I don't think there are enough written sources about Shakespeare and his life to answer that question for sure. It is known that he had a wife and three children, one of whom died young (possibly the reason why he started putting ghosts in his plays). Because of his work, though, he probably wasn't at home much. Whether he engaged in sexual relations with other men, or whether he had any preferences/desires outside of his traditional heterosexual marriage is anyone's guess. It is true that his entire troupe of actors would have been male, because in his day females could not take the stage and men played both male and female roles. So he certainly spent lots of time with men, but that doesn't make him gay. I doubt we'll ever see clear proof either way. People just like to speculate, since we know very little about the man and it's tempting to try to "discover" him by reading and analyzing his plays. There's a famous portrait of him where he's wearing an earring. I remember my Shakespeare professor saying that it caused some people to raise this very question, but that it was just a fashion statement from that time period and didn't suggest anything about his sexual preferences. I've seen portraits of the Kings of France wearing similar earrings... and while one of them was quite possibly gay from all we know about him, I doubt that three of them in a row were.

No he had many mistress and wives.

Thankfully, I remember a bit about this from school. 1. He was supposedly in love with Ann Hathaway, they had 3 children together. 2. He had written poems of his love with a male lord of another villiage. Althought he may of been gay, if both of the above are true he was actually a Bisexual.

Part of my recently completed senior thesis, which hopefully will tell you all you need to know. -------- BEAUTIFUL BOY Shakespeare’s Sexuality, and Why It Matters If there is one thing that every high-school literature student learns about William Shakespeare, it is this: the Bard was a hopeless romantic. From the yearning, “star-cross’d” lovers of Romeo & Juliet (or, more properly, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet) to the romantic shenanigans of Much Ado About Nothing to the oft-quoted sonnets (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”), the casual reader can be forgiven for assuming that old Will had but two playwriting modes: royal intrigue and courtly love. This impression has been cemented in the culture by a procession of breezy, soft-focus films that strip much of the bawdyness (and all of the non-normative sexual context) from Shakespeare’s sprawling, often shockingly explicit dialogue. Every student who has been forced to sit through Franco Zeffirelli’s gauzy 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet probably remembers little save the doe-eyed protagonists’ brief nudity and incessant love-struck mewling. Other popular representations of the Bard, such as in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, obscure the true playwright even further, presenting him as a witty, carefree wooer of women who used his own burgeoning romance to fuel his most famous play. (And conveniently ignoring the fact that the generally accepted author of Shakespeare’s plays had married one Anne Hathaway in 1582, at least eight years before his arrival in London). Even a studiously literal production of Shakespeare’s comedies, such as Kenneth Branagh’s sun-dappled take on Much Ado About Nothing (1993), sacrifices much of the original’s bite for moon-eyed mugging and physical comedy. And when this director (a master of Shakespeare’s blood-drenched histories and tragedies) tries to update the material — as with his quixotic 1930’s-style musical version of Love's Labour's Lost (2000) — the results are an abomination. There were, of course, huge swaths of broad comedy in Shakespeare’s plays (though not much Busby Berkeley-style water ballet), but this version of Love's Labour's — as with most interpretations — focuses on the lighthearted banter to the exclusion of everything else. To his credit, Branagh does employ many of Shakespeare’s bawdy double-entendres. (Such as when Boyet, complemented by lady Maria on his archery skills, puns on the sexual meaning of “hitting the mark”: “A mark, says my lady!/Let the mark have a prick in’t, to mete at, if it may be.”) But the larger joke of the play — in which the traditional romantic mix-ups end not in marriage, but penance for the principles — is all but lost in this version’s upbeat musical finale. In truth, Shakespeare’s view of marriage (as he proved again and again in his plays) was really quite dim, and he ends Love’s Labour’s Lost with a song that gives lie to all the romantic sparring that preceded it: When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks, When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: O, word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! It doesn’t take a Shakespearean scholar to decipher the message: maidens (virgins) with dirty smocks will invariably cuckold their husbands (“Cuckoo, Cuckoo”) — a truth that, for a married man, is most unpleasing indeed. In fact, Shakespeare’s disdain for marriage (or, perhaps more accurately, for the women who bewitch men into matrimony) is arguably the defining motif of his romantic comedies. It is quite telling that, although a number of Shakespeare’s entertainments culminate in joyful weddings (As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night), the ones that feature married couples tend to portray them in a surprisingly dysfunctional light. In All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram, the Count of Rossillion, is literally forced (by his king) to marry Helena, a “poor physician’s daughter.” He immediately abandons her and flees to