>I think that it is a bit disingenuous, or a bit too hasty in any case, to simply conclude that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets to a young man. The implication there is that the sonnets are autobiographical, and that the speaker in the sonnets and the young man addressed are real people, when in fact they may only be archetypes. There is a great deal of uncertainty about the sonnets, and, in fact, this uncertainty goes beyond the controversial details of the "young man" and "dark lady" to whether Shakespeare wrote the sonnets at all; the author may have been Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford.

I agree that the young man may be an archetype, but I think that it's pretty clear that those sonnets are addressed to a man. I can't remember numbers off the top of my head, but there's one in which Nature is said to have "pricked thee out for woman's pleasure," "pricked" being (IMO, and in the opinion of my class) a pretty clear pun on providing one with male genitals. There's also a sequence (again, I can't remember numbers but I'll be happy to go look them up when I get a chance if you'd like) in the first 126 in which the addressee is implied to be having an affair with a woman. I doubt that lesbianism was part of popular discourse in that day to be spoken about in such a relatively open manner. ;)

As for the idea that Shakespeare was someone else, I'll freely admit that I'm no expert. My sense is, however, that we have sufficient biographical data to give pretty solid circumstantial evidence (which is really all that anyone can have) that Shakespeare did in fact author the works that are attributed to him.


> I think it is particularly important to be careful in this area, considering that many of those who advocate most strongly for a strong biographical connection between Shakespeare and the speaker in the sonnets do so with an ideological agenda, that is, an attempt to characterize Shakespeare as homosexual or bisexual.

That's a point. I'm not trying to categorize him in any way, really. I don't think that the sonnets constitute sufficient evidence that we can call Shakespeare homosexual/bisexual. (To begin with, those categorizations didn't even exist when he lived...) Some of them could be read as homoerotic, but I don't think that any of the first 126 are really eroticized; it'd be totally plausible that these were written within a platonic relationship. I just think it's interesting, is all. ;)

~Chrysanthemum~