Shakespeare was a homophobe

By now you must be sick of coronavirus, if only, one hopes, figuratively. Seeking to provide some relief, I noticed the consonance of coronavirus and Coriolanus.

That turned my thoughts to Shakespeare, or rather the way his work is interpreted. I’d suggest we try to remould him in a modern, progressive image, which is understandable.  

It’s a natural tendency to whitewash people we admire. And in the Anglophone world, no one is admired more than the Bard.

Hence we gloss over some of Shakespeare’s traits, those that would get him ostracised in our enlightened times. Such, for example, as his ageism, crassly displayed in Sonnets 2 and 18: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow/ Thou art no longer a darling bud of May”. 

But I digress. My subject today is Shakespeare’s sexuality that still remains as enigmatic as his true identity.

Modern commentators go out of their way to insist that Shakespeare was an active practitioner of the alternative lifestyle, which, incidentally, was a hanging offence in Tudor England.

One such commentator is the celebrated actor Sir Ian McKellen, noted for his performances in many Shakespeare roles, including, I think, Lady Macbeth and, in his younger days, Ophelia. “Did he sleep with another man?” Sir Ian asks himself. “I would say yes.”

This is a deplorable attempt to bring Shakespeare up to date. It’s true that in his sonnets the poet sometimes refers to young men as ‘sweet boy’ or ‘lovely boy’. Yet one can admire the beauty of an Adonis without wishing to copulate with him.

The same goes for Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This apparent love poem is clearly written to a man, as proved by the use of the masculine personal pronoun further down:

“And often is his [my emphasis] gold complexion dimm’d;/ And every fair from fair sometime declines,/ By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;/ But thy eternal summer shall not fade…”

Then, in Sonnet 20, Shakespeare refers to his love object as the “master-mistress of my passion”. This sexual ambivalence might suggest homoerotic passions to some. To me it spells nothing but aesthetic appreciation, something to be expected from a sublime artist.

Some relationships between male protagonists in Shakespeare’s plays also give grounds for speculation. One Antonio seems to be in love with Sebastian in Twelfth Night; another Antonio dotes on Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice; Patroclus seems to enjoy a tender friendship with Achilles in Troilus and Cressida.

Yet it’s only to the dirty, sex-obsessed modern mind that love between two men must have an erotic component. For example, my male friends and I love one another. However, though I can’t vouch for them, I’ve never felt the need to express such feelings in ways that Leviticus and Romans don’t condone.

Then there’s Shakespeare’s family life. People with dirty minds ignore the three children Shakespeare produced with Anne Hathaway, the lesser known person of that name.

Instead they point out the difference in their ages, which may sometimes be a marker of a ‘lavender marriage’. But Anne was only eight years older than Will, not thirty, as in some marriages I could mention (not that I’m trying to impugn anything untoward in Manny Macron’s marital life). So that argument doesn’t cut much ice either.

And it’s certainly demolished by the evidence of Shakespeare’s homophobia I uncovered the other day when rereading Hamlet. In his instructions to Laertes, Polonius says: “Neither a burrower nor a bender be.”

‘Burrower’ is clearly a reference to a perverted practice that has since acquired a different name I can’t repeat out of decorum. And ‘bender’ is a widespread pejorative term for a homosexual.

Until the other day I thought this objectionable word was of a more recent provenance. Yet it’s clearly one of the 1,700 neologisms Shakespeare contributed to the English language.

You must agree that no man using such abusive terminology to describe… hold on a second.

Penelope has just looked over my shoulder, called me a name I dare not repeat and said I needed a new prescription for my reading glasses. Apparently I misread the cited quotation.

According to her the actual line was “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Hence Polonius was merely warning his son against fiscal, rather than sexual, incontinence.

Be that as it may, such moralising is odd in a man who advised his son to sink into expensive drug addiction: “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy…” 

Here comes Penelope again, telling me I should stop wasting space, which could instead be devoted to deep insights. Oh well, never mind.