Say what you like about Shakespeare…

Shakespeare, says the RSC’s artistic director, Greg Doran, was probably gay. It is difficult to infer Shakespeare’s characteristics from his oeuvre. After a lifetime of reading and watching his plays, the only firm conclusion I draw is that he had a bizarre fear of hedgehogs. It is part of Shakespeare’s genius that he never takes just one side of any question. Keats called it his “negative capability”.

Shakespeare’s sonnets do indeed suggest that he lusted after both men and women, just as his history plays suggest that he loathed mobs; but we can’t be absolutely certain. In a sense, though, the views of Shakespeare the man don’t much matter. His works have transcended their author, creating their own reality. As Harold Bloom once put it, whatever experiences we bring to the plays, they illuminate our experiences more than our experiences illuminate them.

Whenever we read Shakespeare’s words, they seem narrowly aimed at our circumstances. The same passage can speak to us in contrary ways at different moments in our lives. How this sorcery works I shall probably never understand; but, if you’re familiar with the canon, you’ll know what I mean.

Gay men in every age have known in their bones that Shakespeare was gay, just as GK Chesterton knew that he was a devout Catholic and Goethe that he was some sort of spiritual German. Maya Angelou, for her part, had no doubt: “Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.”

And, in a sense, they were all correct. Or rather, as TS Eliot put it, “the most anyone can hope for is to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way”.