London - Shakespeare was a woman-hater with homosexual tendencies, according to the new edition of the Arden Shakespeare. Four hundred years after writing the defining heterosexual work - Romeo and Juliet - the king of playwrights is being "outed" to students of literature in a new classroom text of his sonnets.
The new Arden Shakespeare tends towards the theory that England's greatest writer was gay. The editor of the new text, Dr Katherine Duncan-Jones, has based her conclusions on the fact that many of the Bard's sonnets appear to be addressed to a young male aristocrat, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Oxford academic's theory reverses the conventional thinking established in the 1970s by A.L. Rowse, who claimed Shakespeare was a "red-blooded heterosexual".