Shakespeare sex & sonnets

El asunto tiene hoy mucho de casposo. De viejuno. Casi raya al personal. Me da lo mismo la o las elecciones/opciones/gustos y posturitas sexuales de Shakespeare. De la persona que encubre un nombre. Aunque claro, una no es académica ni filóloga. Créanme. He disfrutado desentrañando los sonetos. Leerlos en el inglés original es un excelente ejecicio mental. Y a quién le importa lo que él(ella) fuera. Como si era una drag queen victoriana, calva y desmelenada. Un personaje de Almodovar. O el mismo Almodovar trasmutado y british. ¿Was García Lorca gay?. ¿Was Oscar Wilde gay?. ¿Era Lezama Lima gay?. ¿Era Silvia Plath lesbiana?. Bueno,y qué. El (los) sexo es/son la más cerebral de las funciones fisiológicas humanas. Que cada uno/a sea lo que le de la gana dentro de sus circunvoluciones personales y sin dañar al prójimo. Si el personal fuera más imaginativo y usara mejor el cerebro, supongo que se ahorrarían en psicofármacos y se darían menos casos de conductas sexuales patológicas contra niños/as, mujeres y hasta personas aquejadas de minusvalías. Se preguntarán el motivo de semejante sermón a costa de Shakespeare. Pues nada que es finde, que Don Mariano Rajoy (Spanish Prime Minister) aterriza en CAT & UYA. Y que codondesastre cierra el ciber-cutre-chiringo until next Monday. Espero y deseo que mis amigos/as de USA ya estén repuestos/as de las diarreas de cariño y amor familiares en torno al bendito pavo. Espero que les siente bien el pu-- "black friday" (y que no signifique, necesariamente, matar a algún ciudadano negro). En fin, sad but true, es lo que hay. Was Shakespeare gay, and does it matter?Although not a new question, its re-emergence is germane to the interpretation of his plays, and not just a scholars’ By John Sutherland ‘The Shakespeare sex-and-sonnet issue is by no means new. Victorians were well aware of it.' Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, has of recent years become as popular a recitation at weddings as recitals of Frank Sinatra’s My Way at funerals. If wide notice is taken of a current spat over what we can read about Shakespeare’s sexuality into the sonnets in the correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement, Sonnet 20 may be a future favourite at civil unions. The opening line, to remind you, is A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion. And the end couplet is: But since she [Nature] prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure. The two TLS spatters are Sir Brian Vickers, wholly skeptical, and Stanley Wells – inclined to read Shakespeare’s own gay feelings into the poems. Vickers’s countering line is that one should assume the poet is the “poet’s persona”, no more Shakespeare than Hamlet is Shakespeare. Wells thinks the sonneteer is, indeed, Shakespeare himself in propria persona (this is, remember, the TLS, not saloon bar at the Dog and Duck). These distinguished scholars’ interest in sex and the sonnets is, one may suspect, wholly academic. They are well into that stage of life in which Shakespeare says (rather unkindly) the “heyday of blood is tame”. There is something rather touching about two greybeards, well into their Polonius years with a combined age of 155, speculating about what was bubbling up in the Bard’s twentysomething gonads and whether it spurts into the poems. Sonnets, one should note in passing, are hard to read – particularly as they move on to the “sestet”, or last six lines. They are also particularly hard to write in English. As George Orwell noted, the cross that English poets have to bear is too few rhyme words (how many for “love”? glove / dove / above – that’s it). There are infinitely more in Italian – the home of the sonnet. SONNET 116 Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.