SOURCE: “William Shakespeare,” in A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 93-107.

[In the essay below, Woods discusses homoerotic and homosexual interpretations of several Shakespearean plays, particularly Troilus and Cressida. He also offers a synopsis of the critical debate about whether Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man delineate homosexual desires, and contends that the sonnets are profoundly concerned with the distinction between male friendship and male sexual love.]

What we read in Shakespeare is never pure text, any more than the staging of one of his plays can ever be innocent of the hermeneutics of production. As so many recent critics have pointed out, William Shakespeare is far from being just an author with a body of texts to his name. He is a major cultural institution. In ways which are not true of Christopher Marlowe, he is expected to serve the purposes of countless vested interests. His plays come with introductions and footnotes, and are pestered by whole libraries of commentary. In Britain especially, people's enjoyment of the plays is often restricted by the prospect or memory of exams. Rather than add much to this peripheral noise by performing my own readings here, therefore, I have chosen to concentrate on following some strands of other commentators' thoughts about how the issue of homosexuality relates—or, as some critics will apoplectically insist, how it does not relate—to that monolith of high cultural self-confidence, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The point is to signal the sense of controversy that pervades most straight-identified critical material when addressing these topics, especially in relation to the sonnets, and the ways in which gay critics have therefore had to address such topics as though they were controversial indeed.

The sonnets are the centre of controversy, but we begin with the plays. It is not difficult to see which characters or which incidents in a play might be most likely to recommend themselves to a producer or actor as being available for plausible interpretation as relating to bi- or homosexuality. Every case I mention here will be more plausible in production than any of the anachronistic settings—Macbeth in the wild West, Romeo and Juliet in the American Civil War, The Merchant of Venice in Berlin, Henry V on the sands of Iwo Jima—one can see on some stage somewhere during virtually any month of a given year. And yet they are not treated as such by academic critics. (Audiences are always another matter.)

In Romeo and Juliet (which dates from the mid-1590s) the relationship between Romeo and Mercutio could be played as an erotic relation between post-adolescents who know that the future direction of their adulthood will involve marriage and the concurrent, perhaps consequent, weakening of such male-male bonds. As Paul Hammond has said of the two youths' easy badinage, ‘Homosocial play includes homo-erotic play.’¹ To some readers, Henry IV Parts One (printed in 1598) and Two (printed in 1600) conjure up the spectre of a Hal, corrupted by low-life companions, ascending the throne as Henry V. It would not be merely fanciful to stage a production in which one source of this corruption would be an excessive sexual familiarity between the prince and his unsuitable friends: for, as Jonathan Goldberg has argued, ‘the plays forever transgress even as they seem to be producing the boundaries between illegitimate and legitimate male/male relations’. When it comes to Henry V (probably written in 1599, printed in 1600), Goldberg points out that Hal has a bedfellow (see II. ii, 8), but that we do not know who he is. (Falstaff himself, perhaps?) What matters here is not so much the sex of the bedfellow as his class: ‘For if, on the one hand it would be unremarkable for men to be sleeping with each other, it would be unspeakable if the wrong men were, if the sex between men was not conducive to maintaining social hierarchies and distinctions.’²

If there are characters in Shakespeare who could, without undue distortion, convince us as being predominantly ‘homosexual’, one of the first to come to mind would be Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (printed in 1600).³ Indeed, there might be good reason for raising the issue of Antonio's sexuality in a coherent production of a play that does, after all, take social prejudice as one of its central themes. A twentieth-century audience is likely to want to connect the various sources of oppression in the play, and to contextualise them within what we know of our own recent history. As Alan Sinfield very reasonably puts it, ‘Of course The Merchant of Venice doesn't anticipate the Holocaust, or, indeed, Nazi persecution of homosexuals, but we may find it hard to approach the text without such an issue coming to mind.’⁴ Who is to say that this is an illegitimate way of experiencing the relevance of drama in performance?

In Seymour Kleinberg's 1983 reading, The Merchant of Venice is not only about anti-Semitism, but also ‘about homosexual eroticism in conflict with heterosexual marriage, about the rivalry of romantic male friendship with the claims of conventional marriage’. Pairing Shylock and Antonio as ‘psychological counterparts’, Kleinberg writes of the latter:

Antonio is a virulently anti-Semitic homosexual and is melancholic to the point of despair because his lover, Bassanio, wishes to marry an immensely rich aristocratic beauty, to leave the diversions of the Rialto to return to his own class and to sexual conventionality. Antonio is also in despair because he despises himself for his homosexuality, which is romantic, obsessive, and exclusive, and fills him with sexual shame.⁵

Textually, there may be problems with certain details of this view, but one can see how it might easily be incorporated into the understanding of a staging of the play without violence having to be done to the script. Kleinberg continues:

What Antonio hates in Shylock is not Jewishness, which, like all Venetians[,] he merely holds in contempt. He hates himself in Shylock: the homosexual self that Antonio has come to identify symbolically as the Jew. It is the earliest portrait of the homophobic homosexual.⁶

This is, without doubt, a strongly post-Nazi (and post-Proustian) reading—as all of today's readings must be, unless they are merely complacent, or even ignorant. Kleinberg says that ‘The happy ending of the play is the triumph of heterosexual marriage and the promise of generation over the romantic but sterile infatuation of homoeroticism.’⁷

As such, this ending might be no less uncomfortable to a gay spectator than (say) the ending of The Taming of the Shrew to a conventional feminist. So many of Shakespeare's so-called ‘resolutions’ seem to flatten out the emotional complexities of what has preceded them with this kind of imposition of apparently incongruous, but undoubtedly tidy, institutional endings. (The institutions in question, to the values of which each play is shown to return, are usually those of matrimony and the divine right of kings.) John Clum has commented on the place of the homosexual character in such resolutions, as follows:

In Shakespeare, bisexuality, hinted at, seems to be happily, if cautiously, absorbed by society, but the characters who feel exclusively homosexual desire (the Antonios of Twelfth Night and, perhaps, The Merchant of Venice) suffer the typical stage homosexual's fate of isolation when the traditional finale of coupling is enacted. Yet Shakespeare's comedies can hover at the brink of polymorphous perversity.

