Shakespeare’s Obsession With Queer Desire

Where should we look for an LGBTQ+ icon from the Elizabethan age? How about the playwright Christopher Marlowe, a dissident who scorned those “that love not tobacco and boys” and wrote a historical tragedy about England’s queer king Edward II? Or have you heard of Moll Frith, the gender-nonconforming cutpurse and entertainer who was so famous that their story was told on the public stage in The Roaring Girl (1611)? Both are indisputable queer stars of the period. But let’s not overlook the era’s presiding genius. If we want to find the greatest Elizabethan artist of same-sex feeling we need to head straight to the top of the pile: my standout queer hero is William Shakespeare.

Such a statement merits some historical qualification about terminology (“queer” is of course a modern umbrella term for the broad spectrum of same-sex desires), and you might now be expecting firm evidence of his—and in effect his characters’—queerness. But looking for the equivalent of a smoking gun in arguments about Shakespeare’s sexuality is a hollow pursuit. This wasn’t a time of cut-and-dried sexual identities.

But that doesn’t mean queer desire is a modern invention. For too long, debates about the erotic lives (and erotic imaginations) of esteemed historical figures have been conducted in the manner of a prosecution: great men and women are always straight until proven gay—and that proof had better sweep aside any reasonable doubt.

But we’ve grown out of criminal prosecution of queer desire in our own time, and as we shed some of the chilly inheritances of 18^th and 19^th century attitudes to sex and gender, we might be surprised by what we find in the more distant past. While early modern England was certainly no queer utopia, Shakespeare’s culture and society made much more space for the articulation of same-sex desire than we might expect.

English law constrained people’s sex lives in complex ways. The Buggery Act of 1533 outlawed “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast,” but also laid down stringent evidentiary requirements for prosecution: the full act had to be independently witnessed for the actor or their partner to be convicted in court. The number of people successfully prosecuted for consensual sodomy in Shakespeare’s lifetime was, therefore, vanishingly small. Barely anyone was labelled a “sodomite” by law during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. And nothing else on the queer sexual menu fell under that statute—all other forms of illicit erotic coupling, from kissing to non-penetrative sex, were transgressive by religion and custom, but not law.

While the Church of England was aggressively hostile to queer sexuality of all kinds, the actual instruments of religious doctrine—the ecclesiastical magistracy, also known as the ‘Bawdy Courts’—were mostly overburdened with dealing with the consequences of straight fornication. Very few men or women found themselves facing the parish courts charged with same-sex misconduct, for all that preachers in the pulpit liked to thunder against “the use that nature abhorreth.”

It was in this vacuum of surveillance and punishment that Shakespeare wrote some of his most stirringly homoerotic work. His same-sex love sonnets (first published in 1609) were a radical queering of the form, an innovation that Shakespeare borrowed from his contemporary Richard Barnfield, whose own homoerotic collection appeared in 1595. Shakespeare’s narrator explores his passionate, compulsive desire for a “lovely boy” across 126 poems. If there’s a characteristic mood to Shakespeare’s dozens of queer sonnets, it’s yearning. The speaker’s desire is erotic, chivalric, metaphysical, semi-religious, self-abasing, teasing and sometimes joltingly coarse: in Sonnet 20 Shakespeare jokes that the boy’s penis serves the same purpose as a woman’s vagina, a sexual part designed to entice and excite other men.  

Shakespeare investigated the broad range of homoerotic affect in his plays. Male same-sex relations existed on a scale that stretched from the civic-minded platonic friendship of men of affairs such as Brutus and Cassius (Julius Caesar) to something altogether, well, hornier in nature. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare depicted an intensely eroticised queer relationship between Sebastian (twin brother to shipwrecked Viola) and the sea-captain Antonio. The two men experience a whirlwind romance that engenders a “desire, / More sharp than filed steel” between the grizzled sea-dog and the epicene youngster. And despite his society’s suspicion of female sexuality, Shakespeare understood that women harboured queer desire that was just as powerful as men’s. In The Two Noble Kinsmen (co-written with John Fletcher) the heroine Emilia recalls her devotion to a long-dead female lover. As she admits, the passion in “true love [be]tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex dividual” (i.e., between the two sexes).   

Classical influence was never far away. Shakespeare’s first published work, the erotic poem Venus and Adonis, drew its story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a treasure trove of polymorphous desire and kink sexuality. Shakespeare rewrote Ovid’s brief account of the young huntsman’s resistance to the Goddess of Love into a thousand line mini-epic that invited his mostly-male readership to imagine themselves in the role of Venus the rough seducer, compelling the limpidly pretty Adonis to give in to her desires (a fantasy that also gave heteroerotic pleasure to female readers).

Read More: It’s Not Time to Give Up on Shakespeare—Yet

Homoerotic material was easy to find in the bookstalls, but the real center of queer culture in Shakespeare’s London was the playhouse. The all-male stage was a recognized site of transgressive eroticism. For some observers this was a catastrophe: the anti-theatrical campaigner William Prynne, writing some years after Shakespeare’s death, castigated “men’s putting on of women’s apparel” as a “preparative” to the “most abominable, unnatural sin of Sodom.” But the majority of theatregoers either thought otherwise, or didn’t mind. Boy actors, like actresses of the Restoration stage, attracted devoted followers and sexualised attention from men that must often have been unwelcome. 

Dramatists willingly exploited the homoerotic energies of the early modern theatre. The playwright John Lyly was probably the first to leverage the queer theatricality of the boy-playing-a-girl-disguised-as-a-boy trope, in which the real body of the young male actor was incorporated into the romantic narrative on stage. Shakespeare learned from Lyly: his disguised heroines (in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Cymbeline) all have moments when they reflect on the erotic confusion caused by their layered performance of gender.

Perhaps because of such storylines, the early modern playhouse acquired a reputation as a site of gender nonconformity for performers and audience members alike. In 1617 a satirist claimed to be horrified at the sight of “a woman of the masculine gender” taking a seat in the Blackfriars; the debates that erupted in the early seventeenth century about the behaviour of allegedly masculine women and effeminate men on the streets of London identified the theatre as a contributing factor to these social transgressions.  

Ultimately, whether or not Shakespeare would have described himself as gay, straight, bi, or any other modern sexual identity isn’t really the point (and is, in any case, a redundant speculation: he didn’t have access to those terms). More compelling is the realization that Shakespeare was artistically obsessed with queer desire, imbuing his plays and poems with a homoerotic dynamic that clearly found a gratified audience.

Some Shakespeare fans today will resist the urge to draw an association between the feelings in his work, and the feelings the man harbored in his own soul (and it is true that he was not, as far as we know, afflicted with murderous desire for the crown of Scotland, for instance). But it’s exciting to think about  the possibility—the likelihood—that Shakespeare’s queer interest arose out of queer emotion—that his queer art was born from a queer artistic self. 

It’s time to make space for Shakespeare in the queer chorus line of history, a cast we’re still populating as scholars and biographers look back at past lives and ask fresh questions about the way our ancestors understood desire, sexuality and identity. Old dead gays won’t have looked or sounded precisely like the gloriously rich range of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities today, but our shared histories of queer feeling trace a powerful line back into the past. And looking back, we find Shakespeare.