"The Italian tricolor was first established during the Napoleonic Wars by French republics in northern Italy , who styled it after the French tricolor." History
Posted on 04/03/2003 2:04:15 PM PST by MadIvan
A 17th-century Louis Vuitton trunk containing numerous Barbra Streisand records, the complete Rogers and Hammerstein video collection, and a signed copy of Miss Collins’s Joan’s Way: Looking Good, Feeling Great was recently discovered on the South Bank, near the site of the Globe Theatre. This must be further compelling evidence that William Shakespeare was a flamboyant (by law all gays have to be described so) homosexual.
Entering the scrum that passes for Shakespearean Lit Crit comes Sir Ian McKellen, leading thesp, with his claim that the Bard is as gay as Judy Garland’s fan club. His sexuality has long been a fruity debating point, as old as the quest for the identity of the Dark Lady.
Academics, who like to frighten horses, claim that occasional phrases reveal his inverted nature: Sonnet 126, for instance, begins “O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power . . .” A whole school of academia has built up around the meaning of “will” in Sonnet 135 — “Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,/ Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine.” And how about that “wilt”, eh?
Why stop there? Surely, if we were to peer harder, the whole of his work (“I would not be a queen/For all the world” Henry VIII) could be deconstructed for signs of pinkery: the playwright who sent one of Britain’s finest armies “once more unto the breach, dear friends”, who named a character Bottom, and for whom “lend me your ears” could easily have been just a missed stroke. All’s Well That Bends Well? Whichever Way You Like It?
Shakespeare sits with Field Marshal Montgomery, Handel, Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, J. Enoch Powell and Abraham Lincoln, all infinitely fascinating figures from the past claimed as friends of Dorothy by on-the-make authors, bored academics and wishful-thinking gay campaigners.
Hoover, the former FBI hard nut, we learnt in one work of insignificance, on less formal occasions wore a black dress with flounces, lace stockings and liked to be called “Mary”; Michael Collins, the IRA hero, it has been claimed, shared a bed with other men while on the run. (A more sober historian unsuccessfully reassured Nationalists that “their hands under the blankets were firmly on their revolvers”.) Abe was too close to his log-cabin friend Joshua Speed. Even Dracula has been labelled gay. Bram Stoker supposedly had a homosexual crush on the impresario Henry Irving and based the Count on him.
It’s all flapdoodle. It’s the sort of game anyone can play because no one can plausibly deny or confirm psychobabbling claims about secrets of the heart; everyone is safely dead and buried. It’s all predicated on the erroneous modern belief that sex — rather than money, faith or power — is the great motivator. That, and the bizarre belief that homosexuality somehow confers an explanation of behaviour, beyond merely what happens in the bedroom. Do we really believe that Alexander the Great’s homosexuality caused him to sweep across Asia Minor in search of exotic knick-knacks? Or that Hitler sent gays to the death camps in the biggest and most deadly attempt to appear, as the lonely hearts ads put it, “straight-acting”?
How could Sir Ian, some 400 years later, have an inkling of Shakespeare’s sexuality, when Ron Davies, the moment-of-madness Welsh Secretary, has difficulty in knowing himself whether he is, to coin a euphemism, a badger-fancier or not; a confusion worthy of the sea of self-doubt that was Hamlet. “To be or not to be: That is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing end them.” End them? Ooh, missus.
The author has no problems with his sexuality.
"The Italian tricolor was first established during the Napoleonic Wars by French republics in northern Italy , who styled it after the French tricolor." History
"For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." 2 Timothy 4:3
Yes and no. Some pieces of them appear in print (a line in the anonymous play Edward III in 1596, for instance, and two complete sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599). In 1598 we have a reference to Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private friends," so it's clear that they were not published then and were only being handed about among a few people. A fragmented, badly-printed, unauthorized form of the sonnets appeared in 1609. Publishing in Elizabethan England appears to have been a free-for-all, with anyone publishing anything he cared to, with a false attribution if that would be profitable, or no attribution at all. Anyone could publish anybody else's work, and there were no copyright laws. So many of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare were never published with his name on them during his lifetime, and many of the works published with his name on them are not his. Hence the matter of authorship is a bit of a mess.
...also...
It seems that the sonnets were private poem-missives to a young man Shakespeare was carrying on with but who was being encouraged to marry for dynastic reasons
That is ALMOST word for word the current "rumor" that was running around Shakespeare when I *left* Academia-Land; I'm surprised evolved. When I heard it, he was COACHING a young man on how to act with a woman, or it was assumed he was writing about himself in the third person (with some overlap w/The Dark Lady). Wonderful to speculate on and on like this when we don't know anything at all (fact says Shakespeare was most likely relatively...well...normal...).
As for Ian. M., good actor, like a lot of them, should learn to keep his mouth closed on a lot of other stuff. *shrug*. Same old same old. Less concerned with Ian McKellen making a silly statement like this, and more with deliberate indoctrination of a pro-homosexual agenda in the public, with a special focus on youth (that IS the underlying issue here...and hence McKellen as a tangent, since he's pop culture). That is, with a special focus on youth being so tolerant that you end up with an entire generation deliberately socially/sexually stunted & confused (IMHO the rise of "bisexuality" can be directly tied into this).
The other point to make is that plenty of heterosexuals are in the closet, too. :-) (that is, heterosexuals generally don't make a big deal of their heterosexuality and hold a big boff-in or something to support it)
Got nothing against gay people who don't want to force their agenda on other people or society; same rules apply to them as I feel apply to everyone else (stay outta my business and I'll stay out of yours).
So, Ian wants to think The Bard was gay. *shrug*. Let him, I guess, since as I stated earlier what little evidence we have doesn't support that in any way (unless you buy the dynastic Cyrano/coach thing AND you buy that that somehow makes you gay -- I don't buy your latest iteration of that theory).
As you remark, we know very little about Shakespeare's life. The documentation to prove or disprove much of anything isn't there, and until and unless it appears, many, many dissertations and academic careers can be founded on theorizing. Obviously I can't present hard fact to support my views; nor can you. My contention obviously is that what we do know doessupport what I've written. After all, I see no refutation of the point I'm making, that individual phrases I cite in the sonnets imply that the author's feelings toward his subject ("frantic-mad") were outside of the bounds of usual male heterosexual friendship.
I take no position on the issue of who actually wrote the Shakespeare canon, but there are still some ongoing debates about which plays he wrote or contributed to, and I don't know why you raised this question.
--from one who at one time graded more than her fair share of five-cent college theses
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