Did Will Limp?

In 1921, Frank Harris argued that Shakespeare’s art reveals the man: “As it is the object of a general to win battles, so it is the life-work of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his own genius.”

Rene Weis agrees. He thinks that he can find out a lot about Shakespeare’s personal life because Shakespeare revealed himself in his sonnets and plays. He finds that Shakespeare had a limp. After all, he refers to limping in the sonnets (“Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,” Sonnet 89 – which, as the TLS reviewer points out, suggests that Shakespeare was not lame). And Weis thinks he cast himself in roles – Richard III, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Edgar in Lear – that required a limp. And Iago, who is not said to limp but who, Othello suspects, has cloven hoofs where his feet should be.

By Weis’s rendering, Shakespeare was as much a moral as a physical cripple. In the TLS reviewer’s summary: “the dramatist, having conducted passionate love affairs with the Earl of Southampton and Emilia Lanier, then indicated the end of that episode in The Merchant of Venice by making Antonio hand Bassanio over to Portia. If this was a private working-out of a personal problem, what followed was anything but private: Shakespeare went on, in Troilus and Cressida, to satirize the relationship of Essex and Southampton in his unsympathetic description of the homosexual Achilles and Patroclus – this, according to Weis’s chronology, at a time when Essex had just been executed and Southampton was under sentence of death in the Tower. He wrote the play, Weis argues, by order of someone in the Government, as part of a policy of discrediting Essex. As if this betrayal were not enough, Shakespeare went on to publish the play in 1608, and then apparently thought he could make it up with his former friend by publishing the still more incriminating Sonnets. He did it for the money, Weis explains. Times were bad.”

Lois Potter, the reviewer, doesn’t buy it. But she notes that if it happened, it would not be surprising that someone might have “commented on his cloven hoof.”