This depends on the production. Clum goes on to mention John Caird's 1989 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which the administering of the love potion almost resulted in Demetrius' falling in love with Lysander. Only Puck's officious intervention could literally turn Demetrius to face Helena at the appropriate moment. Clum comments:

Homosexual desire is barely averted. The moment got one of the production's biggest laughs, but it also reminded one of the possibility of homosexual desire lurking very near the surface in many of Shakespeare's comedies.⁸

It is difficult not to think of the Dream, in particular, as having as one of its central themes the sheer contingency of sexual object-choice.

The most prominent male ‘couple’ in Shakespeare, enjoying a lasting sexual relationship and resisting all pressure to part them, are, I suppose, Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida (probably written in 1602 but not printed until 1609). Gregory Bredbeck reports the craven evasiveness of Kenneth Palmer's annotations to the 1982 Arden edition of the play. Famously, Thersites calls Patroclus ‘Achilles' brach’, ‘Achilles' male varlet’ and his ‘Masculine whore’. Commenting on the fact that the word ‘brach’ had a specific sexual meaning, Palmer writes that ‘it seems unlikely that Thersites meant (or was taken to mean) that Patroclus was a catamite’. And on ‘male varlet’, the meaning of which he can neither deny nor hide, Palmer says that, even if Thersites is accusing Patroclus of having sex with Achilles, ‘there is no certainty’ that his ‘imputation’ is ‘correct’. As Bredbeck correctly comments, these annotations are made to erase precisely what is the crux of Thersites' scurrilous remarks, ‘the political discourse of Renaissance sodomy’.⁹

Not only do Achilles and Patroclus absent themselves from war; but what particularly hurts the Greek old guard is the manner of their abstention. Withdrawn into the privacy of Achilles' tent, they are nevertheless regarded as ostentatious in their attention to the sufficiency of their own relationship. The nature of their offence, or its ostensible nature at least, is outlined at some length by Ulysses:

The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns
The sinew and the forehand of our host,
Having his ear full of his airy fame,
Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent
Lies mocking our designs. With him, Patroclus,
Upon a lazy bed, the livelong day
Breaks scurril jests,
And with ridiculous and awkward action,
Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,
He pageants us

—‘us’ being, on this occasion, Agamemnon, Nestor, Menelaus and Ulysses himself, though Ulysses only specifies imitations of Agamemnon and Nestor (I. iii, 142-51). It appears that, in the opinion of Ulysses at least, Achilles has been disarmed by flattery: his fame as a hero has given him an inflated sense of his own worth, and this has had the effect not of spurring him on to further and greater deeds of heroism, but of allowing him to rest on his laurels. It is as though he had been effeminised overnight, his valour reduced by excessive praise to daintiness. He spends all day reclining on a bed with Patroclus, making not love but mischief. In its imitative theatricals, their idleness is creative but unproductive, a perversion of the way in which young warriors should respect and be influenced by their elders. By mimicking the older men ‘with ridiculous and awkward action’, Achilles becomes in their eyes as ‘ridiculous and awkward’ as he thinks them. After all, they may be old, but they are not sacrificing national pride to a childish pageant.

Ulysses gives examples of the two lovers' performances, in which Achilles plays spectator to Patroclus' performer; but in narrating these offences in such detail, offering plausible direct quotations from Achilles and a precise record of the tone of Patroclus' voice, Ulysses himself turns into a performer. The sheer extent of his indignation—this is a long speech—takes his mind as much off the war as he is claiming Achilles' has lately been. Indeed, there is not a little evidence that he actually relishes his account of the mocking of Agamemnon and Nestor. He sums up as follows:

                                                  And in this fashion,
All our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes,
Severals and generals of grace exact,
Achievements, plots, orders, preventions,
Excitements to the field or speech for truce,
Success or loss, what is or is not, serves
As stuff for these two to make paradoxes.

(lines 178-84)

This is not elegant—Shakespeare's Ulysses is very much the military man—but his list builds up to a splenetic ending in the dismissive, coupled anonymity of ‘these two’ and the horror of the paradox. We may be reminded of how scandalised by Oscar Wilde's use of ‘brilliant paradoxes and corrosive epigrams’ the leader-writer of London's Daily Telegraph claimed to be (6 April and 27 May 1895); but what resonances does the concept of paradox have when spoken by an exasperated Greek hero in front of an audience in early seventeenth-century England?

The 1957 Cambridge edition of the play glosses ‘to make paradoxes’, merely, as signifying to ‘turn into absurdities’, which is, indeed, part of the story. By making fun of their ageing seniors, Achilles and Patroclus are turning epic into farce, at the same time as their confining themselves to a comfortable tent is turning epic warfare into chamber theatre. Seeing absurdity in heroes past their best, they are making absurdities of them. Worse still, the habit is catching: for, as Nestor now reports:

                    in the imitation of these twain,
Who, as Ulysses says, opinion crowns
With an imperial voice, many are infect.

