Since I’ve got a book out called ‘155 Sonnets,’ it’s pretty clear I’ m interested in Shakespeare. Sure, there are lots of scholars out there who know more about his life than I do, but I’m interested enough that I would be remiss if I didn’t dedicate this blog to his birthday.
First of all, we don’t actually know if it is his birthday. The first sonnet in my book is called “April 14th”, and it’s a birthday poem for Shakespeare, so obviously at the time I wrote it (sometime in the early 90s) I thought that was the date. What we know is that he was baptized on the 26th, so the 23rd is a fair guess and it makes a nice story, dying on his birthday, a bookended life, so that’s the day people seem to have decided on. Basically, his birthday is April 23rd at the latest.
Why does this matter? It doesn’t, much. If he was born on the 23rd, he was a Taurus, if he was born a day or two earlier, he was an Aries, but that’s not really relevant. We have his work, and if we can’t figure out his personality from that, knowing his birth sign isn’t going to help.
Actually, there is a lot we don’t know about Shakespeare.
I celebrated the day by going to a seminar given by my friend, Alex Went, who has studied the man in far greater depth than I have, and it was pretty interesting. He talked a bit about some different theories – was Shakespeare gay, was he a secret Catholic, did he ever visit Prague? – showed some slides, and then we had cake.
We don’t even know if this is really what he looked like
I’m pretty convinced, based on Sonnet #20, that he had sex with at least one man:
A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion
a woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
with shifting change, as is false woman’s fashion
In other words, I like having sex with you because you look like a girl but don’t go all crazy and shit the way they do.
He may have been a secret Catholic. My understanding of Elizabethan history is that she had sort of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to that. He certainly wasn’t an overt Catholic, since that was a good way to get your head chopped off, but he clearly wasn’t a fanatic Protestant, either. (His wife was, but he didn’t like her much. Their relationship stands as historical proof that the phrase “Behind every great man is a great woman” is nonsense.) I suspect he wasn’t any more religious than he had to be. It certainly isn’t a major theme of his work.
As to whether he ever visited Prague, that’s something the literati living here like to talk about, but there’s no real evidence for it, or in fact that he ever left England at all.
In any event, he would be 450 years old today. Or maybe at some point in the last couple of weeks. Happy Birthday.
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