Spain, insisting that he will only accept her as his wife if she can somehow get the ring he wears at all times and bear his child (though of course he refuses to sleep with her). She ultimately tricks him into impregnating her by posing as the true object of his lust, Diana, who has already procured his ring as a sign of everlasting affection. After this ludicrous deceit, the play culminates with Bertram promising a pregnant Helena (in what must surely be the least sincere line ever uttered upon a stage) to “love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.” In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, the King of Sicilia, becomes so irrationally jealous of his wife, Hermione, that he orders his best friend killed and sends his wife to prison. In The Taming of the Shrew, a greedy suitor (Petruchio) decides to woo a wealthy — if thoroughly unpleasant — woman named Katherina. His solution to her nasty temperament? To be so excessively unpleasant in return that she can’t help but relent. And remember — these are the comedies! The examples of marital discord from Shakespeare’s serious plays, such as Othello and Troilus and Cressida, are even more dire. Overall, Shakespeare’s view of his female characters is exceedingly bleak, even by the unenlightened standards of the times. While the Bard certainly wrote some of the strongest female characters in Elizabethan theater, his overall view of women seems harsh, to say the least. They are invariably two-faced (“God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another,” Hamlet sneers at his mother), duplicitous (“There is never a fair woman has a true face,” Enobarbus warns in Antony and Cleopatra) and easily seduced, husband or no (“She is a woman, therefore may be woo’d,” opines Demetrius of the married Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, “She is a woman, therefore may be won”). Overall, Shakespeare’s attitude toward “the fairer sex” is perhaps best voiced by the Duke of York in King Henry VI, Part III: “Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible.” Now, much has been made of William Shakespeare’s possible shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway (who was eight years his senior and pregnant when they wed) as a likely source of his raw emotions on the subject of nuptial bliss. But the general antipathy for the female of the species on display in these plays seems to suggest a disdain not just for a single woman or marriage, but for the very institution of marriage itself. It must be noted, however, that there does exist within the writings of Shakespeare a body of direct, heartfelt and passionate verse, unburdened by the sort of snide cynicism about love and matrimony that litters his other work: the much-celebrated sonnets. Unfortunately for conservative traditionalists (and high school romantics everywhere), the most ravishing and love-struck words to come from Shakespeare’s pen were written to another man. In many ways, it’s surprising this isn’t a well-known fact. Upon close inspection, it’s obvious that the 154 sonnets are rife with masculine subjects and imagery. Take “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” — surely the most-quoted poem in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Nowhere in the body of this sumptuous ode is the sex of its subject specified, though it seems easy enough to infer. After all, if Shakespeare is comparing his beloved to a “summer’s day,” then the poem’s central couplet “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines/And often is his gold complexion dimm’d” all but makes explicit that the poem’s object — who supercedes the sun in his beauty — is also a man. But it certainly doesn’t take this sort of linguistic detective work to definitively ascertain the sexual bent of Shakespeare’s most passionate love poetry. Indeed, among the first seventeen sonnets — the so-called “marriage cycle” — it is made clear again and again that the author is writing to a “lovely” young man, urging him to marry before he (and his unsurpassed beauty) are ruined forever. From Sonnet III, “Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest”: For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb Of his self-love, to stop posterity? In fact, not only is it obvious that the object of Shakespeare’s cajoling affection is a man, but — with their surfeit of explicit sexual imagery and alternating tones of lust and regret — the first 126 sonnets (i.e., those dealing with the “lovely boy,” in one form or another) repeatedly suggest an ongoing physical relationship between the author (“Will”) and his poetic muse. Nowhere is this made more clear than Sonnet LVII, in which Shakespeare laments: Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require. Although professions of love from one man to another were not uncommon in Elizabethan society (as we shall soon see) any physical consummation of this love was strictly forbidden, and Shakespeare is obviously tormented by his unbridled “lust in action.” He therefore rationalizes his homosexual longing by insisting that his “best of dearest” was in fact intended by Nature to be a woman. If there is any single sonnet that fully limns Shakespeare’s sexuality, it is surely Sonnet XX, in which he offers this extraordinary rationalization for his vast desire: A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion: An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created; Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. The explicitness of this verse, in which the male poet’s feminine love (his “master-mistress”) has been “prick’d out” for women’s pleasure, is still rather shocking by today’s standards, so one can only imagine what contemporary audiences made of it. (And rest assured that they did