(185-7)

By imitating the lovers' imitations, others in the Greek army (Ajax and Thersites are named) are infected with their insubordination. The older heroes' authority is being threatened by an epidemic of satirical theatricality. There are connotations, here, of both contemporary Puritan objections to theatre itself and, of course, distrust of male love. Achilles and Patroclus are, at the very least, seeing too much of each other, homoerotically forsaking their homosocial obligations. So serious is this transgression that it could lose the Greeks the war. There is far more to paradox than mere absurdity of speech: it threatens to overturn the ‘natural’ order of the body politic (see chapter 32).¹⁰

Other plays have recently kept returning to the stage in partially ‘homosexual’ interpretations. One of these is Othello (performed at court in 1604 but not printed until 1622). Ever since Tyrone Guthrie's 1937 production at the Old Vic, with Ralph Richardson as Othello and Laurence Olivier as Iago, it has been blandly acceptable to suggest that Iago's hatred and envy of Othello arises from an unacknowledged and unreturned erotic attraction. The other main reading, also now common, is possibly best represented by one of its earliest adherents, Leslie Fiedler, who argues that, in what he regards as Iago's ambivalent feelings for Cassio, ‘there are equivocal hints of a repressed passion between males turned destructive, rather like the relationship more frankly treated by Herman Melville in Billy Budd’. Fiedler speaks of the ‘glimmerings of homosexuality’ in Iago's account of Cassio's dream.¹¹ This is the key moment, because the most explicitly if misdirectedly erotic, in any homosexual reading of the play, whether critical or in production. In Iago's words to Othello:

                                                  I lay with Cassio lately,
And being troubled with a raging tooth
I could not sleep.
There are a kind of men so loose of soul
That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs:
One of this kind is Cassio.
In sleep I heard him say: ‘Sweet Desdemona,
Let us be wary, let us hide our loves’;
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he plucked up kisses by the roots,
That grew upon my lips; then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sighed and kissed, and then
Cried ‘Cursèd fate that gave thee to the Moor!’

(III. iii, 410-23)

Sleeping together means little: beds were routinely shared, even by strangers, in Shakespeare's time. What is revealing, if the story is true, and even more revealing, whether or not it is true, insofar as Iago does not appear to notice that it reveals anything about himself, is Iago's submission to being made love to as Desdemona's surrogate. He does not push Cassio away, or shake him as one might a disturbing snorer; but silently submits, firstly to caresses, then to insistent kisses on the mouth (indeed, the image of uprooting them suggests these kisses are invasive: these men are kissing with tongues), and finally to the scandalous indignity of lying underneath another man.

There are productions which act out this incident at some point during the sleepy drunkenness of Act II, scene iii, thereby removing any doubt about the veracity of Iago's report. This seems regrettable, particularly since Iago's paradoxical and duplicitous nature (‘I am not what I am,’ he says at one point) is made manifest by his skills at ambiguous double-dealing, and doubt would seem to be one of the most useful intellectual and emotional conditions for a production to instil in its audience if they are productively to respond to Iago as his machinations take their toll. The problem is, though, that to make him a repressed, perhaps self-hating, homosexual is to attempt to explain away his bad behaviour pseudo-psychoanalytically, basing the explanation on the rather feeble notion that homosexuality itself is reason enough for a man to seek to destroy a heterosexual relationship. I am not objecting as much to the facile version of homosexuality that this represents—though it clearly is objectionable—as to the trivialisation of Shakespeare's complex portrayal of Iago. There is no doubt that a crass, simplistic production can destroy the play; and presenting Iago in this manner, with homosexuality itself as a bogus villain, would probably amount to such a production. No wonder Jonathan Dollimore has been so vehement in pressing his argument that, as one of the chapter subheadings in his book Sexual Dissidence puts it, we should ‘Forget Iago's “Homosexuality”’.¹² Elsewhere, Dollimore has distinguished between the cliché of twentieth-century productions and a more plausibly sixteenth-century perspective, seen from which ‘Iago embodies not “sublimated” homosexuality but militant maleness and a virulent contempt for women’.¹³ Even this, though, may not set him apart from the masculinist institutions he serves to an extent that could begin to provide motivation for his extraordinary malice.

The more militaristic the context of the individual play, the more Shakespeare demonstrates his interest in passionate relations between men. As we have already seen, however, it was not possible serenely to wander into such dangerous territory without, at the very least, showing an awareness of potential risk. Jody Greene has argued that the ‘fragmentary qualities’ of Timon of Athens do not derive from an aesthetic failure on the author's part—a failure, that is, adequately to ‘polish’ or ‘finish’ the play—‘but rather from the impossibility of writing a play about the limits of male friendship in the Renaissance without recourse to the vocabulary of sodomy’.¹⁴ Greene claims that this play is eminently suited to the kind of critical scrutiny characteristic of such readers within gay studies as Bruce Smith, Gregory Bredbeck and Jonathan Goldberg, and is evidently perplexed by their never having addressed Timon: ‘it takes place in a world virtually absent of women, and treats such themes as male friendship, prodigality, usury, unnatural reproduction, and “diseased” sexuality’. It is ‘an all-male drama in which the boundaries of friendship and sodomy collapse’.¹⁵

Any of these remarks might be applied, also, to Coriolanus. Consider the sheer extravagance of Aufidius' words on meeting up with Coriolanus, hitherto his archenemy:

                                                  here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly, and as nobly with thy love,
As ever in ambitious strength, I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I lov'd the maid I married: never man
Sigh'd truer breath. But that I see thee here
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart,
Than when I first my wedded Mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

(IV. v, 110-19)

First and foremost, this is an expression of male privilege, in the face of which a mere wife is hardly visible at all. But it is also, undoubtedly, an avowal of love. Furthermore, Aufidius has been dreaming—or are these nightmares?—of Coriolanus.

                                                  Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me:
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat,
And wak'd half dead with nothing.

(IV. v, 122-7)

When he immediately uses a sodomitic metaphor in reference to the business of waging war—he speaks of ‘pouring war / Into the bowels of ungrateful Rome’—one is inevitably inclined to refer it back to what has just been said. The two warriors' having been, as Aufidius puts it, ‘down together in my sleep’ makes deliberate play with the idea of two men in a bed, even though he is only speaking of himself, alone, dreaming of the other. Contrary to twentieth-century critics who do not wish to talk about such topics, intense homosocial relationships do, in Shakespeare, veer towards the topic of sodomy. It may be that the men involved resist sodomy with all the fear and loathing of the critics themselves. But the fact that the topic arises at all tells us a great deal about certain social attitudes. We are not dealing with what homophobic critics like to think of as a prelapsarian age, ‘innocent’ of ‘deviance’. And gay critics are not ‘reading things into’ texts which are so palpably interested in that heavily policed boundary between friendship and sexual love.

