We really have no idea about his political opinions or whether any voice in which the player speaks is his own. I know no reason to doubt the null hypothesis at WS had conventional political opinions. He was a well known figure, and if people speculated about Marlowe's alleged atheism and homosexuality, it is unlikely that unconventional views WS held would have escaped comment. If he was anti-Royalist he kept it a dark secret. He had to if he wanted to keep his head and his job. The penalties for anti-Royalism were spectacularly gruesome and the Elizabethan-Jacobean secret police were alarmingly efficient for their time.
The plays have a lot of stuff about the glories on monarchy in general and the Tudors & Stuarts in particular. His picture of the plebeians, e.g., in Henry VI.2 or Julius Caesar is hardly flattering. Even when he's being relatively flattering, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, he makes fun of the common folk. I don't know why we should discount the evidence of the plays and favor the some reading of the sonnets as expressing his real views. It's also doubtful that the sonnets, with their aristo audience, were a particularly good vehicle for expressing anti-Royalist opinions.
We also don't know whether he was gay or bi or whatever, although there is a lot of homoeroticism in his poetry. We don't even know, and scholars disagree, about, whether he loved his wife or really cherished or indeed practiced fidelity. My own view is that he was bi, played around, and didn't much care for his wife, but that's a guess based on very little.
We do do know that he actively sought social status and worked hard to get a coat of arms, hob-nobbed and maybe more with aristos whom he flattered shamelessly, and was a substantial property owner by the time he died. Not the stuff of which radicalism is made.
--- Dennis Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Wed, April 25, 2007 6:31 am, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >
>
http://www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/VanishingShakespeare.pdf
> >
> > I haven't looked at it so I have no idea how many
> orders of magnitude
> > separate it from reality.
>
> Several orders. Of course, the report is garbage.
> Sure, Shakespeare is
> great; so are Bert Brecht, Toni Morrison, Elfriede
> Jelinek, and Iraqi
> novelist Alia Mamdouh ("Napthalene", 1986).
>
> But the delicious irony lost on the neocon
> knuckleheads is that
> Shakespeare was, as close readers of the sonnets
> have shown, fabulously
> gay, occasionally anti-royalist and pro-plebian, and
> generally smitten
> with the young black men working in Britain's ports
> as sailors.
>
> -- DRR
>
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>
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