Shakespeare's Patron and Possible Lover

The Guardian has a new story about the discovery of a new portrait of the third Earl of Southampton - Shakespeare's patron and the "fair youth" addressed in his sonnets. The story goes on to discuss the debate between historians as to whether or not Shakespeare (at left) was gay and whether or not the Earl of Southampton was more than merely a wealthy patron to Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, a new exhibition of Elizabethan clothing and cross-dressing in Shakespeare opens at Shakespeare's Globe, London, in May. I can just imagine the angst among the Wildmon clan at the American Family Association which will have to boycott all plays by Shakespeare should it turn out the bard was gay. :) A copy of the newly identified painting can be found here. Here are some story highlights:

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"My God," I thought, "could this be the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron and, perhaps, his lover?"' The features, as Cobbe points out, 'tally strikingly with those of the famous de Critz portrait of Southampton, dating from 10 years or so later'. The equally celebrated Hilliard miniature, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, also bears a telling resemblance to the Cobbe portrait.

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Experts who have studied the facts now agree that the portrait is undoubtedly the earliest known image of the third Earl of Southampton - Shakespeare's patron, the 'fair youth' addressed in his sonnets - somewhere between the age of 17 and 20 and painted at exactly the time those first few sonnets were written.

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In the portrait by an unknown artist, dating from the early 1590s, the teenage Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, is wearing lipstick, rouge and an elaborate double earring. His long hair hangs down in very feminine tresses and his hand lies on his heart in a somewhat camp gesture. Unlike all the other extant portraits of Southampton, who later chose to be depicted as a rather more macho courtier and soldier, this is much more the face of the androgynous creature the poet ambiguously called the 'master-mistress of my passion' in the twentieth of the 154-sonnet cycle.

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The Shakespeare scholar, Sir Frank Kermode, former professor of English at Cambridge, who has been to Hatchlands to see for himself, says: 'The portrait already has considerable intrinsic historical interest, and if you believe that the young man addressed in the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley there is the additional thrill that this could be the face that Shakespeare fell in love with, perhaps wishing its owner was a girl. The magnitude of the thrill depends on how much you think the identity of the young person matters to the poems. Many think it matters a lot.'

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[T]he opening poems in the cycle express ambiguous sexual longings for an effeminate youth, traditionally identified as Southampton, Shakespeare's patron at the time, and his host in London and Hampshire when the plague closed the London theatres. W.H. Auden, for instance, argued that the sonnets unequivocally showed that his 'Top Bard' was (like himself) gay. Others have gone further, and suggested that Shakespeare, the father of three children by his wife Anne Hathaway, must have had a gay affair with Southampton.

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Whatever the truth about Shakespeare's sexuality, which seems likely, as was the case then as now in the theatre, to have been flexible, the dramatic discovery of the Cobbe portrait of the young, effeminate Southampton is bound to relaunch a tidal wave of debate. Given the strong feelings these arguments arouse in the field of Shakespeare studies, which has recently seen a voguish penchant for investigations into Elizabethan cross-dressing, . . .