see it. Shakespeare’s Sonnets — along with his two other long-form poems, Venice and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece — were by far his most popular work during his lifetime.) It should be remembered, however, that — contrary to popular belief — England in the late 17th and early 18th century was not a particularly repressive culture. Although the rise of Puritan influence (culminating in the execution of Charles I and the brief reign of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640’s and ‘50’s) would tame things somewhat, the large city-centers of England (especially London) were full of gambling establishments and “bawdy houses.” Prostitution was common, as was public drunkenness and illegitimate pregnancy. Although sodomy was illegal (punishable by imprisonment, if not torture and death), there existed no such thing as “homosexuality” during Shakespeare’s time. In fact, it was thought only right and good that men should love one another as equals. After all, woman were widely considered inferior to men, so in many ways the bond between two males seemed more “right” than the procreative union of a man and a woman. A perfectly illustrative example is laid out by Adam Nicolson in his engrossing literary history God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Nicolson relates how William Sancroft, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, forged an incredibly close relationship with his roommate, Arthur Bonnest, at Emmanuel College (then a seminary for Puritan ministers at Cambridge University). “They lived together, read together and slept together,” Nicolson writes. After Bonnest left the school (apparently with TB), the two students engaged in a correspondence that could only be characterized as a series of love letters. “Though art oftener in my thoughts than ever;” Bonnest wrote, “thou art nearer mee then when I embraced thee. Thou saiest thou lovest me: good, well repeat it againe and againe.” To which Sancroft replied: “O lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart and give thee so large an interest there, that nothing may supplant thee.” If such deeply felt male longing could be expressed in the very heart of England’s Puritan establishment, obviously Shakespeare’s far more lascivious words would hardly incite a huge uproar in the streets of London. Still, taken in toto, the Sonnets (and, to a lesser degree, Venice and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece), are almost impossible to dismiss as the product of a purely intellectual and paternal affection. And once one pinpoints the intended recipient of these lines — Shakespeare’s “lovely boy” himself — such a conservative interpretation becomes absolutely untenable. It has long been accepted by the majority of Shakespearean scholars that the “youth” of the Sonnets (at least the first group of 17) was almost certainly Henry Wriothesley — the 3rd Earl of Southampton, and a long-time benefactor of the playwright. The reasons Southampton is suspected are many: first (although certainly not foremost) is the dedication to the 1609 quarto volume of “Shake-Speare’s Sonnets,” which read “To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternity setting forth. T.T.” If this were the only argument for Southampton, it would be a fairly weak one. After all, it’s not at all clear that this dedication was even penned by Shakespeare, as it bears the initials of the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. And if it was meant exclusively for Henry Wriothesley, why reverse the initials? (Some have speculated that it was actually meant for William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, who was praised — along with his brother — in the famed 1623 folio.) A far more decisive connection can be found, however, in the dedications to the Bard’s two earlier long-form poems. Both are pledged, unambiguously, to Southampton — and the striking difference in the two tributes is quite revealing. The first, to Venice and Adonis, written around 1592, is couched in the formal language of an emerging writer to his well-heeled patron: “I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden.” But the second, written only a year later, is so effusive (even by the standards of the day, in which obsequiousness to one’s benefactor was de rigueur), it can only be surmised that the relationship between Shakespeare and Southampton had taken a decidedly personal turn: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end… What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.” The final, and most compelling, argument for Southampton as the sonnet’s golden muse can be found within the Earl’s own life. A rich and imperious young man, Henry Wriothesley had suffered two huge losses in his life. His mother was banished from his home early on by his jealous father, who accused her of adultery. Then, at age eight, Southampton’s father unexpectedly died, leaving him a ward of the state (albeit a very rich one). He was taken into the home of the most powerful man in England, Elizabeth’s lord treasurer, Lord Burghley. Around the time that Shakespeare and he were becoming intimates, extraordinary events were swirling around the young earl. He was evidently a carefree and — judging by contemporary portraiture — delicately attractive young man (with a head of luxurious, shoulder-length auburn hair). He was also a huge fan of the theater, preferring, as a contemporary wrote, to “pass the time in London merely in going to plays every day” with his friend the Earl of Rutland. What he had less affinity for, apparently, was the opposite sex. As Stephen Greenblatt explains in his entertaining (if overly speculative) biography Will in the World: Burghley arranged for Southampton to marry his own