Shakespeare spoke for, and loved, men and women

William Shakespeare was bisexual? Well, duh. Or rather, as the great man himself put it, “there needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this”.

A forthcoming book by two immensely distinguished Shakespeare scholars, Prof Sir Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson, argues that a chronological ordering of the sonnets shows that Shakespeare’s desire for both men and women did not fluctuate. “To reclaim the term bisexual seems to be quite an original thing to be doing.”

Actually, Shakespeare’s bisexuality always struck me as one of the very few things that can be confidently extrapolated from his writings. We have only the haziest notion of his political opinions, for all his plays about kings. We can’t say whether he was a Catholic, a Protestant or a nonbeliever – though all these assertions have their convinced defenders.

Indeed, the wonder of his corpus is how little we can infer from it. Shakespeare had an extraordinary ability to argue both sides of a case. This ambiguity means that he seems constantly to be addressing you personally, his lines somehow attuned to your particular circumstances. Keats called it his “negative capability”.

Harold Bloom, after a lifetime of studying and teaching the plays, concluded only that “by reading Shakespeare, I can gather that he did not like lawyers, preferred drinking to eating, and evidently lusted after both genders”. To that list, I would tentatively add that he distrusted crowds, had suffered a painful betrayal and hated hedgehogs.

This last, bizarre as it sounds, is the only deduction that I draw with absolute certainty. There are nine references to hedgehogs or urchins in his oeuvre, plus the “hedge-pig” whose whine begins the gruesome witches’ brew in Macbeth. All nine are either monstrous (“you spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny hedgehogs, be not seen”), terrifying (“hedgehogs which lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount their pricks at my footfall”) or insulting (“dost grant me, hedgehog?”) That’s right: when the greatest mind produced by our species wanted to convey horror, it turned to hedgehogs.

Identifying Shakespeare as bisexual may seem to be just the latest example of his uncanny aptness. Shakespeare is conservative in conservative times and radical in radical times. Nazis and Communists found things to admire in his writings. Our present age, obsessed as it is with identity politics, was bound to do the same. Those who conscript Shakespeare to their cause are often completely unable to allow alternative readings. If, for example, you read Henry V as an anti-war play, you might genuinely struggle to see how anyone can interpret it as a patriotic pageant, and vice versa.

Shakespeare is, by some strange sorcery, always on your side. Thus, Goethe was convinced that he was a kind of spiritual German, accidentally born in the wrong place. GK Chesterton saw him as a devout Catholic. To Maya Angelou, “William Shakespeare was a black woman”. And, in a sense, they were all right.

So of course Shakespeare knew what it meant to love both men and women. More remarkably, he knew what it meant to love as a man and as a woman: his female characters, like his male ones, are inexhaustible. How he did it, I shall probably never understand. But if you know the plays, you’ll know what I mean.

He also hated hedgehogs, ‘which lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount their pricks at my footfall’