Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/366

 Beyond doubt Shakespeare was, for at least a part of his life, dionysian-uranian; alternating between passion for a beautiful young man, and amorous sentiment for a woman. No other commonsense conclusion is possible, in view of the Sonnets. Who was that youth whom the poet styles their "onlie begetter"? The mysterious "Mr.W. H—" maybe long disputed, and is probably unlikely ever to be known—whether he was the Earl of Southampton, or some other ephebus. But that Shakespeare loved the lad with a perfectly pagan, sexual passion, is not to be questioned. Those other sonnets that have a feminine motif (the word "onlie" in the dedication of the Sonnets is significant) often read like foils to those of the male love. It is as silly to try to reduce the sexualism of the Shakespearean personality in the Sonnets to mere romantic idealism and fantasy, as it would be to try to construe Hafiz and Sadi into spiritual lyrists and elegant allegorists. Men do not write, as did Shakespeare write, of their consuming love for a young man, of adoration of his fair body, of consequent jealousies, hopes, doubts, despairs, slavery, in such verses as those of the Sonnets from, we will say, the first to the twentieth or the twenty-fourth, (with the rhapsodic "What is your substance, whereof are you made?") unless such poets are, or would be, pederasts. It is either hypocrisy or idiocy on the part of a commentator on Shakespeare to misconstrue such addresses as "A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted," or "Lord of my love, to whom in vassallage," or "Against my love shall be as I am now", or "What's in the brain that ink may character," or "O thou my lovely boy", or "That thou hast her, it is not all my grief"—the last-mentioned among the dionysian-uranian group. We know little of the personal Shakespeare. We know little of his life. But we know enough of the poet's matrimonial infelicity, and of his charm of personality for his own sex to support the evidential theory of his uranianism; even had he not made