.....

While Shakespeare's plays are interesting enough, to varying degrees, as gay literature, nothing in them can compare, quantitively or qualitatively, with the sonnets, either as pure text or as the site of an enduring controversy about sexual meaning. These poems date from the mid-1590s but were printed in 1609. There are 154 of them. They are love poems. According to the order in which they are almost invariably published, the first 126 are addressed to a young man, the rest to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’. They are either deeply emotional expressions of love or subtle imitations of such expressions. That is to say, they are either private love poems (albeit later put into publication) or flamboyant public exercises in literary expression. They either constitute the greatest of the gay texts in English literature—or they do not. If they were addressed to actual individuals, it should be possible for the curious literary historian to come up with the names of the individuals concerned. And if the young man is named (for the Dark Lady hardly matters), and if it can be proved that he was of a much higher rank than the poet, or that like the playwright he was happily married and had children, then his naming can be used to disprove the scandalous impression that the first 126 poems express same-sex(ual) desire. Hence much of the dreary research which has been done into the identity of the collection's supposed dedicatee, the famous but unnameable ‘Mr. W. H.’, who is possibly, in any case, a misprint for Shakespeare's own initials.

Simon Shepherd has pointed out that people have responded in significantly different ways to the suggestions that, on the one hand, any given character in one of the plays is homosexual and, on the other, that the sonnets to the young man represent homosexual desires. Shepherd writes:

Homosexuality in the plays has only been found in the last few years, and doesn't cause much worry. The Sonnets are different because, instead of showing a fictional world, they apparently depict [their author's] real feelings. It might be expected that a great artist can deal with all manner of unsavoury topics, but can a great artist be homosexual? Especially if that artist is the national poet, who represents all that's best in English writing.¹⁶

The debate on the sonnets has been vigorous and committed. Much is at stake. A national poet is at far greater risk of censorious distortion than any merely good writer who happens to work in a national language. In Shakespeare's case, the manhood of Englishness is at stake.

In the ‘literary and psychological essay’ with which he introduces his glossary of Shakespeare's Bawdy (1968), Eric Partridge takes a firm line against homosexual readings of Shakespeare.¹⁷ In his very first sentence on the topic he dismisses them all by invoking his own heterosexuality as a guarantee of authority: ‘Like most other heterosexual persons, I believe the charge against Shakespeare; that he was a homosexual; to be, in the legal sense, “trivial”: at worst, “the case is not proven”; at best—and in strict accordance with the so-called evidence, as I see it—it is ludicrous.’ Quite apart from the eccentric punctuation, there is a lot going on here. In the first place, there is a veiled threat to straight and closeted readers, that if they fail to reject gay readings, they will themselves be assumed to be homosexual. Secondly, of course, no reasonable person (which seems to mean, no heterosexual person) could be happy with such a ‘charge’ being laid ‘against’ them. Thirdly, Partridge is eliding gay readings of Shakespeare's sonnets with biographical claims that Shakespeare himself was ‘a homosexual’—though in what follows, he is unable to quote a critic who actually makes this claim. Fourthly, there is a discrepancy between the suggestion that only homosexual readers perform homosexual readings and the idea that such a reader is laying a ‘charge against Shakespeare’ rather than sympathetically identifying with him. Finally, for all his claims to (hetero) objectivity and, in a footnote, to ‘possessing an open mind’, Partridge is speaking in a tone which is itself distinctly unscholarly. Indeed, so intemperate is his approach to the subject of homosexuality that he has relinquished control over the logic of his language: ‘at worst’ and ‘at best’ appear to have been misplaced.

In his second sentence on the subject, Partridge outlines a brief history of homosexual readings: ‘The charge was first brought in 1889 by a homosexual (Oscar Wilde); it was renewed, exactly a decade later, by another [Samuel Butler]; it was again renewed, at a second interval of ten years, by yet a third; and, roughly three decades later still, the subject—if we ignore several unimportant intermediate attempts—was, not very convincingly, reopened.’ Partridge does not go on to name the author of the last case, presumably, because he was alive when Shakespeare's Bawdy was being compiled. However, most painful to Partridge is the fact he has to acknowledge next: that since the First World War ‘the theme has … been touched on by several notable writers whose heterosexuality is not in doubt’. These notables he neither quotes nor even names, for he feels he has a far more persuasive case in denouncing other critics' homosexual partiality. Not that he ever engages with the arguments of Wilde, Butler and so forth. On the contrary, he dismisses them out of hand. In an extraordinary sentence, he argues that ‘To re-examine the “evidence” adduced by the homosexuals … would be a waste of time’ (p. 12). If by any chance anyone should disagree with this approach and want to engage more fully with the debate, Partridge refers people whom he calls ‘my heterosexual readers’ to two firmly hetero biographies of Shakespeare, by Hugh Kingsmill and Hesketh Pearson respectively. He offers no help to his homosexual readers, either because to do so would be another waste of time, or because he knows they will already have scurried off to the library to waste their time consulting the likes of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Butler.

Partridge wastes the next page of his essay asserting that Shakespeare would have ‘subscribed in full to the sentiments expressed’ in Kenneth Walker's The Physiology of Sex (1940). He quotes one such sentiment—‘There, in the unfortunate intersexual whose method of expressing his urge disgusts us, walk ourselves, but for the grace of a more satisfactory complement of hormones’ (p. 13)—in the evident belief that attending to the minutiae of the history of medicine would be yet another waste of time. That Partridge is content to rely on Walker in 1968 says little, either, for his willingness to keep up to date with the debate on sexuality in the twentieth century, let alone that in the seventeenth.

