Did shakespeare think its okay to be gay

Like most sonnet cycles of the time, they follow a loose but discernible narrative about ideal love but, unlike any other known sonnet cycle, the lover and his beloved are both men. The first sonnets out of are addressed to a male character known to Shakespeare scholars as the Fair Youth, and include some of the most famous love poems in the English language.

These poems are again surprising in their content. The poet-narrator is nonetheless having sex with her; in sonnetmore remarkably, it transpires that the Fair Youth is sleeping with her too. In sonnetShakespeare makes it clear which of the two he prefers:. Many critics have found this so painful they simply refuse to believe it.

That is, Shakespeare and the Fair Youth were just good friends, and writing such poems to a male friend was absolutely standard for Tudor heterosexuals. Used with permission. This argument has the weakness of being false. While close and passionate friendship between men was normal at the time, it was not usual for men to dwell obsessively on the beauty and sexuality of their platonic friends, much less to write more than sonnets about it.

Furthermore, sonnets were strongly associated with sexual love throughout this period. Shakespeare himself treats them as infallible signs of love in several of his plays, such as when Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing remarks of Benedick:. This idea, first advanced by James Boswell did shakespeare think its okay to be gaysurvives to the present day.

But there was an audience for gay poetry, and writers such as Barnfield pandered to it. Such poems were always safely placed in a classical setting and framed as an homage to Greek or Roman literature. This is unprecedented and is hard to explain as a choice that only one poet ever made.

It might be conceivable that, when he sat down to write a sonnet cycle, Shakespeare decided — unlike any other sonnet writer — to address poems to a male beloved. But the whole thing becomes preposterous when we are asked to believe that, when he added a fictional woman to the mix, he made her a dark-skinned, syphilitic, conventionally unattractive person who was also fucking the man from sonnets There is one gambit in the war against assigning a queer identity to Shakespeare that is relatively new.

Rather, gay sex was understood as a sin that all men were prone to, which reflected not a preference for men, but a general depravity. In theory, sodomy was a heinous crime, punishable by death. In practice, it was almost always ignored. This argument has the virtue of being true, and is also unquestionably important to an understanding of the period.

Sodomy as a fashionable vice that goes hand in hand with womanising appears everywhere in 16th- and 17th-century satires. Schools and universities were also often described as places where boys were taught sodomy, and the fear was not that youths were being corrupted by homosexual teachers, but by sinful ones.

Everywhere we find the assumption that all men — if sufficiently depraved — are susceptible to the charms of lovely boys. The sexual fluidity implied by these accounts was probably real. But most men shared beds with other men; boys shared beds with boys. This was certainly a practical measure, born of a shortage of beds and a lack of central heating, but was also cemented into habit, so that an Elizabethan man forced to sleep by himself felt lonely.

You Cannot Escape the Gay – Shakespeare in Love

When the combination of sexual frustration, youth and co-sleeping led to predictable results, it was generally winked at. In theory, sodomy was a heinous crime, and punishable by death. In practice, it was almost always ignored; one researcher who hunted through the court records for the county of Essex between and found evidence of only one prosecution.

To some degree, of course, this might have reflected a real lack of awareness.