Sexual Shakespeare

Shakespeare's sexuality has always been an ambiguous concept, despite the pleasant fictions of "Shakespeare in Love". Now Michael Keevak examines such sources as anecdotes, imitations, forgeries, spurious works and portraits to show that this ambiguity has a long and twisted history. "Sexual Shakespeare" argues that Shakespeare's sexuality has always presented a problem to readers, who thus have a tendency to desexualize him. Keevak casts his net widely among Shakespeareana to reconsider a wealth of intriguing evidence, including the sexuality of the man himself as discerned through such contradictory clues as his reputation as a womanizer and his allegedly homosexual sonnets; the Shakespearean forgeries of William Henry Ireland; and the question of whether restoration dramatist William Davenant was Shakespeare's illegitimate son. He also evaluates the questions of Shakespeare's sexuality that are at the heart of controversies over authorship and visual representations of the bard's face.
Because so little reliable information is available about Shakespeare, Keevak suggests that the very idea of his sexuality, much like his personal reputation, should remain as open and unfixed as possible - that Shakespeare and his contemporaries are not easily reducible to a sexuality of any kind. His book offers a new way of understanding our desire to uncover "the absent sodomite" in the early modern period and makes a unique contribution to both queer theory and Renaissance studies.