granddaughter… Southampton refused, declaring that he was averse not to this particular girl but to marriage itself. When it became clear that this was not a passing mood but a fixed resolution, the alarmed kin, foreseeing very clearly the blow to the family fortune, began to increase the pressure. The problem was that the young earl was so enormously rich, and so habitually reckless with his money and land, that the prospect of a substantial loss did not frighten him. But Greenblatt, if anything, underplays the severity of Burghley’s displeasure. In reality, Southampton’s refusal to take a bride — any bride — cost him the then-staggering sum of £5,000, which in 2000-era pounds sterling would be equivalent to £1,048,856! While this inflation-adjusted number probably exaggerates the sum’s relative value (we are, after all, measuring over a span of 400 years), there is no doubt that Southampton paid his protector a fine that, invested wisely, would support a normal English citizen of the day comfortably for a lifetime. To say that Wriothesley was willing to incur a “substantial loss” to avoid marriage is an understatement of Brobdingnagian proportions. With this history in mind, the context of the opening sonnets seems clear. While some (including Greenblatt) argue that Lord Burghley might have hired Shakespeare to write these poems, hoping to influence his theater-loving ward through the language the boy loved best, it seems far more likely that Shakespeare wrote them of his own volition, in a heartfelt attempt to save his lover (and benefactor) from social and financial ruin. The plaintiveness and despair of Sonnet III now appears more poignant than ever, as Shakespeare attempts to convince his impetuous, narcissistic beloved to “look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest/now is the time that face should form another.” But what of the plays? There, too, hints can be found as to the author’s true love. While the sonnets certainly present the most overt hints as to Shakespeare’s sexuality, they are not the only examples of his non-traditional leanings. In fact, he often inserted gay characters and themes into his plays, in ways both subversive and direct. The most obvious examples come from his dramas set among the Greek and Roman empires, where such behavior was expected (and therefore relatively uncontroversial). Instead of milking these themes and characters for laughs, however (as his audience would have surely expected), Shakespeare was as judicious and non-judgmental as any Elizabethan dramatist could possibly be with such sinful material. In Troilus and Cressida, for instance, it is made abundantly clear that Achilles, the reluctant warrior, is spending all of his time “upon a lazy bed” with his man-servant Patroclus. In fact, late in the play Thersites — having been insulted by Patrocus — snarls “Prithee be silent, boy, I profit not by thy talk. Thou art said to be Achilles’ male varlet” (i.e., his male whore). And yet, in a play whose main theme warns against upsetting the natural order (“Untune that string,” Ulysses warns, “And hark what discord follows”), it is not Achille’s “unnatural” union, but Cressida’s romantic disloyalty, that incites the greatest tragedy. If anything, the love between Achilles and his second is portrayed as strong and true, an unbreakable bond that ultimately provides the emotional catalyst of the play, helping to set wrong things right. In the end, it is the death of Patroclus that spurs the powerful Achilles into action, ultimately ensuring the Trojans’ defeat. (In this, of course, Shakespeare is simply following the blueprint of Homer’s Iliad, but his treatment of the Achilles-Patroclus relationship remains stunning for its time.) Even more interesting, perhaps, is the speech that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the Volscian commander, Aufidius, as he gazes upon the titular hero in Coriolanus: Know thou first, I lov’d the maid I married; never man Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! I tell thee, We have a power on foot; and I had purpose Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn, Or lose mine arm for ’t. Thou hast beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me; We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat, And wak’d half dead with nothing. What are we to make of this? The twining of physical battle and physical love is an incredible gambit, making the military pact between Aufidius and Coriolanus akin to a passionate love affair. Thus, when Coriolanus betrays his new brother in arms at the play’s end, Aufidius’ terrible revenge seems all but preordained — the final violent act of a jilted lover. But to locate the most involved and intriguing aspect of the Bard’s sexual boundary breaking, the insightful reader must look where one would least expect to find it: in the heart of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. It is here — most specifically in As You Like It, Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor — that the canny playwright takes a theatrical shortcoming and fashions it into a deft instrument of transgression. It is well known that women were not allowed into Elizabethan theaters (as these “play-houses” were considered barely a step above brothels in repute), which naturally forced playwrights to employ young male actors for all of their female roles. What is less widely discussed is how Shakespeare ingeniously used this necessity as a creative opportunity, working the resulting gender confusion directly into the plots of his madcap comedies and mixed-up love affairs. The Bard’s comedies are, obviously, filled with examples of cross-dressing, misplaced affections and sexual subterfuge. But it is not simply the act of having a female character dress as