William Shakespeare may have had an illegitimate son for whom the legendary bard penned a sonnet, a new book has claimed.
William Shakespeare may have had an illegitimate son for whom the legendary bard penned a sonnet, a new book has claimed.
Sonnet 126, addressed to “my lovely boy”, was written for the infant William Davenant, who grew up to be poet laureate. A comparison of both men’s portraits shows they suffered from the same facial deformity around the eye.
The case is made in Shakespeare’s Bastard, a rare biography of Davenant, a theatrical impresario and Royalist general in the Civil War, that will be published to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, the Times reported. The author, Simon Andrew Stirling, says contemporary rumours that Shakes-peare was Davenant’s father were suppressed by academics who wanted to portray the playwright as a paragon of virtue. Shake-speare was the child’s godfather. Hamnet, Shakespe-are’s only son with his wife Anne Hathaway, had died some years earlier when only 11. The couple had two daughters who lived to marry. The mother of his illegitimate boy was Jane Davenant, a tavern mistress whose husband John, a “grave melancholy man”, worked in the wine trade. Records suggest that the Davenants’ first seven children died young in London. The couple then moved to Tattleton’s House, near Lincoln College, Oxford, where they raised another seven children. Sonnet 126 has often been suggested to be a homoerotic love poem. The mistaken gay theme may be explained because the poem comes at the end of a sequence known as the Fair Youth sonnets which are understood by scholars to refer to a homosexual passion between Shakesp-eare and the Earl of Southampton. Stirling notes that the pair appe-ared to have gone their separate ways in 1594.
