...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