In a brilliantly titled essay my friend Joseph Pearce dismantles the current idiocy that William Shakespeare was gay.
Contrary to Friedlander’s own glib acceptance of the myth of Shakespeare’s homosexuality, isn’t it unlikely that Shakespeare would have escaped punishment in a culture in which homosexual practice was punishable by death if the sonnets were so transparently “queer” as “queer theorists” proclaim them to be? Isn’t it more likely that Shakespeare’s love for the person to whom the sonnets is addressed is innocent and that the critics are guilty of seeing bawdy innuendo when they should be seeing the love of one person for another, staring at the gutter when they should be looking with the poet at the stars?
Go here for the whole article.