In the case of Shakespeare's sonnets, about which, although they form the centre of his case, he has no ideas of his own, Partridge can only quote Hesketh Pearson: ‘Most of the sonnets can be read as literary exercises’—by which Pearson means that the emotions expressed in the poems are merely conventional, not sincere, and should not be taken at face value as apparently intense and obsessive expressions of passion. Partridge calls this a ‘no nonsense’ approach (p. 14). He then quotes Pearson's opinion that ‘Homosexualists have done their utmost to annex Shakespeare and use him as an advertisement of their own peculiarity. They have quoted Sonnet 20 to prove that he was one of themselves. But Sonnet 20 proves conclusively that he was sexually normal.’ Rather than actually quote Pearson's explanation of how the sonnet does any such thing, and rather than offer his own gloss on it, Partridge simply quotes Sonnet 20 in full, as if fully confident that ‘my heterosexual readers’ will only have to read it to agree. He says nothing further about it, but rushes on to sonnet 144 in a sentence beginning ‘As if that were not enough …’ (p. 15).

I am working with a copy of Shakespeare's Bawdy borrowed from my university library. A student has annotated this section of Partridge's introduction—in pencil, I am glad to say. In the margin next to the claim that Shakespeare would have ‘subscribed to’ the views of Kenneth Walker, the student has written: ‘One reader would be very dissatisfied if anyone touched his hormones.’ At the end of Partridge's essay, the student has added: ‘And if Shakespeare had been a homosexual, you my poor perverted & ignorant man, would never have had the opportunity of writing this silly little article because you would have written him off as an “unfortunate intersexual”.’ I mention these annotations because they strike me as being no less interesting than the essay itself. The student's anger is just as worthy of serious consideration as Partridge's. Neither is speaking from an objective position, but only Partridge is pretending to do so. For me, they symbolise opposite sides of a more general debate about gay culture and gay studies.

Of course, what Eric Partridge says about gay critics is correct: we represent, as it were, a vested interest, and the readings we perform are shaped accordingly. It was, indeed, homosexual readers who resisted the anti-homosexual tendency to read the sonnets as a mere fashionable exercise, and who read them instead as passionate love poems.¹⁸ It has to be said that, as literature, the sonnets were all the better for it. Neither the various identifications of ‘Mr. W. H.’ (William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? Willy Hewes? A misprint?) nor speculation on the poet's own sexual identity or habits has any substantive effect on the sonnets' availability to gay readers and openness to gay readings; and only the most obdurate, even desperate, anti-homosexual reading strategies will allow the sonnets to be read as a formal exercise by a red-bloodedly heterosexual writer. It is the latter reading which is the more perverse.

Another version of the dismissal of gay readings of the sonnets occurs in a book by Alfred Harbage. It is briefer than Partridge's, but no less firmly opposed. Harbage mentions that the issue of ‘strange love’ (he uses a phrase which is Elizabethan, but which is not the only Elizabethan phrase available) ‘was at last brought into the open by Oscar Wilde and others who had a personal interest in establishing its presence’. Personal interest is, presumably, to be contrasted with the impersonal objectivity of the heterosexual. Harbage adds:

The consequence is that it is now impossible to say anything right about the emotional content of the sonnets. Homosexuals are inclined to share Wilde's view, and it would be inhumane to deny them its comfort, but since our humane impulses should be inclusive, we must recognise that endorsing the view will not contribute to the greatest comfort of the greatest number. Attacking the view is an equally dubious tactic. Needless defenses of Shakespeare's heterosexuality can only advertise that it has been questioned, while a notably vigorous defense might seem intended to advertise the speaker's own sexual normality.¹⁹

Far be it from me to suggest that such a standard example of homophobic liberalism, with its consistent references to homosexual readers as ‘them’ and everyone else as ‘us’, must have the effect of advertising Alfred Harbage's own ‘sexual normality’. That is not a matter of much interest here. Nor do I have time to debate whether it is really the task of literary criticism to ‘contribute to the greatest comfort of the greatest number’. (We have television and Prozac for that.) Harbage's regret that he can no longer ‘say anything right’ about the sonnets represents, in miniature, the growing unease among certain types of critic when confronted by any subcultural viewpoint that enables the universalising coercion of the mainstream to be challenged. Harbage appears to believe that our whole system of meaning has been demolished by the raising of the question of homosexuality in the same breath as the answer of Shakespeare.

The bottom line is always the sexual orientation of the so-called Bard. As Simon Shepherd suggested, it is not the sonnets themselves which are being so resolutely defended against scandalous imputations of sodomitic yearning so much as the reputation of the sonneteer. Indeed, by contrast, the sonnets are mere literature, a relatively trivial matter when national pride is at stake. As a chapter subtitle by Katharine Wilson succinctly and insistently puts it, ‘SHAKESPEARE NOT HOMOSEXUAL’.²⁰ Of course not; but, as Alan Sinfield has said, ‘the early-modern organisation of sex and gender boundaries, simply, was different from ours. And therefore Shakespeare couldn't have been gay. However, that need not stem the panic, because, by the same token, he couldn't have been straight either.’²¹Ergo, SHAKESPEARE NOT HETEROSEXUAL. Commit it to memory.

The sonnets remain. And they are still ‘love poems’, still spoken by a male persona, and their two addressees are still respectively male and female. I was going to add that nothing can change these basic facts, but some efforts have been made in the past to do precisely that: as in Michelangelo the Younger's 1623 edition of his great-uncle's Rime, certain radical editorial changes could be made to render love poetry safe. John Benson famously published a heterosexualised version of Shakespeare's sonnets in 1640, leaving out altogether Sonnets 19, 56, 75, 76, 96 and 126. In 101 and 108 he changed ‘he’ and ‘him’ to ‘she’ and ‘her’; and in 108 ‘sweet boy’ became ‘sweet love’. In 14 ‘fair friend’ became ‘fair love’—clearly indicating that to Benson (and contrary to many anti-homosexual critics in the twentieth century) the word ‘friend’ was male but was not necessarily chaste. However, tellingly, Sonnet 20 survived intact, apart from an insignificant misprint. Benson was clearly one of those who read Sonnet 20 as an unambiguous disavowal of sexual intent.