a man (which, in reality, meant having the actor revert to his true gender) that is so extraordinary, but what transpires while these characters are in disguise. It should be noted that, in Shakespeare, it is almost always the “woman” who cross-dresses in this fashion — apparently Will had little interest in exploring the comedic possibilities of a man in drag. Given the logistics involved, it’s not hard to see why. With a stage full of men already dressed as “real” women, adding another actor in women’s costume could only serve to confuse the audience (and fundamentally break the already fragile suspension of disbelief). A rare exception comes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff is dressed as “the Witch of Brainford,” and several men at the climactic masked ball are mistaken for women. It is telling, perhaps, that Wives was supposedly written at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who adored the character of Falstaff. It is not considered one of the Bard’s more impressive works, and some experts suspect he may have farmed its writing out to another playwright. The most convoluted of Shakespeare’s gender-reversal scenarios occurs in As You Like It, in which Rosalind, the daughter of a banished duke, dresses as an attractive young man named Ganymede in order to escape from her evil uncle. Slipping into the woods with her best friend, Celia, Rosalind keeps an eye out for Orlando, a young wrestler who won her heart just before her escape. Naturally, when she finally meets with Orlando in the Forest of Arden, she is in disguise as Ganymede, and he fails to recognize his beloved. This being Shakespeare, “Ganymede” listens attentively to Orlando’s outpouring of love for Rosalind, and then proposes a most outlandish solution: Orlando will pretend that he, Ganymede, is Rosalind (which of course he is), and attempt to woo him/her, in anticipation of the true courtship. In a fascinating speech, Ganymede explains to the perplexed Orlando that he had once cured another lovestruck fellow in exactly this way. Reading the passage, one cannot help but imagine Rosalind/Ganymede’s teasing voice as the very personification of the coquettish, vain youth of the sonnets: He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking; proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are, for the most part, cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness. The situation is patently ridiculous, constructed for the sole purpose of having Orlando pour his love and longing out to this beguiling “pretty youth.” Surely, in its time, this was played for broad laughs, but that certainly doesn’t negate the homoerotic charge of two young men engaging in this suggestive banter onstage: Gan. But come, now I will be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition; and ask me what you will, I will grant it. Orl. Then love me, Rosalind. Gan. Yes, faith will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all. Orl. And wilt thou have me? Gan. Ay, and twenty such. Orl. What sayest thou? Gan. Are you not good? Orl. I hope so. Gan. Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? Later in the play, a shepherdess named Phebe also falls hard for the disguised Rosalind (it is surely no mistake that Shakespeare chose the name Ganymede — a beautiful Trojan boy carried away by Zeus to act as cup bearer to the gods). This sets the stage for an equally amusing scene toward the end of the play, where Ganymede must fend off the amorous advances of another woman. Something quite similar happens in Twelfth Night, in which a shipwrecked woman, Viola, disguises herself as a boy while searching for her (possibly drowned) brother Sebastian. Once again this subterfuge results in an utterly confused romance, as a rich, beautiful countess named Olivia falls madly in love with Viola’s alter ego, “Cesario.” And it is surely no accident that Viola/Cesario’s ultimate rejection of Olivia’s romantic overtures echoes the sentiments of Shakespeare’s own “master-mistress,” Henry Wriothesley, as he rejected his arranged marriage (and, indeed, all women): By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, And that no woman has; nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. It is through these cross-dressing women that Shakespeare seems to revisit and recreate the “fair flower” of his sonnets. These playful characters are, like his beautiful boy, at once both male and female, shy and forthright, fetching and vexing in equal measure. They are, as Sebastian notes of his sister Viola, “one face, one voice, one habit, and two persons.” There are many more examples of barely disguised homoeroticism in the Bard’s vast body of work — the “love” between Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, for instance, or the mixed-up marriages of the simpletons Slender and Caius in Merry Wives (who inadvertently wed two masked boys) — but I believe the point has been made. The question then becomes, what of it? Does it really matter one way or the other if William Shakespeare was straight, gay, bisexual or a bestiality-prone pederast? I would argue that it does, if only because the extra-textual information on this, the English language’s most celebrated author, is so woefully slim. To willfully ignore something so central to the man’s creative life — both in its gestation, and in the themes he ultimately chose to embrace — seems pig-headed in the extreme. Which brings us to an even bigger conundrum: why has this rather obvious line of inquiry (and the larger implications it raises) been so consistently sidelined and ignored? Although it’s easy enough to blame the inherent conservatism and squeamishness of the Shakespearean orthodoxy (which certainly plays a part), I believe that there exists a larger impediment