Researchers Make Fresh Claim that Shakespeare Was Bi
Just who was William Shakespeare - quite possibly the finest poet in the English language - thinking of when he set out to compare a beloved to a summer's day? New research reinforces the long-held notion that the recipient of Sonnet 18 - one of his most well known - could well have been a man.
But that doesn't mean Shakespeare was gay, researchers note; of the sonnets they examined, the Shakespeare scholars say that while 27 seemed to be written to men, another 10 were definitely about women, reports UK newspaper the Daily Mail.
There's also the fact that Shakespeare was married to wife Anne Hathaway for three and a half decades, from age 18 - and Hathaway was already pregnant during the wedding ceremony, the newspaper notes.
While it's long been thought that the poet and playwright wrote sonnets both to a "Dark Lady" and a "Fair Youth," researchers Sir Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondon argue that the truth of the matter was more complicated - perhaps much more complicated, with at least several sonnets suggesting a three-way relationship involving both another man and a woman.
In any case, said Wells, "It's just not the case that there were only two addressees in the sonnets."
Moreover, the scholars dispute that there ever was a "Dark Lady." Rather, they noted, the word "black" recurred in the sonnets, seemingly referring in at least one instance to a woman's hair color.
Shakespeare wrote 182 sonnets in all, the Daily Mail recalled.
The entire canon of Shakespeare's sonnets is considered and examined in Wells and Edmondon's forthcoming book, "All the Sonnets of Shakespeare," due out Sept. 10 from Cambridge University Press.