Slashing the Bard

The news hit Reuters and quickly spread around the world. A portrait had been discovered of Henry Wriothesley - earl of Southampton, the patron of William Shakespeare and alleged subject of some his most impassioned sonnets. Scholars point to Sonnet 20 in particular as evidence that Shakespeare was bisexual and that Wriothesley may have been his lover.

This sonnet is at the centre of a scholarly debate between those that think Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical and those that think they are fictions (not counted the inevitable debate about whether they were written by Shakespeare at all.) The first 'camp' points to Wriothesley's womanly hair and accessories (seriously confounding cross-dressing with same sex preferences), and the second quite rationally points out that such style were common amongst Elizabethan men and the painting style of the day made everyone look like a drag queen whether they used cosmetics or not.

Sonnet 20 is far from conclusive in itself as it praises the young Wriothesley "master-mistress of my passions" but is quite clear in its own archaic way in saying that sex is out of the question when the admirer and admiree both have penises. Enter "The Players" a book that describes how things might have gone assuming that Shakespeare and his patron were, in fact, lovers. The first two things I noted about this book were that it was published to early (1997) for the recently discovered portrait to appear in its cover, and than Sonnet 20 was not one of the sonnets in its appendix - Cowell apparently did not see a penis as an impediment to romance.

Dry at times, but thoroughly enjoyable the book plots Shakespeare's path through the few known events of his early life in a manner constant with the events described in his cycle of sonnets (an affair with the 'fair youth' ending in a love triangle with a 'dark lady' - in this case the Italian musician Emilia Bassano). It is, perhaps, a little heavy on the historical accuracy and name-dropping, but still a great read and a passable (rather gritty) romance. As for the connection between written words and sexual identity... Stephanie Cowell writes with the lucidity of a woman who libido is fully engaged (if well clothed in historical scholarship). Yet she is neither man nor (apparently) homosexual - but obviously able to convincing write, and likely fantasize, about experiences with little bearing on her real (autobiographical) life.

The more savvy of you will have known from the title of the piece, where I was going to finish. There is an enormous field of fiction, easily found on the internet, called 'slash'. Slash is fiction dealing with homosexual romances and written, for the most part, by heterosexual women. Slash is often based on television series such as Star Trek or Buffy, and similar fiction from a Japanese tradition (called yaoi) is often based on popular manga and anime. "The Players" is, in effect, high literary slash. The familiar online aspect of the genre brushes up against the Bard with sonnets and stories of its own (e.g. Wittenberg by A.C. Chapin and Thy Eternal Summer by Christina Siu).

It is in this context that I step firmly into the sceptics camp when it comes to Shakespeare's own sexual preferences. This is in no way due to homophobia on my part - I fully enjoyed a fictional account of the possible Shakespeare/Wriothesley affair - but slash fiction has taught me that life and imagination are quite capable of living in separate sexual realms... so I must conclude that there is no way of knowing the extent to which Shakespeare life and art were intertwined when immortalized his teenage patron's fickle beauty with the lines: "Shall I compare the to a summer's day? Though art more lovely and more temperate..."