to the acceptance of Shakespeare’s homosexuality: the basic incompatibility of this fact with the biographical details surrounding William Shakspur, the actor and theater manager from Stratford-on-Avon widely accepted as the author of Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. Now, it is not my intention to address the so-called “authorship controversy” at any length within these pages. Suffice it to say that I believe the true provenance of Shakespeare’s magnificent body of work will probably never be definitively proven one way or the other. Thus, it seems foolhardy to allow a textual reading of Shakespeare’s work to be colored by the biography of any particular candidate. Yet it seems that this is exactly what has happened when it comes to the question of Shakespeare’s sexuality. While there exists overwhelming evidence that the poet and playwright known as William Shakespeare had, at the very least, one intensely physical love affair with another man, it remains barely remarked upon because there exists no evidence that Stratford’s William Shakspur was remotely capable of such a thing. In fact, other than being involved in the notoriously dissolute world of the London theater, Shakspur was a model husband and father (by the somewhat lax standards of the day). Although he spent a fair amount of time away from his wife and children, this was not highly unusual in a time when traveling twenty miles constituted a full day’s journey. He dutifully sent money back to his family in Stratford, secured a good-size house for them, invested in real estate, and purchased a coat of arms to earn a little respectability. He died at home, and left a meticulously detailed will that divided his possessions amongst his wife and daughters down to the last “broad silver-gilt bowl.” (With no mention, as has been oft-noted by anti-Stratfordians, of a single manuscript, book, or interest in any of the theaters he supposedly owned.) While much has been written about William Shakspur’s chilly relationship with his wife, Anne Hathaway, it is based almost entirely upon speculation. Since she is not mentioned, or even alluded to, in any of his poetry (unless you believe that the phrase “hate away” in Sonnet CXLV is a pun on “Hathaway,” as some do), and in his final will and testament he left her nothing but “my second best bed with the furniture,” most Shakespearean scholars infer that, at best, he was indifferent (and at worst he disliked his wife intensely). But if you separate Shakspur’s known life from the works of Shakespeare, he appears no more indifferent to his wife than most hardworking Elizabethan men, and a good deal more attentive than some. What can be said, however, is that Shakspur does not seem at all the type of fellow who would go in for a passionate affair with a young, curly-haired earl. Of course, this doesn’t stop the man’s various biographers from trying to rationalize the overt sexuality of the sonnets — and Shakespeare’s apparently libertine philosophy in general. A typical effort can be found in Greenblatt’s popular treatment, in which the author dramatizes (in a flight of fancy typical of his style) how a twelve-year-old Shakspur might have felt while performing in a school play with another boy: Before Menaechmus knocks at her door, it swings open and Erotium herself appears, ravishing his senses: “Eapse eccam exit!” (“Look, she’s coming out herself!”). And then in this moment of rapture—the sun is bedimmed, he exclaims, by the radiance of her lovely body—Erotium greets him… on some such occasion as this, it is possible that the adolescent Shakespeare felt an intense excitement in which theatrical performance and sexual arousal were braided together. This is truly dime-store psychology of the worst kind, and it is not borne out in any way by Shakspur’s known history (slight as it is). Greenblatt’s treatment of Shakespeare’s relationship with Southampton is equally fanciful, suggesting that Will took on the poetic assignment to help Burghley — and boost his reputation — but then ended up developing real feelings for the comely earl. But at least Greenblatt acknowledges that a romantic entanglement between Shakespeare and Southampton was likely — many traditional scholars refuse to go even that far. In truth, a number of the other authorship candidates seem a far better fit for the voice and sensibility that speaks to us through Shakespeare’s work. Christopher Marlow, notorious for his supposed quip “all they who love not tobacco and boys are fools,” wove subtle (and not-so-subtle) homosexual themes into his plays Dido, Queen of Carthage and Edward II. Francis Bacon remained unmarried his entire life, an incredibly rare (and gossip-inducing) decision for its time. Edward de Vere, 16th Earl of Oxford, was a notorious louche who spent his time at court writing poetry and chasing kitchen servants. (He would later be accused of drunkenness, sodomy, atheism, and sexual depravity by his onetime friend Charles Arundel.) But, in the end, the mystery of who composed these works, the cornerstone of English literature, is simply a diversion — a parlor game for armchair scholars and bored university students. What is far more important is that we not let pet theories and presuppositions blind us to the living, breathing — and, yes, feverishly sexual — soul that lurks at the heart of these still-vital lines. It is not the long-silenced hand that we, as readers, should be seeking, but the vibrant and true personality that Shakespeare’s work conjures afresh with every reading. We should take him as he reveals himself, not as we would wish him to be. As the Bard himself so presciently entreated: No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it; for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe.

