Shakespeare professor who says... THE BARD WAS BI!

What Was Shakespeare Really Like? Stanley Wells

Cambridge University Press €18

In the 407 years since Shakespeare’s death, audiences have wrestled with the paradox that the most renowned writer in the English language is the one we know least about. The Bard left no autobiography or memoir, no personal documents or private diaries. All we can deduce about what he was ‘really like’ is from his 39 plays and 154 sonnets.

If anyone’s equipped to do the gleaning, it’s Professor Stanley Wells, editor of the complete Oxford Shakespeare since 1978. In his short but pungent book, he tells us what Shakespeare’s friends thought of him, his ‘uprightness of dealing’ and his ‘honey-tongued’ charm.

Ben Jonson said that, ‘in conversation [he] had an excellent fancy [ie imagination], brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped’. (Shakespeare the chatterbox – who’d have thought it?) It’s no surprise to learn that he was highly articulate with a wide vocabulary, and that he displayed surprising levels of specialist knowledge. And he seems to have soaked up the speech patterns and behaviour, moral attitudes and sensitivities of people from different classes.

Wells’s readers may think: Is that it? Can this meek bourgeois family man be the guy who invented speeches for King Lear and Cleopatra? Fortunately, Wells has an ace up his sleeve: the sonnets.

Commentators have puzzled over the identities of the young man and the ‘Dark Lady’ addressed in the poems, and the poet’s frank assurances that he has two loves, one male, one female. Wells concludes that the Bard ‘led a double life’, of respectability in Stratford but, away from home, ‘had consummated love affairs with men and women and anguished over them’.

These secret urgings and scoldings were the seeds of his creativity. Prof. Wells deserves an applause for bringing them into the light.