dark lady (see sonnet 145, for instance) but it would also appear that this dark lady comes from a higher social class than Anne and thus we have Anne referring to her as ‘my mistress’ (see sonnets 127, 130 and 144, for example).
Was William Shakespeare gay? There is no evidence in the Sonnets, nor perhaps in the other poems and plays written by Anne that would implicate her husband in any gay relationships. As Greer (in Summers, 2021, p. 77) notes, “No contemporary gossip associates Shakespeare with buggery.” Indeed Anne is quite at pains (and in pain herself at his affair) to point out his infatuation with the dark lady (see sonnet 129 for a powerful argument against lust which is aimed directly at William).
More to come.