Reading the sonnets addressed to the boy and those to the lady as having interconnected meanings, some readers take the logical step of relating the poet's affection for the boy to the misogyny which puts into doubt his affection for the lady. To Leslie Fiedler, ‘The point is that the poet confesses to sleeping with women and considering it filthy, while chastely (but passionately) embracing an idealised male.’²² Joseph Pequigney makes roughly the same point at a later date: ‘Fundamental and pervasive in Shakespeare's two-part sequence is the contrast between “two loves” in two senses of the word: two “loved ones” … the male and the female; and “two types of love,” the homoerotic true love and the heterosexual lust.’²³ The latter distinction should not be confused with homosexuality and heterosexuality as we think of them nowadays. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick draws back to take a wider social view, in order to define the distinction between the two loves with greater precision. She writes:

there is not an equal opposition or a choice posited between two such institutions as homosexuality (under whatever name) and heterosexuality. The Sonnets present a male-male love that, like the love of the Greeks, is set firmly within a structure of institutionalised social relations that are carried out via women: marriage, name, family, loyalty to progenitors and to posterity, all depend on the youth's making a particular use of women that is not, in the abstract, seen as opposing, denying, or detracting from his bond with the speaker’.²⁴

The necessary recourse to woman—but not for woman's sake—is virtually the first theme of the whole sequence. In Sonnets 1 to 17 the speaker urges his beloved friend to get married and have children, in order thus to preserve his beauty beyond its mortal span. The mood here is demoralised, partly because the lover is reflecting on the speed at which his loved one's beauty inevitably must fade, but also because the poet has not yet hit upon the glorious fact that the intensity of his own love can do physical reproduction's job far more efficiently: for the poet is a poet, which conventionally means that he can offer the young man a ticket to immortality. It is not until later in the sequence, though, that he will suggest this. For now, heterosexual intercourse looms.

In yet another attempt to establish that the sonnets cannot possibly have any queer connotations, Paul Ramsey has argued that ‘Sonnets 1-17 are not very apt to have been written by an active homosexual to his lover’.²⁵ This appears to be an anachronistic view of the matter. In a world where beloved adolescent boys were simply assumed to be due to graduate to courting women at the moment of entry into manhood proper, the repeated sentiment of these opening poems would be read as routinely recommending, not a change in exclusionary ‘sexual orientation’ but the necessary next step into adulthood. It is an initiatory sentiment, proud of the boy's growth at the same time as it is, perhaps, quietly regretful of it.

Valerie Traub is referring to the move beyond these opening seventeen sonnets—whereby the speaker gives up the idea of children and, instead, privileges the poetic creativity of men above the reproductive creativity of women—when she writes: ‘The logic of the sonnet sequence is, I believe, thoroughly misogynistic, and its homoerotics seem utterly entwined with that misogyny: a debased female reproduction is excised, and its creative powers appropriated, by the male lover-poet who thereby celebrates and immortalises his male beloved.’²⁶

If the sequence as a whole has always been controversial, all of its controversies have centred on a single poem, Sonnet 20. Twentieth-century readers in particular have tended to fight out the sexual issues raised by the whole sequence, mainly, on the scuffed and bloodied arena of number 20. Here the poet refers to the young man he loves as ‘the master mistress of my passion’, endowed with the face and heart of a woman, but without a woman's fickleness. The concluding six lines go as follows:

And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition thee of me defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
          But since she prick'd thee out for women's
pleasure,
          Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

The ‘one thing’ for which the poet has no use is, of course, the young man's prick—pricked out by Nature to provide women with the pleasures of penetration. Whether this last point is to be taken ironically or dead-pan is open to question. This is the only sonnet in the whole sequence with only ‘feminine’ line-endings (that is, lines which end on an unstressed, ‘weak’ syllable).²⁷ Thus, in rather a literal sense, the body of the poem enacts a certain sexual flexibility: masculine language in a feminine structure, virility in drag. The boy is girlish—which is to say, he is desired by men—in a manner which reminds us of a literary convention going back at least as far as Homer. The poem certainly does not mean that he is effeminate.

Sonnet 20 has not always caused embarrassment: we have seen that John Benson kept it in the 1640 edition. But it soon began to do so; and the embarrassment has rarely faded since. In 1780 George Steevens said, ‘It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation.’ In 1840 D. L. Richardson said, ‘I could heartily wish that Shakespeare had never written it’.²⁸ Samuel Taylor Coleridge felt the need, even in his private marginalia, to defend the whole sequence of the sonnets as Philip of Macedon had defended the Theban Band against ‘those, whose base, fleshly, & most calumnious Fancies had suspected their Love of Desires against Nature’. Coleridge went on:

This pure Love Shakespere appears to have felt—to have been no way ashamed of it—or even to have suspected that others could have suspected it / yet at the same time he knew that so strong a Love would have been made more compleatly a Thing of Permanence & Reality, & have been blessed more by Nature & taken under her more especial protection, if this Object of his Love had been at the same Time a possible Object of Desire / for Nature is not bad only—in this Feeling, he must have written the 20th Sonnet, but its possibility seems never to have entered even his Imagination. It is noticeable, that not even an Allusion to that very worst of all possible Vices (for it is wise to think of the Disposition, as a Vice, not of the absurd & despicable Act, as a crime) not even any allusion to it in all his numerous Plays—whereas Johnson, Beaumont & Fletcher, & Massinger are full of them. O my Son! I pray fervently that thou may'st know inwardly how impossible it was for a Shakespere not to have been in his heart's heart chaste.²⁹

Coleridge's parenthetical distinction between the ‘Disposition’ and the ‘Act’ is interesting in itself. (Like so many other pieces of evidence, it puts paid to crude post-Foucauldian claims that before the invention of homosexuality as a state of being there were only individual homosexual acts.)

