What ways did Shakespeare show his true feelings?

Answer 1

Shakespeare may have shown his true feelings in private conversations with his wife, his children and his friends. Since nobody ever wrote down those conversations, we can never know. Some people think that Shakespeare was showing his feelings in his sonnets, although we cannot be sure of that, and do not know to whom the sonnets were addressed. Some also believe that Shakespeare occasionally put his own words into the mouths of characters in his plays (especially the "advice to the players" in Hamlet and the "we are such stuff as dreams are made on" speech from the Tempest.) but this is very shaky ground indeed, since it makes more sense to believe that those words were intended to tell us about the character rather than the author. Besides we choose such passages based on wishful thinking--nobody suggests that Iago or Richard III or Aaron the Moor show Shakespeare's true feelings because we don't want to believe that Shakespeare thought that way.