With a bravery that might be foolhardiness, the 21st century poet is wading into the most enduringly enigmatic of the Bard’s works
Almost every season there’s some Shakespeare news, usually associated with the conundrum of the man himself. A year or so ago, we saw the discussion of a portrait allegedly of the Bard. Then last spring came James Shapiro’s mischievous resurrection of the authorship question in Contested Will, a scholarly tour of the various, mainly American, theories supporting the candidacy of Marlowe, Bacon and the Earl of Oxford as possible «authors» of the work. I wrote at some length about Shapiro in the Observer, and there were several reviews, pro and anti.
Six months later, along comes the poet Don Paterson. He’s not questioning the authorship – far from it – but he has come up with «A New Commentary» on the Sonnets (just published by Faber) in which he declares, unequivocally, that Shakespeare was gay. As he puts it in his introduction:
«The question ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was. Arguably he was a bi-sexual, of sorts; though for all the wives, mistresses and children I’m not entirely convinced by his heterosexual side …»
This, of course, is not a new position. Critics and scholars have argued this, from the textual evidence of the sonnets, for years. What is striking is Paterson’s vehemence. Moreover, he follows it up with the defiant assertion that his reading of the sonnets is a «primary reading» which «isn’t necessarily required to articulate its findings». That seems to be a licence to print all kinds of speculation.
A bit further on, he describes how he approached the question of «What are these poems to us now?» in a passage that indicates either a refreshingly instinctual approach to literary criticism, or a kind of mad disdain for the reader: «Rather than lock myself in the library, I wrote [the book] when I was wide awake, bored, half-asleep, full of cold, drunk or hungover; I wrote it feeling happy, frustrated, serene, elated, smart, befuddled and stupid. I wrote it on the train, in bed, in the bath and in my lunch-break …»
Over the years, the sonnets have developed a reputation as the Bermuda Triangle of Shakespeare scholarship: a place where good critics go missing, or become horribly confused. Some reviewers are going to worry that Paterson has eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner, but I found his candour rather thrilling. Some Bardophiles will love it. Others will not.
Myself, I’m still reading Paterson’s Commentary; there are some 450 pages of it. It’s exhilarating stuff. With a bit of luck, he might even stir up a new approach to the argument about the poet’s sexual identity. It will certainly make a change from the Bacon question.
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More on this story
- Shakespeare’s sonnets by Don Paterson
- Shakespeare’s sonnets are synonymous with courtly romance, but in fact many are about something quite different. Some are intense expressions of gay desire, others testaments to misogyny. Wary of academic criticism, Don Paterson tries to get back to what the poet was actually saying
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