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   Shakespeare, sexuality and the sonnets Shakespeare, sexuality and the
   sonnets

Shakespeare, sexuality and the Sonnets

     * Article written by: Aviva Dautch
     * Themes: Shakespeare’s life and world, Poetry, Gender, sexuality,
       courtship and marriage
     * Published: 30 Mar 2017
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   Aviva Dautch traces how Shakespeare's Sonnets have been read and
   interpreted through the lens of biography, identity, gender and
   sexuality.

   The Sonnets hold a strange space in the Shakespeare canon, for they are
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   feverishly passionate, often cynical, sometimes bitter and frequently
   mournful – lurking behind our readings are 400 years of rumour and
   speculation about Shakespeare’s sexuality and the identity of his
   addressees. Perhaps that is inevitable for a collection written in the
   first person, as the temptation to merge the narrator’s ‘I’ with the
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   their relationship with vibrant immediacy and beguiling intimacy.

   In Sonnet 20 Shakespeare makes it clear that his narrator’s sexuality
   is complex, his love object ‘the master-mistress of my passion’ (20.2);
   ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen’ (63.13). Not only is
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   problematic. In 1640, John Benson edited a new edition in which he
   changed many of the poems, perhaps to avoid provoking questions about
   Shakespeare’s sexuality. For example, the final couplet of Sonnet 101,
   ‘Then do thy office, muse; I teach thee how / To make him seem long
   hence as he shows now’ (101.14) becomes ‘To make her seem long hence as
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   warned that what ‘resolved my reason into tears’ is ‘lo passion, but an
   art of craft’. However tempting it is to read the Sonnets as a
   confessional exploration of Shakespeare’s sexuality, it’s important to
   remember that he was a craftsman of the highest degree, and that the
   poems transformed his real life experience into the ‘subtle matter’ of
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     * Love poetry in Renaissance England

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