CRITICISM

Adelman, Janet. “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies.” In Shakespeare's “Rough Magic,” edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, pp. 73-103. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985.

Focuses on The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, and compares the different ways Shakespeare explored and dealt with the notion that a relationship can be simultaneously homosexual and heterosexual.

Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Tradition and the Individual Sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire.” In Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Contexts, edited by Claude J. Summers, pp. 41-68. New York: Haworth Press, 1992.

Examines Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-20 and finds evidence that homoerotic desire could play a role in defining an individual in early modern England. The critic also suggests that in these poems gender and sexuality are intentionally ambiguous because they constitute a critique of whether desire can be expressed through language.

Dollimore, Jonathan. “Shakespeare Understudies: The Sodomite, the Prostitute, the Transvestite and Their Critics.” In Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, pp. 129-52. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Offers an overview of the commentary by late twentieth-century cultural materialist critics on the issue of homosexual desire in early modern England, with particular reference to the plays of Shakespeare.

Garner, Shirley Nelson. “A Midsummer Night's Dream: ‘Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill.’” Women's Studies 9, No. 1 (1981): 47-63.

Contends that the restoration of harmony at the close of A Midsummer Night's Dream is contingent on both the dissolution of bonds between women and the successful suppression of homoerotic desires. Garner focuses on Titania's love for the Indian queen, Oberon's attraction to the changeling boy, Theseus's homoerotic fantasies, and the relationship between Hermia and Helena.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Desiring Hal.” In Sodometries, pp. 145-75. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Maintains that in the second tetralogy, regulating male/male relations is an integral part of the process of turning Hal into a paragon of kings. Goldberg argues that because such relations cannot be marked by any signs of effeminacy, the achievement of “proper” masculinity necessarily results in misogyny and incipient homophobia.

———. “Romeo and Juliet's Open Rs.” In Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, pp. 218-35. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Challenges orthodox views of Romeo and Juliet. Goldberg contends that, particularly through a series of substitutions of one love object for another and the instances of same-sex attraction, the play destabilizes the heterosexual order and shows that desire is not necessarily linked either to gender or to individual personality.

Johnson, Nora. “Ganymedes and Kings: Staging Male Homosexual Desire in The Winter's Tale.” Shakespeare Studies XXVI (1998): 187-217.

Asserts that The Winter's Taleis profoundly concerned with the connection between the stigmatization of sodomy and early modern attacks on theatrical practices.

Pequigney, Joseph. “The Expressions of Homoeroticism.” In Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 42-80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Highlights the erotic allusions of Shakespeare's sonnets—especially Sonnet 52, 75, and 87—to support the argument that the relationship between the poet and the fair friend is sexual in both orientation and experience. Pequigney also takes issue with twentieth-century commentators who read Sonnets 1-126 as expressions of asexual male friendship or disinterested love.

———. “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice.” English Literary Renaissance 22, No. 2 (Spring 1992): 201-21

Characterizes the relationship between Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night as homoerotic and the love between Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Veniceas non-libidinal. Pequigney also argues that bisexuality is an integral motif in Twelfth Night and that the ring episode in the final scene of The Merchant of Veniceunderscores that play's concern with the Christian principle of unsparing generosity.

Rackin, Phyllis. “Historical Difference/Sexual Difference.” In Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, edited by Jean R. Brink, pp. 37-63. Kirksville, Mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993.

Points out some important distinctions between sixteenth- and late twentieth-century ideological notions of gender and sexuality. In the course of her discussion, Rackin remarks that Shakespeare's plays consistently associate a man's desire for a woman with effeminacy and repeatedly represent extreme virility—as evinced in strict self-denial and military courage—as wholly compatible with erotic desire for other men.

Reschke, Mark. “Historicizing Homophobia: Hamlet and the Anti-theatrical Tracts.” Hamlet Studies 19, Nos. 1/2 (Summer/Winter 1997): 47-63.

Evaluates Hamlet's misogyny, his obsession with role-playing, and his avoidance of intimacy with other men. Reschke relates these attributes to the charges leveled by Elizabethan anti-theatrical writers, who, he maintains, in their tirades against effeminacy and sodomy, provided the origins of the modern cultural phenomenon known as homophobia.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire, pp. 28-48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Discusses the sonnets' delineation of same-sex love vis-à-vis institutionalized social relations that can only be sustained by women's adherence to patriarchal conventions.

Shepherd, Simon. “Shakespeare's Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality.” In The Shakespeare Myth, edited by Graham Holderness, pp. 96-109. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

Argues that throughout the twentieth century, politics and ideology have permeated both academic debate about Shakespeare's sonnets and theatrical interpretations of his plays. For popular commentators and scholars alike, Shepherd contends, the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare is dangerous because it threatens the “respectability” of England's preeminent literary icon.

Sinfield, Alan. “Shakespeare and Dissident Reading.” In Cultural Politics: Queer Reading, pp. 1-20. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Provides a concise review of the current debate about same-sex love in early modern England. Sinfield concludes that a common theme among commentators on this issue is that Shakespeare's contemporaries drew different sexual distinctions than we do and, in particular, that they did not link male same-sex relations specifically with effeminacy.

———. “How to Read The Merchant of Venice without Being Heterosexist.” In Alternative Shakespeares, edited by Terence Hawkes, pp. 122-39. London: Routledge, 1996.

Finds that although Antonio is clearly in love with Bassanio, the play does not provide clear evidence that this love is sexual. Sinfield suggests this ambiguity may indicate that the notion of same-sex love was neither remarkable nor threatening in early modern England, yet he also notes that if Antonio is relegated to a position on the fringes of Belmont's society at the close of the play, the text supports the marginalization of men who love men.

Smith, Bruce R. “Combatants and Comrades.” In Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics, pp. 31-77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Remarks on several of Shakespeare's plays about soldiering and courtship—including Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, and Love's Labor's Lost—and suggests that in these dramas homosexuality is only an implicit subject. Yet even in these works, Smith contends, the universal impulses in male bonding toward both violence and sexual desire frequently coincide, and often find expression in homoerotic language. Additionally, Smith provides an extended review of the legal, moral, and religious discourse on male friendship and love from classical antiquity through the early modern period.

———. “I, You, He, She, and We: On the Sexual Politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets.” In Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, pp. 411-29. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.

Assesses the complex transactions that take place between the speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets and the readers of these poems. While reading these poems, he asserts, we must recognize that early modern constructions of gender and sexual desire were much more fluid than the twentieth-century's rigid distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality.

Traub, Valerie. “Recent Studies in Homoeroticism.” English Literary Renaissance 30, No. 2 (Spring 2000): 284-329.

A bibliographical essay that puts into context the 1990s commentary on homoeroticism in literary works, and surveys recent critical developments in Shakespearean criticism regarding this topic.

Van Watson, William. “Shakespeare, Zeffirelli, and the Homosexual Gaze.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20, No. 4 (1992): 308-25.

Focuses on Zeffirelli's film adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Though Watson regards both Shakespeare and Zeffirelli as social and political conservatives, he claims that their work sometimes exhibits a homosexual sensibility. The critic is principally concerned here with how Zeffirelli's selection of camera angles and focus, depth of shots, and lighting underscore what Watson sees as homoerotic undercurrents in the texts of the plays.