A theatre expert has claimed that William Shakespeare was bisexual, and subject to a historical “fake news” conspiracy to recast him as straight.
Nicholas de Jongh, a former theatre critic, claims Shakespeare was in love with an English earl, and devoted his famous sequence of love sonnets to him.
His affair with Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, was then allegedly written out of history by literary homophobes horrified by the idea of the Bard being in love with a man.
In an interview with London newspaper The Islington Tribune, de Jongh outlined his ideas about Shakespeare’s sexual proclivities, which form the basis of a new play written by him.
De Jongh, a former writer for the Guardian and London Evening Standard, stopped short of describing Shakespeare as gay (he was married with three children), but said he was “sexually fluid”:
…the situation exists that there has been a 400-year-long cover up. Fake news about his sexuality still exists
No academic or biographer has written that his one great love affair was with an aristocrat. It was clearly a significant period of his life.
He added that efforts to scrub gay undertones from the poems stretched to 17th Century editors of Shakespeare removing “he” from lines and replacing it with “she”.
Later students of the Bard – including famed poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – were “disgusted” by the idea so cast it out of their minds, de Jongh also claimed.
His play, Pricked Out, opens at the King’s Head Theatre in London on March 25.