It may be true that some of Shakespeare's 'love' poetry was directed at men, however, this does not mean he was a homosexual. Love and beauty took on much different condonations than they do today, and they very well may just be a show of friendship or 'love' in a completly non-sexual way.

I dont believe so. he had a wife, whom i am related to, but still theres a chance of a secret gayness in him.

no he was not gay because ahe had children

He's been dead since 1616, so does it even matter? No one's going to be dating him these days, after all.

There have been rumors that he dedicated some of his writtings to another man with more then friendship, so it is possibly that Shakespeare was gay. But then yet again, he was married. It's kind of what you interpret it as?

I don't believe he was gay, everyone back then looked gay!

Definitely, he believed the only way to preserve your lineage and "live forever" was to reproduce explaining why he was married and had children, give me a break he wrote almost every sonnet talking about how beautiful guys where, who is WH?? and why is he dedicating his poems to him?? He also writes poem about the women's vagina being and hell and some chic with venereal diseases...hmmm he hates womens and loves how beautiful men are

I agree. Having children has nothing to do with it at all. I am in the theater and i have known a few gay men who have married and had several children, then later realzied they were gay and divorced thier wives. Being gay in this day and age can be scary, and I'm sure it was back then too. He may have been bisexual though. Or he could have just been trying to lead a status quo 'normal' life by having a wife and children. I dont know exactly what to say about Shakespeares's sexuality. He may have been gay from the Sonnets he so passionatly declared to be about a male. But also, he seemed devoted to his family? I dont know. Its a mystery I don't think anyone will ever be able to solve.

He could never have been gay since he was married he could have been bisexual though

Who cares? What possible difference could it make? Whether he was or wasn't is his business.

according to my calculations, i have reason to believe that william shakespeare is in fact GAY.

Shakespere batted for both teams! Bysexual

No he was not.

Shakespeare was Shake-speare and not Shakspur (the uneducated guy who when he died, no one cared). Shake-speare was Christopher Marlowe living in exile in France as Monsieur Le Doux. So, the question is: Was Marlowe/Le Doux gay? In all likelihood he was bisexual since he was a very well known young man and an ardent atheist, humanist and narcissist in England before faking his death at 29.