More recent critics have made every (often contortionate) effort to read this key sonnet as proving that the speaker has no physical interest in the young man. In his 1963 ‘psychosexual analysis’ of the sonnets, H. M. Young argues that Sonnet 20 ‘simply could not have been written by a homosexual’. He continues, ignoring strong precedents in classical literature: ‘“A woman's face” would add no charm in the eyes of a homosexual, and the one thing which nature so carelessly added would not have been to his purpose nothing. It would, so far from defeating him, have been the one thing absolutely essential.’ Young does concede, however, that Sonnet 20 is fiendishly ambiguous and proves nothing about the poet's sexual orientation: for the whole poem could be an elaborately contrived ‘smoke-screen, a haze expressly contrived to obscure that homosexual feeling which the poet's keen interest in his friend's physical beauty repeatedly suggests’.³⁰ One cannot help adding that, if so, it is an extraordinarily inept piece of smoke-screenmanship. Surely Young believes Shakespeare is a better poet than that.

Hallet Smith is willing to acknowledge the presence of love, but not of sexual desire: ‘The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion. Sonnet 20 makes quite clear the difference between the platonic love of a man for a man, more often expressed in the sixteenth century than the twentieth, and any kind of homosexual attachment.’³¹ Paul Ramsey, on the other hand, acknowledges the presence of sexual desire, but not of sexual activity: ‘Shakespeare says that there is a sexual element in his feeling for the young man’ but that ‘the relation was not physically overt’; to argue that it was ‘is to call Shakespeare a liar’. He adds, with an implicit sideswipe at those who perform more explicitly gay readings of the sonnet, ‘It would be pleasant to accept the testimony of Sonnet 20 and consider the matter closed.’³² But unlike Ramsey, the sonnet is obdurately resistant to closure.

Peter Levi says that ‘In the sonnet (20) about [the Earl of] Southampton as a boy-girl or a girl-boy, Shakespeare makes it clear what kind of love he is talking about, but clearer still that this is sublimated, unconsummated love.’ In fact, the sonnet does not refer to the essentialist binaries boy-girl and girl-boy, but rather to a matter of sexual roles. The ‘master mistress’ might be understood as being, in terms of passion, both subject and object—by which I mean both lover and beloved—and, in sexual terms, both active and passive. At no point is sublimation ‘clearer still’ than desire itself. Levi also says, still apropos of the sonnets, that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste’.³³ This is actually no truer of Elizabethans than of Reaganites.

Robert Giroux, having referred to number 20 as the sonnet which is ‘most explicitly homosexual’, nevertheless concludes that such sentiments as are expressed in it ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’ and that, on the contrary, lines 13 and 14 are the poet's way of saying ‘that physical love between him and the young man is out of the question’.³⁴ This compromise, at once acknowledging and dismissing the possibility of a gay reading, creates as many new problems as those it glosses over. In particular, one would want to ask Giroux whether he wishes to engage seriously with the possibility that either a latent or a chaste homosexual desire is operating in the poem. Either way, Giorgio Melchiori calls Sonnet 20 blatantly homosexual (‘schiettamente omosessuale’).³⁵

A number of commentators attempt to distinguish between different types of homosexual desire in order to make some sense of this poem's ambiguity without rendering it down to banal unambiguity. For instance, Martin Seymour-Smith writes: ‘In the unique Sonnet 20 Shakespeare tries to come to terms with what is an extremely complex situation. The poem can be understood only as a declaration, by a person who has previously imagined himself to be heterosexual (and whose experience has been totally heterosexual), that he is experiencing homosexual feelings.’³⁶ Elsewhere, Seymour-Smith extends this point to cover the sequence as a whole, which provides, he says, ‘a poetic insight into what may be described, paradoxically, as a heterosexual's homosexual experience’.³⁷ But this is the critic's own paradox; it would not be comprehensible to anyone whom its key terms post-dated.

I myself once implied that the youth is ‘chiefly admired for the delightful promise of his backside’, and that in Sonnet 20, therefore, ‘Shakespeare is not interested in his boyfriend's penis’.³⁸ Much remains to be made love to. There is, after all, a lot more to a boy than his penis. What about his arse? In this respect, I was suggesting a pederastic sexual relationship on the Greek model, where the man's pleasure was paramount, the boy's virtually unmentionable. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us that ‘here again as elsewhere in the Sonnets, “nothing” denotes, among other things, female genitals’.³⁹ For the speaker's purposes, then, the boy's arsehole might prove to be ‘nothing’ indeed—a sexual organ lacking in intrinsic status, dedicated solely to the pleasures of its penetrator. By contrast, the boy's penis would be undesirably demanding.

Bruce Smith says that Sonnet 20 represents the moment at which ‘Homosocial desire changes by degrees into homosexual desire.’⁴⁰ Claude Summers quotes this point and adds: ‘For all the speaker's temporising in the concluding couplet, what is most interesting in the sonnet as a whole is his genuine sense of bewilderment as he attempts to understand his newly awakened passion.’⁴¹ In these readings, the poem constitutes a reflexive statement of the poet's coming-out to himself: he is beginning to realise the enormity of the presence of a supernumerary penis in his consciousness. No mere ‘friendship’ poem would need to have raised this topic at all.

