Shakespeare: The World as Stage

A separate matter of contention is whether the “onlie begetter” is the person being addressed in the so

We don’t know when Shakespeare wrote his so

The so

It is an appealing scenario but one based on nothing but a chain of hopeful suppositions. We have no evidence that Shakespeare had even a formal acquaintance with Southampton, much less a panting one. It must also be said that the few specific references to appearance in the so

Looking for biography-Shakespeare’s or anyone’s-in the so

“If we take the ‘I’ in every so

The dark lady is no less doubtful. A. L. Rowse-who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion-in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions “ca

We will almost certainly never know for sure, and in any case we perhaps don’t need to. Auden for one believed that knowing would add nothing to the poems’ satisfactions. “Though it seems to me rather silly to spend much time on conjectures which ca

The matter of Shakespeare’s sexuality-both that he had some and that it might have been pointed in a wayward direction-has caused trouble for his admirers ever since. One early editor of the so

Discomfort lasted well into the twentieth century. Marchette Chute, in a popular biography of 1949, relegated all discussion of the so

We needn’t be so blushing. The lines he alludes to are: “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.” Most critics believe that these lines indicate that Shakespeare’s attachment to the fair youth was never consummated. But as Stanley Wells notes, “If Shakespeare himself did not, in the fullest sense of the word, love a man, he certainly understood the feelings of those who do.”

Perhaps the biggest question of all is, if he didn’t write them for publication, what were they for? The so

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Did Shakespeare really believe that a so