Were Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley homosexual lovers?

Great Debates
1

Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets speak of a “Fair Youth,” and they were addressed to an unidentified man known only by the initials “W. H.”

Speculation in recent years has pointed towards Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, one of Shakespeare’s patrons.

There is some discussion of this theory here.

That last part is most interesting. Here is the portrait of Wriothesley in which he is dressed and made-up as a woman. Although he has a beard in other paintings, it seems clear from studying the basic features that it is in fact the same person. Maybe it’s possible that there were men back then who had their portraits painted as women just for the hell of it, but I tend to suspect there is a homosexual element to it.

What do you think? Was the great playwright actually the Bard of Gayvon? Did he want to shake his spear at other men? Or is this just a bunch of wishful thinking and revisionist history like the whole thing about Abraham Lincoln?

2

Your portaits do not look like the same person to me. There are similarities, but there are also differences - different shapes to eybrows, presence/absence of a cleft chin, and so on. How strong is the identification of the “female” portrait as that of Henry? Could it be a female relative?

Of course, whether Shakespeare had a sexual relationship with Mr WH/the fair youth doesn’t depend on whether he was Henry Wriothesley.

3

Here is a fascinating article that goes into much greater detail about that portrait and the analysis of it.

4

And what do they actually say about this fair youth? If simply mentioning the existence of a good looking young man makes someone gay then I must be queer.

How did you conclude that this individual is dressed and made-up as a woman? I’m not an expert on Elizabethan fashion, but that looks no more feminine than lots of other Tudor portraits of young men.

Granted he has long hair, but since he is shown in his official portrait with exactly the same hairstyle that tell us nothing.

Does it?

As Mr. Gainsborough’s butler’s dogsbody says, all Tudor portraits look the same since they’re painted to a romantic ideal rather than as a true depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the person in question.

To me they both look they are done to the stylistic standard of the period, with heart shaped face, heavily lidded eyes and pointed features. But beyond that I see little more resemblance between these two individuals than between any random Tudor portraits

I think I’d like to see some evidence from experts. Is the man in that portrait really dressed as a woman? Are the two portraits really of the same person?

5

I think the portrait looks distinctly feminine. His face has been made-up, his skin whitened and his lips reddened in a way which is not present in other portraits of men from that same era. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert on Tudor portraits but I have spent hours and hours looking at them and studying them carefully, because they fascinate me along with many other kinds of realist art, and from what I’ve seen of paintings from this period, Southampton seems to me to be dressed as a woman in that picture.

For a more authoritative analysis read the link in post 3.

6

I think the response you’re quoting here was posted by the SDMB’s own Pinkfreud.

And any number of other historical figures. I’ve never been much convinced by this kind of thing: not only have ideas about sexuality changed, it’s hard to judge whether a person was gay or straight hundreds of years after his death and based upon such fragmentary evidence.

The paintings could be of the same person, but it’s not certain. The hair looks similar, the rest is hard to determine. This is also the first time I’d heard anyone suggest Anne Hathaway was the Dark Lady.

7

Robert Browning had the best answer to this Romantic notion that Shakespeare bared his soul in his Sonnets, like some Keats or Shelley centuries before their time.

Wordsworth had written, Scorn not the sonnet, critics! … With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart,.

Browning replied, in another poem, Shakespeare unlocked his heart? once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

Shakespeare was blessed with the most vivid imagination and greatest gift with words that anyone has ever possessed. Was he incapable of inventing an imaginary sonnet sequence? All that we know of Shakespeare suggests that, unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, he was not given to writing about himself in print. His ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ were simply literary exercises in the then-fashionable sonnet.

You can guarantee that every generation some writer will come along with another candidate for the mysterious W.H. or Dark Lady, none of them with a shred of real evidence, just as in the parallel sport of coming up with the ‘real’ author of Shakespeare’s works.

