The Museum Of Secret History

Mr. W.H., wanted dead or alive!

Room Seven: Yes, again about Shakespeare. And his boyfriend. No worries, there are other chapters in progress that are not exclusively about Elizabethan dramatists.

You may have heard of Shakespeare's sonnets - maybe because I already info-dumped some of you, but oh, well. (To be honest, I am mainly writing this chapter to prepare you for the court-drama I'll talk about in another chapter.)
So, Shakespeare wrote sonnets, how nice. Sonnets are a kind of poem with 14 lines and in iambic pentameter. An Italian poet named Petrarca had before started the tradition of "search yourself a mistress, write her a good lot of pining sonnets even though you will never be able to reach her", and within a few years, most Elizabethan poets are like "Fuck yes!! That's the coolest shit!!"

So our dear Will Shakespeare. Most likely, he had been writing his poems as early as 1593, but kept them private. Which is understandable, because the fidelity to his awesome wife Anne is in huge doubt when one reads the sonnets. In fact, they make clear that William was cheating on her.
Only two innocent sonnets are published in anthology called "The Passionate Pilgrim" in 1599, but the full volume of 154 poems is only published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe as "Shakspere's Sonnets. Never before Imprinted". Yes, he wrote Shakespeare as Shakspere.

Now the fun part begins: 28 of those sonnets are addressed to a muse called 'The Dark Lady' - they are rather lewd and absolutely sexual and crude in language. But really, really funny.

The first 126 sonnets, on the other hand, are addressed to a man.

A man often referred to as 'The Fair Youth', and those poems, my dudes, are so tender, and complex, and yes, also a little sexual, but have a completely different tone and attitude than the 'Dark Lady' sonnets. No, seriously, please read them. And if you do so in the correct order, they also form some kind of narrative, with farewells, periods of absence and fights in the relationship - to read one sonnet without context is also good, but as someone who rushed through all of them in one ride-or-die-session, I would really recommend reading them together.

This includes Number 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day". Yes. The most famous love poem of the English language was written by a man, for another man. Take that, English teachers.
But how do we know that Shakespeare writes about a man?
Because he isn't trying to hide it. Throughout the first section, Shakespeare always uses male pronouns for his beloved, and male titles. You want some examples?
For example 26 starts with "Lord of my love" and just gets gayer from there, or 63, which says "His beauty shall in these black lines be seen/ And they shall live, and he in them still green" or Nr 108 that literally addresses the beloved as "sweet boy" and again in 126 as "my lovely boy". Oh Billy, darling.

And then there is of course sonnet 20, which is the queerest of them all. It is no use to quote it here, since we need the full context of it. Here:

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

To quote "Upstart Crow", a sit-com about the Bard, "By adding one thing -- which would be a cod-dangle, aha."

So what Shakespeare, still a man of his time, basically says is: "I love you as I should love a woman, but you are actually a woman - Nature has just given you a male body."