Entering the scrum that passes for Shakespearean Lit Crit comes Sir Ian McKellen, leading thesp, with his claim that the Bard is as gay as Judy Garland’s fan club. His sexuality has long been a fruity debating point, as old as the quest for the identity of the Dark Lady.

Academics, who like to frighten horses, claim that occasional phrases reveal his inverted nature: Sonnet 126, for instance, begins “O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power . . .” A whole school of academia has built up around the meaning of “will” in Sonnet 135 — “Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,/ Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine.” And how about that “wilt”, eh?

Why stop there? Surely, if we were to peer harder, the whole of his work (“I would not be a queen/For all the world” Henry VIII) could be deconstructed for signs of pinkery: the playwright who sent one of Britain’s finest armies “once more unto the breach, dear friends”, who named a character Bottom, and for whom “lend me your ears” could easily have been just a missed stroke. All’s Well That Bends Well? Whichever Way You Like It?

Shakespeare sits with Field Marshal Montgomery, Handel, Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, J. Enoch Powell and Abraham Lincoln, all infinitely fascinating figures from the past claimed as friends of Dorothy by on-the-make authors, bored academics and wishful-thinking gay campaigners.

Hoover, the former FBI hard nut, we learnt in one work of insignificance, on less formal occasions wore a black dress with flounces, lace stockings and liked to be called “Mary”; Michael Collins, the IRA hero, it has been claimed, shared a bed with other men while on the run. (A more sober historian unsuccessfully reassured Nationalists that “their hands under the blankets were firmly on their revolvers”.) Abe was too close to his log-cabin friend Joshua Speed. Even Dracula has been labelled gay. Bram Stoker supposedly had a homosexual crush on the impresario Henry Irving and based the Count on him.

It’s all flapdoodle. It’s the sort of game anyone can play because no one can plausibly deny or confirm psychobabbling claims about secrets of the heart; everyone is safely dead and buried. It’s all predicated on the erroneous modern belief that sex — rather than money, faith or power — is the great motivator. That, and the bizarre belief that homosexuality somehow confers an explanation of behaviour, beyond merely what happens in the bedroom. Do we really believe that Alexander the Great’s homosexuality caused him to sweep across Asia Minor in search of exotic knick-knacks? Or that Hitler sent gays to the death camps in the biggest and most deadly attempt to appear, as the lonely hearts ads put it, “straight-acting”?

How could Sir Ian, some 400 years later, have an inkling of Shakespeare’s sexuality, when Ron Davies, the moment-of-madness Welsh Secretary, has difficulty in knowing himself whether he is, to coin a euphemism, a badger-fancier or not; a confusion worthy of the sea of self-doubt that was Hamlet. “To be or not to be: That is the question/ Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And by opposing end them.” End them? Ooh, missus.

The author has no problems with his sexuality.