William Shakespeare: the Master-Mistress of His Passion
Perhaps the most famous poem in English begins with a question: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 has been read at weddings, printed on Valentine’s cards, and quoted by lovers for over 400 years. It arguably sets the gold standard of romantic poetry in the entire Western canon.
The thee was a man.
This is not a contested reinterpretation. It is fact. Sonnet 18 sits within the first 126 of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets: poems addressed to a figure academics call ‘The Fair Youth’. This mysterious male was a beautiful young man Shakespeare addresses love to with real intensity of feeling; the Sonnets swing from adoration to jealousy, tenderness to fury, desperate pleading to a resigned acceptance. Collectively, these poems form some of the most remarkable love sequences ever written in the English language.
And the beloved is another male.
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The Man Behind the Monument
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) needs no biography. His plays are public performances, written for stages and crowds. He is so deeply embedded in the public psyche that Shakespeare’s name functions less as an individual and more as an institution.
His Sonnets are different. They offer something the plays do not: a private Shakespeare. They are intimate, urgent, and largely homoerotic. Addressed to specific people in a way that his plays, for all their genius, carefully avoided.
The collection of sonnets was published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe. It is widely accepted this was without Shakespeare’s consent or oversight, given the numerous errors they contained. They are divided into two unequal sequences. The first 126 poems are addressed to a ‘Fair Youth’; the final 28 concern a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’, with whom the speaker has a tortured, sexually explicit relationship. The Fair Youth poems are the driving heart of the collection of Sonnets, containing the most quoted lines and the most sustained exploration of desire, queer or otherwise, in Shakespeare’s vast entire body of work.
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
~ Sonnet 20, William Shakespeare
Sonnet 20 is the poem that makes the Fair Youth’s gender impossible to deny. The speaker describes a face so beautiful it was originally ‘painted’ as a woman’s, before Nature ‘added one thing to my purpose nothing’: a penis. The wordplay, in typical Shakespeare fashion, is bawdy, unambiguous, and unmistakable. The addressee has a male body. The speaker desires him. The poem acknowledges this with a mixture of frustration and erotic delight that, as always with Shakespeare, feels startlingly modern today.
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What Four Centuries Tried to Hide
The editorial history of the Sonnets is itself a history of the closet. When John Benson published a pirated edition in 1640, in order to make them more marketable, he changed pronouns and added descriptive titles, reframing them to give the impression that they were love poems written to a woman. Benson was to be the first of many who engaged in the deliberate straight-washing the truth of Shakespeare’s private poetry.
The Victorians were particularly inventive in their avoidance. Editors reframed the Fair Youth poems as simply exercises in patronage, expressions of ‘Renaissance friendship’, or as purely literary conventions with no biographical significance. The argument ran that men in the 16th Century wrote effusively to one another as a matter of course, and that reading desire into the Sonnets was an anachronistic projection. This is partly true; male friendship in the period did have a different emotional register. But it collapses entirely when you actually read the poems themselves. Shakespeare does not write to the Fair Youth the way he writes of other men in his work. He writes like a man consumed.
The most famous love poetry in the world, addressed to a man, hiding in plain sight for 400 years.
Sonnet 18 promises to immortalise the beloved’s beauty through verse. Sonnet 29, one of the most emotionally transparent in the collection, describes the speaker’s despair lifting at the thought of the young man: ‘For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings’. Sonnet 116: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’ is read at weddings every weekend in Britain. These are not ambiguous. They are love poems.
Why This Matters Today
Shakespeare matters to queer history because he is the ultimate establishment figure. He is taught in every school. He is performed at every theatre. He is revered as the pinnacle of English literature. And his greatest love poetry is written to a man.
This is not a marginal detail, or an interesting footnote. It is the central fact of the Sonnets, and it demolishes the argument that queerness is somehow modern, marginal, or not really part of the long-established Western literary tradition. Shakespeare proves that queer desire sits at the centre of the Western canon. At the very heart of the poetry of the most canonical writer in the entire English language.
Without acknowledging this, we engage in an act of erasure. When we read these poems out of context, it is an act of appropriation. Not because straight people cannot find joy and meaning from the Sonnets. Of course they can; Shakespeare is universal, after all. But the sustained, deliberate omission of their queer origin is part of a centuries-long tradition of editorial discomfort by straight people, to contain Shakespeare within their own terms.
Safe.
Sanitised.
Straight.
Shakespeare was none of these things.
Not in his plays, those eternal monuments celebrating all of humanity’s greatness, and its weaknesses. Nor was he in his Sonnets. In them, Shakespeare wrote some of the most intense love poetry in English to a man, never feeling the need to disguise it. He wrote about that love with more skill, more beauty, and more enduring power than anyone before. Or since.
The poems by Shakespeare to the Fair Youth are still here. Four centuries of editors massaged the pronouns, rewrote the commentary, and insisted it was simply friendship. The Sonnets have outlived all these efforts to soften, disguise, and constrain.
The only question left is whether we’re willing to reclaim Shakespeare and read what he actually wrote. Not what we were told he did.
