Further Thoughts on Shakespeare in Love

As a playwright whose works and words have become so immortalized, there have been oodles of depictions of Shakespeare in pop culture. Not just adaptations of or riffs on his plays, even though there are obviously piles of those too. No, I’m talking about biographical and/or highly fictionalized portrayals of the man himself. And when we’re looking at stories about someone like Shakespeare, the first thing I always look for is this: is he bi? I get that Shakespeare’s sexuality is the subject of plenty of debate, although, if we’re going off of his poetry, I’d say that the “debate” is due more to homophobia than a lack of compelling evidence. After all, no one who recites “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” to a woman is advocating that it epitomizes the beauty of “intense platonic friendship.” Come on now.

But, because queerness tends to be left out of history, because Shakespeare was a very famous historical figure who wasn’t famously LGBTQ (unlike, say, Oscar Wilde or Gertrude Stein,) and perhaps especially because Shakespeare wrote so beautifully about love, depictions of Shakespeare in movies and on TV tend to side-step his apparent attraction to men. As such, when I see stories about Shakespeare, I always look to see if this is addressed. Every once in a while, a portrayal touches on that side of him, like when he coyly flirts with the Doctor in a brief exchange in Doctor Who’s “The Shakespeare Code.” More often than not, though, it’s not so much as hinted at.

I was particularly interested in this going into Shakespeare in Love, obviously aware of the fact that it was a fictionalized love story involving Shakespeare, one with a clearly-heterosexual couple on the poster. And watching the film, I think it walked an intriguing line, because, while I don’t think the movie really depicts Shakespeare as bi, it not exactly depict him as not bi either.

I mean, yes, Viola is definitely a woman, and Will’s romantic and sexual relationship with her is very much of the opposite-sex variety. I’m not going to pretend the film offers anything it doesn’t. However, the (itself-very-Shakespearean) premise involves Viola posing as a man in order to pursue a life on the stage, and that gives the romance some nice blurring. Viola first kisses Will when she’s disguised as Thomas Kent, and there’s at least one backstage scene of them making out during a rehearsal while she’s in her male drag (they’re alone, but it’s worth mentioning that everyone else in the company still thinks Viola is a man at that point.)

It’s not just that these scenes happen, because comedy from various eras involve plenty of comically-romantic confusion and cross-dressing. We’ve all seen sitcoms/sketches/etc. in which a man unwittingly comes onto a man trying to pass himself off as a woman, and while not as common, we’ve also seen men nervously questioning their attraction to an evident “man” who (cue sigh of relief) turns out to be a woman in disguise. What happens in Shakespeare in Love doesn’t break any new ground there. What’s different, though, is Will’s reaction. When “Thomas” kisses him on the boat and then hurries away, Will is surprised but not horrified, defensive, or disgusted. Likewise, their backstage kisses are furtive but not overly so – they’re being private but Will gives no impression that he’ll be “ruined” or anything if he’s caught in a romantic situation with “Thomas.”

It’s this normalization that makes me think the film, while not openly portraying Will as bisexual, leaves room to suggest that he might be. Will falls in love with Viola at first sight (to be fair, she’s a superfan and he’s a rather prideful playwright, so there’s at least a little ego there,) but if he met “Thomas” first (auditioning with one of Will’s own passages, so again, ego,) it could have been “him” instead. I appreciate that, at least leaving the door open. These days, I would hope for more than that, but in 1998, it was more than a lot of movies were doing.

Also, this last bit is about gender, not sexuality, but I’m going to include it because I do like how the movie plays with notions of gender within the romance. The film includes plenty of Romeo & Juliet homages and allusions within Will and Viola’s love story, chief among them the “balcony scene” after Will crashes the ball at Viola’s home. But as Will and the company get deeper into writing/rehearsing the play, we see scenes of Will and Viola in bed together practicing her lines. And since Viola is “Thomas” to the rest of the company, she’s playing Romeo, not Juliet, so when Will rehearses with her, he reads Juliet’s lines. It’s perhaps reflective of the era, in which men/boys played all the women’s parts onstage, but I love that Will shows no reluctance to read the woman’s role while in bed with his lover.