Shakespeare ‘the outsider’ was gay, claims RSC director

Artistic controller says that it is ‘no longer acceptable’ to conceal sexuality of the playwright’s gay characters

HE WAS responsible for some of the greatest tales of love and lovers in the English language.

But interest in William Shakespeare’s own love life was rekindled yesterday after the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company suggested the Bard may have been gay.

Greg Doran said he believed Shakespeare’s sexuality had given the playwright an outsider’s perspective which had helped his work.

Mr Doran, who took over artistic control of the RSC in 2012, also said it was “no longer acceptable” that performances should conceal the sexuality of Shakespeare’s gay characters.

Debate over Shakespeare’s sexuality has raged for decades among scholars.

Mr Doran told Today on BBC Radio 4: “I guess a growing understanding of Shakespeare as I have worked with him over the many years that I have, makes me realise that his perspective is very possibly that of an outsider.

“It allows him to get inside the soul of a black general, a Venetian Jew, an Egyptian queen or whatever and that perhaps that outsider perspective has something to do with his sexuality.”

The key clues to understanding Shakespeare’s sexuality were in his sonnets, according to Mr Doran.

He said: “He wrote a cycle of 154 sonnets, which were published in 1609, and 126 of those sonnets are addressed to a man and not to a woman.”

Mr Doran said academics had found “a process of heterosexualisation of those sonnets during the Victorian period”, where the pronouns in them were changed.

He said: “It wasn’t somehow quite kosher for the great national bard to possibly have affections for his own sex.

“I am just aware how many times Shakespeare has gay characters, and how sometimes those gay characters Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes as ‘gay characters’ Antonio and Bassanio are not played as gay, and I think in the 21st century that’s no longer acceptable.”

Mr Doran said the character of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is “absolutely clearly in love with the young man Bassanio and sometimes that is kind of toned down”.

Their love had been portrayed as “we chaps are very fond of each other”.

He said: “It’s not. It’s clearly a very particular portrait of a gay man, and I think in the 21st century it’s no longer acceptable to play that as anything other than a homosexual.”

The debate over Shakespeare’s sexuality last erupted three years ago when leading scholars clashed in the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement

‘He wrote a cycle of 154 sonnets… and 126 of those sonnets are addressed to a man and not to a woman’

about the issue.

Sir Brian Vickers triggered the spat by criticising a book suggesting Sonnet 116 appeared in a “primarily homosexual context”.

He said it was an “anachronistic assumption” because Shakespeare was using a form of rhetoric that allowed men to express love without implying sexual attraction.

Sir Stanley Wells, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Birmingham, last night told The Daily Telegraph: “Shakespeare was certainly not exclusively gay.

“He married Anne Hathaway when he was only 18 and they had a daughter, Susanna, within six months, then twins – a boy, Hamnet and a girl, Judith.

“But he was pretty certainly bisexual, and actively so. The strongest evidence comes from the sonnets, in some of which he writes of a triangular relationship with a man and a woman.

“Some people claim that these poems are fictional, but I think this is an evasion.”