Sexuality of William Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

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  William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on the 27th of November 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six. A marriage license was issued by the consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester, and two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the very next day as surety that nothing stood in the way. Six months after the wedding, a daughter named Susanna arrived. Almost two years after that came twins: son Hamnet and daughter Judith. By all appearances, this was a settled domestic life. Yet Shakespeare soon left his family and moved to London, leaving behind a wife, three children, and a question that has occupied scholars for centuries. His sonnets speak of sleepless nights and jealousy. They address a beautiful young man as "dear my love" and ask whether anything could compare him to a summer's day. They describe a married woman who drives the poet to anguish. And in 1640, someone found the pronouns troubling enough to change them. Who was William Shakespeare really writing about, and what do those poems tell us about the man who wrote them?

• 2. A Hasty Wedding

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  The Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read just once rather than the customary three times, a concession that points toward some urgency. Hathaway's pregnancy is the most likely explanation. Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare probably loved Hathaway at the start, pointing to a passage in Sonnet 145 that he believes plays off her name. The sonnet includes the lines "I hate from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying 'not you.'" The word "hate" echoing "Hath-a-way" is the kind of wordplay Shakespeare planted throughout his work. But Greenblatt also notes that after only three years of marriage Shakespeare left for London, and suggests this departure implies he felt trapped. Shakespeare and Anne were buried in separate but adjoining graves. His will left her "the second best bed with the furniture", a phrase that has been argued over ever since. Many historians contend the second best bed was actually the marital bed, since the best bed in a household was typically reserved for guests. Poet Carol Ann Duffy endorsed this reading in her poem "Anne Hathaway", in which Anne recalls the bed they shared as "a spinning world of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas where we would dive for pearls", while guests in the best bed dozed, "dribbling their prose". There is also a practical legal point: the law at the time automatically entitled a widow to a third of her husband's estate, so Shakespeare may have seen no need to list specific bequests.

• 3. Rumors and Anecdotes

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  A lawyer named John Manningham wrote in his diary an account of Shakespeare meeting a woman who had arranged a late-night rendezvous with the actor Richard Burbage, who was playing Richard III at the time. Shakespeare, having overheard the arrangement, arrived first and was already with the woman when Burbage came to the door. Shakespeare, the story goes, sent word back that "William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third." Manningham recorded this in March 1602, a month after seeing the play. Scholars note it is one of very few surviving contemporary anecdotes about Shakespeare as a person, and some are skeptical of its accuracy. Others have found significance in the simple fact that Manningham believed Shakespeare was attracted to women and not averse to occasional infidelity. A more ambiguous reference appears in a poem called Willobie His Avisa, by Henry Willobie. The poem mentions Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and later features a character identified as "W.S.", described as a player who had recently recovered from a painful love affair, now advising a younger man called "H.W." on how to pursue a woman named Avisa. The fact that "W.S." is called a player, and appears just after a compliment to Shakespeare's poetry, has led several scholars to read this as a veiled portrait of Shakespeare in conversation about his own romantic history. Twenty-six of the sonnets are addressed to a married woman called the Dark Lady, adding another thread to the possibility of affairs.

• 4. The Fair Youth Sonnets

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  One hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare's sonnets appear to be love poems addressed to a young man known as the Fair Lord or Fair Youth. The sonnets were first published in 1609, perhaps without Shakespeare's approval. The dedication names a "Mr W. H." as their inspirer, and the identity of this figure remains contested; the most frequently proposed candidates are Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and William Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, both of whom were considered handsome in their youth. Sonnet 13 calls the young man "dear my love." Sonnet 15 declares the poet at "war with Time for love of you." In Sonnet 20, the narrator describes the youth as the "master-mistress of my passion" and theorizes that the youth was originally a woman with whom Mother Nature had fallen in love, resolving the dilemma by adding a penis, which the narrator then calls "to my purpose nothing." Scholars have read that line both as a literal denial of sexual interest and as deliberate irony. In Sonnet 52, the erotic wordplay becomes explicit in Elizabethan terms: "his imprisoned pride" uses "pride" as a contemporary euphemism for an erect penis. G. P. V. Akrigg, the first historian to publish an extended study of the Earl of Southampton, wrote that he suspected "some element of homosexuality lay at the root of the trouble" and that Shakespeare's love for Southampton "may well have been the most intense emotion of his life." In 2025, a privately owned miniature portrait of Henry Wriothesley by Nicholas Hilliard was reported for the first time. It is painted on a playing card, and the card's original red heart has been painted over with a black arrow. Art historian Elizabeth Goldring has speculated that the arrow may resemble the spear on Shakespeare's coat of arms, raising the possibility that Shakespeare was the original recipient of the portrait.

• 5. The Pronoun Problem

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  In 1640, a publisher named John Benson released a new edition of the sonnets. He changed most of the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, so that readers would understand nearly all the poems as being addressed to the Dark Lady. Benson's altered version became the dominant text for more than a century. It was not until 1780 that the scholar Edmond Malone republished the sonnets in their original form. That same year, George Steevens became one of the first to articulate publicly what the original text seemed to imply: reading Shakespeare's description of a young man as his "master-mistress", Steevens wrote that it was "impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation." Other scholars aligned with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who argued around 1800 that Shakespeare's love was "pure" and that the sonnets contained "not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices." A. L. Rowse, the Shakespearean scholar, maintained throughout his life that "Shakespeare's interest in the youth is not at all sexual." Richard Dutton noted the irony that Rowse himself was widely understood to be homosexual and had written openly about gay writers including Marlowe and Wilde, yet never wavered on this point. Robert Browning took a more detached view. Responding to Wordsworth's suggestion that Shakespeare had unlocked his heart in the sonnets, Browning replied in his poem House: "If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

• 6. Platonic Friendship vs. Desire

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  Douglas Bush, writing the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition of the sonnets, argued that modern readers should not rush to read homosexuality into the poems. He pointed out that intense affection between men, including bed sharing and confessions of love, was a recognized and even idealized feature of Renaissance friendship, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne. Such friendship, Bush noted, was "often exalted above the love of women" in the literature of the period. Academic Jonathan Bate offered a middle position: "there are indeed powerful same-sex relationships in the plays, suggesting that, whatever he got up to in the bedroom, at the very least he had a bisexual imagination." Stanley Wells took up the question in his 2004 book Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, arguing that the scholarly debate had not yet found its balance. He thought earlier deniers of any homoerotic content were wrong, but worried that more recent liberal commentators had "swung too far in the opposite direction" and let their own sensibilities color the evidence. Oscar Wilde had approached the dedication question differently in his 1889 short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", proposing that the mysterious dedicatee was Will Hughes, a boy actor in Shakespeare's company who was both "Mr W. H." and the Fair Youth. By 1944, the Variorum edition of the sonnets included an appendix cataloguing the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. A scholarly dispute on the matter appeared in the letters pages of The Times Literary Supplement as recently as 2014, confirming that no consensus has settled.