A gay Shakespeare

SIR – Greg Doran, the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, claims that Shakespeare may have been homosexual (report, July 22).

This forms part of a great tradition of Shakespeare appropriation. Every individual and interest group claims Shakespeare as their own, and selects evidence from the work accordingly. Shakespeare is not only a closet homosexual but also a closet Catholic, a closet atheist, a closet Marxist, a closet republican, a closet feminist.

According to Mr Doran, the plays contain many homosexual characters and relationships, and this suggests Shakespeare was homosexual. The plays also contain many murderers, so according to this logic Shakespeare must have been a murderer, too.

Shakespeare was a dramatist, and dramatists create plays with their imaginations. They observe human nature, then offer models of behaviour that audiences can consider within the frame of a story enacted in a certain place and time. Plays are not encoded autobiography: they are sets of propositions, of “what ifs”, in which the audience is invited not only to confront their own beliefs but to live the inner lives of other humans.

As for Mr Doran’s claim that Shakespeare was an outsider, what biographical information we do have seems to challenge this. Shakespeare was admired and liked by his fellow dramatists and actors. When he made his money he bought a title and a coat of arms, acquired a massive house in his home town and retired there. He did his best to get his daughters well-married. He bore witness in court cases. When he was dying he redrafted his will in order to protect his wealth and, upon his death, was buried in front of the high altar in the church where he had served as sidesman. This is hardly the profile of an outsider; it is the epitome of bourgeois conformism.

As an ageing, white, middle-class heterosexual with adult children, I find in Shakespeare’s plays characters and situations that speak for me. But these just help to define me, not Shakespeare. And this is an essential element of his genius: we can all find models of experience and identity that help us articulate our own. John Keats detected in Shakespeare what he called “negative capability” – the ability to hold opposing ideas and values in his mind with equanimity, and to find “as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen”.

It is understandable that, on the 50th anniversary of the act that decriminalised homosexuality, beneficiaries of the bill should be invited to celebrate and reflect on this moment of enlightenment. But as artistic director of the RSC, Mr Doran should remember that he does not speak for homosexuals but for Shakespeare and his audiences.

It is to the glory of Shakespeare that so many people want a part of him. But that’s all they get: a part. Again I turn to Keats: “Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments upon it.” He cannot be reduced to one meaning because this is not what he sought. His works resonate not with meaning but significance. His limitless imaginative sympathy allows him to speak to and for every one of us. Leslie Albiston

Stratford-upon-avon, Warwickshire