[socal_parrot]

Maybe the guy was just a poor painter.

[poet]

B4 long, the limp wrists will say the world is gay. Sheesh

[NewHampshireDuo]

Odd Portrait Has Many Guessing Shakespeare Was Gay

who cares....

[weegee]

Here's the "shocker" that I could see coming when it was revealed that the painting's owner was the one trumpeting the discovery:

"But even if the discovery of the portrait is much ado about nothing, it has proved effective publicity for the painting, which is now on show at Cobbe's stately home at Hatchlands Park in southern England."

[SpringheelJack]

I can't imagine a more silly excuse of an article. The portrait shows a man who MIGHT be considered effeminate, who MIGHT be Southampton, who MIGHT be the addressee of Shakespeare's sonnets. Somehow from all that, we are supposed to find a compelling reason to speculate that Shakespeare was gay.

[martin_fierro]

This guy?

Seems to me the goatee would indicate a MAN, but those were woolier times...

[Savage Beast]

It's difficult to see how some of the sonnets, notably Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day and Weary with Toil I Find Me to My Bed, are not homosexual--the former bright and loving, the latter dark and horrifying. And what about When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes?

Somehow this does not bother me. It's life--like war and peace, love and hate, damnation and redemption.

Inside my wedding ring are inscribed the following:

"...even to the edge of doom."

--Savage Beast

[LadyDoc]

Different societies have different ideas.

The accusation that Shakespear was gay is based on his poems to a young male friend that seem very romantic. However, his poems to his female mistress are more erotic.

Back then, male friendship was praised, because there was a strict line between the sexes and their places in life. Your best friend was a male, but sodomy was forbidden. But you had a mistress or wife not to talk politics or drink with, but to sleep with and make a family.

Many of his plays bring up cross dressing women doing men's work successfully, but in the end they marry and are happy in the female role. Sort of like Rosie the Riviter and the WAACS in World War II: Sure they could fly, work on planes, and be soldiers, but they weren't "feminists" who hated men. They could be better wives for doing this, since they did not hate men but could appreciate their men's jobs and problems.

Modern society makes male friendship into a suspicious thing, sexualizing friendship. Look at those worrying about male friendship in Lord of the Rings as being gay. It is not. And look at modern feminism that denies women have any role in life but becoming failed men.

[SunkenCiv]

[two years later] The very same point about the Earl of Southhampton has been made before, must have been some time ago, because it appears in this:

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William Shakespeare: Life of Drama A&E Biography

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