You know Sonnet 18.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date...
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Heart be still. Are his ending couplets amazing or what? I read these aloud on the eliptical. Had to get some exercise but I didn't want to stop my school work. The final exam for 16th c. lit. is a week from Monday. Yikes! I've never spent so much time reading, studying and writing for a class in my life. This was a tough one. That's the reason for the big gap in my blog writing.
These sonnets were fun to read again. Shakespeare is truly amazing. I think you appreciate him more when you read the work of his contemporaries. I mean, they're all good -- I'm a big fan of Marlowe and I really liked Sidney -- but Will is heads and tails above the rest. His words could turn granite into butter. What a crappy metaphor. Oh well, I tried, in honor of The Man.
So, I guess Shakespeare may have been homosexual, but more likely, he was a heterosexual with homosexual lapses, or maybe the other way around. Why literary scholars focus so much on the sexuality of writers is beyond me. But then, as now, sex sells, I guess. I didn't read all the sonnets; we were assigned certain ones. So I can't comment with confidence on whether he was writing about a woman or man. Seems more often to be a woman. One of the sonnets (135) uses the word "Will" over and over again in different contexts. One interpretation is that "Will" is Will's dick. Apparently it was quite large. That's all I'm saying about that.
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