It’s Shakespeare for those who have no interest in the man’s work or the man himself other than as a dummy to hang their ludicrous theories on. The rest of us may safely ignore them. We’ll certainly be alerted by serious Shakespeare scholars if anything sound does come to light in the future.

8

I haven’t read that before, and it’s very true. It’s hard to know anything about Shakespeare’s character, but I’ve long had the sense that he deliberately a private person, and not one given to publishing his own feelings.

9

The first thing to note is that the person making this claim is Alec Cobbe, the very same Alex Cobbe who has since claimed to have identified a new portrait of Shakespeare in this same collection. Does this mean that this collection is a treasure trove of hidden gems? Or merely that he is a bit gullible?

Does the painting show someone, male or female, ‘dressed as a woman’? More to the point, have any of the experts actually claimed this? Alastair Laing certainly knows his stuff. But when Anthony Holden, who doesn’t, says that Laing ‘believed the portrait was not of a woman, but of a young man apparently dressed as a woman’, what weight are we to put on that word ‘apparently’? How strongly, if at all, does Laing agree with the idea that the sitter is dressed as a woman?

Personally, I think that the way in which the sitter is dressed is the most masculine thing about it. The outfit is more likely to be that of a man, while the long hair was a well-established male fashion of the time and men also wore earings. The doubt is instead the facial features, which could be - but far from necessarily - those of a young woman.

But one has to remember that the portrait is not a photograph. The face has literally been painted. (And we are looking at a photograph reproduced on a computer screen.) In any case, young men were often painted with pale skin and red lips.

As Laing says, identifications based on supposed resemblances are notoriously dodgy. But if one wants to make such comparisons, the obvious image to use is the Hilliard miniature in the Fitzwilliam. That at least dates from roughly the same time as the putative date of this portrait. And, despite what Cobbe and Holden claim, the resemblance is not at all ‘telling’. Any actual resemblances are things like the hair style, which simply underline that such things were fashionable among rich young men at that date. The facial features, on the other hand, are different. Particularly note the jawlines.

That leaves the claims about the provenance. So the Cobbes are related to the Wriothesleys. Fair enough. Except that such six-degrees-of-separation genealogical connections always need to be treated with some caution. Just because something could have descended through a family in a particular way does not mean that it did.

Strictly speaking, it is only the dedication of the book, a dedication which is not by Shakespeare, that is addressed ‘To Mr. W.H.’. This is why it isn’t obvious that ‘W.H.’ features in the Sonnets at all.

10

Suppose for the moment that the painting is indeed a portrait of Southampton dragged up.

And suppose further that this is evidence, given the gender roles and stereotypes of the day, that Southampton was gay, in the modern sense.

This is not evidence that Shakespeare was gay; if anything, it could lean in the other direction.

Granted that Shakespeare wrote sonnets which are open to homoerotic readings (to put it no higher).

One possible explanation of this is the Shakespeare was gay. Another possible explanation is that Shakespeare was writing to appeal to the sensibilities of a gay patron. And, lo, here we have a patron who is apparently gay, which is consistent with the second possible explanation.

11

This is so interesting to me given my hometown experience as a youth having interacted with three prominent gay members associated with the annual Shaw festival, two of them being directors and the other a benefactor. These three are the only festival people I’ve ever had an opportunity to speak to. (I was their paperboy)

What am I to believe? That playwrights and those who are into the theatre are prone to be gay ?

12

The Wiki entry on Southampton says:

There’s no citation for this, so I don’t know how true it is.

13

I’ve never heard the theory that Anne Hathaway was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. She was his wife, and the Dark Lady in the sonnets seems to be closer to a lover.

As for the “is Shakespeare gay and who was his lover” question, as a student of literature I’ve never really thought it mattered who the Young Man actually is, or whether Shakespeare was actually gay. In the context of the sonnets as a series one can strongly argue that the narrator and the Young Man are lovers but the narrator does not necessarily equal the poet himself.