Rictor Norton uses his reading of Sonnet 20 to take issue with those critics who claim the sequence is merely conventional:

The sonnet reveals a man who is nearly obsessed by the fact that his lover has a penis. By expressing this awareness on paper, he has violated all the decorum proper to the missives between a faithful friend and his alter ipse. I can find no other example in Renaissance literature, either in England or on the Continent, in which a gentleman even hints at, much less so blatantly, his friend's genital endowment and its relation to his own pleasure. The tacky dismissal of its usefulness to him raises an issue that should otherwise have gone unnoticed.⁴²

That last point is certainly persuasive. Having brought the beloved's penis into the account—and having thereby inadvertently kept it under phallocentric discussion for several centuries—the poet has effectively sexualised the young man, whether lover or friend, and has therefore sexualised the account of the relationship, whether actively physical or not. It has never been wrong for critics to bear the boy's penis in mind.

Once a decision has been made about Sonnet 20, or once the reader has opted for indecision, readings of the other sonnets follow in due order. Effectively, the struggle for ownership of the sonnets is won or lost in the fourteen lines of number 20. The love-or-friendship question resurfaces only occasionally in relation to the chastity or physicality of later poems. There are few surprises to come. So it is the expected critics who point out later moments of sexual ardour. For example, Martin Seymour-Smith writes that ‘It is not easy to explain [Sonnet] 36 [‘Let me confess that we two must be twain …’] by any other hypothesis than the physical one.’ Reading it in accordance with this hypothesis, he infers that ‘Shakespeare acknowledges that the sensual side of himself has won. Therefore they can never meet again.’⁴³ And it is with familiar exasperation that Joseph Pequigney says of Sonnets 52 (‘So am I as the rich, whose blessèd key …’), 87 (‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing …’) and 75 (‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life …’) that they ‘can be perceived as chaste only at the cost of their considerable attenuation’.⁴⁴

Reading the sonnets will always flush out the reader's attitudes to homosexuality. To that extent if no further, this sequence of poems is the key gay text in English literature. (And Sonnet 20 is the key individual poem.) For centuries the sequence has been testing the extent to which canonical English literature will ever be allowed to be ‘gay literature’ at all. The sonnets cannot easily be consigned to oblivion—as has effectively happened to Richard Barnfield's poems—so the queerness has to be sent there instead. Hence the importance of Mr W. H.'s identity. Once he can be proved to be a mere patron, whom Shakespeare is seeking to flatter and thank, then the heat of the passion in the words is proved satisfactorily temperate. Be that as it may, it seems that many critics would agree with D. L. Richardson in wishing these love poems from a man to a boy had never been written at all. Remember what the not-so-foolish Fool says in King Lear (III.vi, 19): ‘He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love or a whore's oath.’ The love of boys will lead to endless trouble. Perhaps only writing about it leads to worse.

Notes

1. Paul Hammond, Love between Men in English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 59. See also Joseph A. Porter, ‘Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Canonization of Heterosexuality’, in Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum and Michael Moon (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 127-47.

2. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 161, 163.

3. For an account of Bill Alexander's 1987 production of the Merchant for the Royal Shakespeare Company, see John M. Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama, revised edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 5-7.

4. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4. Needless to say, the Nazi persecution of homosexuals will never come to mind if the history of that persecution has been suppressed.

5. Seymour Kleinberg, ‘The Merchant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism’, in Stuart Kellogg (ed.), Essays on Gay Literature (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1983), pp. 113-26; p. 113.

6. Kleinberg, p. 120.

7. Ibid., p. 124.

8. Clum, pp. 114-15.

9. Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1991), pp. 33-4. The notes in question are on pp. 156 and 263 of the Arden edition.

10. I have seen Troilus and Cressida only twice, both times performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, but at a distance of twenty years from each other. In 1970 Achilles was famously played by Alan Howard as a somewhat hysterical queen with his hair swept back in a bun. In 1990 he was played by Ciaran Hinds in full leather, all man but also every inch the queen.

11. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (St Albans: Paladin, 1974), pp. 128-9.

12. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 157.

13. Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Shakespeare Understudies: The Sodomite, the Prostitute, the Transvestite and Their Critics’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2nd ed., 1994), pp. 129-52; p. 134. At this point, Dollimore is paraphrasing a longer passage from Bruce R. Smith's Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 61-3.

14. Jody Greene, ‘“You Must Eat Men”: The Sodomitic Economy of Renaissance Patronage’, GLQ 1, 2 (1994), pp. 163-97; p. 165.

15. Ibid., pp. 178, 186.

16. Simon Shepherd, ‘Shakespeare's Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 96-109; p. 97.

17. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, revised and enlarged edn 1968), pp. 11-12.

18. But there were major homosexual exceptions: W. H. Auden, for instance. See his introduction to the Signet Classics edition of the Sonnets (New York, 1965).

19. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare Without Words, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 75.

20. Katharine M. Wilson, Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 355.

21. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading, p. 19.

22. Fiedler, p. 32.

23. Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 186.

24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 35.

25. Paul Ramsey, The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York: AMS Press, 1979), p. 32.

26. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 143.

27. Stephen Booth claims that Sonnet 87 also uses feminine rhymes throughout. This is not the case. In Sonnet 87, Booth misreads the ‘-ate’ syllables of ‘estimate’ and ‘determinate’ (lines 2 and 4) as being unstressed—Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 163.

28. Quoted in E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), p. 163. Colman himself rather sensibly hedges his bets by saying that the addressee of the bulk of the sequence is ‘a male friend who is, in one sense or another, the poet's lover’ (p. 161).

29. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 12: Marginalia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 42-3. The marginal note appears in Coleridge's copy of Robert Anderson's The Works of British Poets (1792-5). It was written at 3.30 a.m. on 2 November 1803 at Greta Hall, Keswick. I am grateful to Tim Fulford for this reference.

30. H. M. Young, The Sonnets of Shakespeare: A Psycho-Sexual Analysis (1963), p. 11. Quoted in Colman, pp. 163-4.

31. Hallet Smith's introduction to the Sonnets in G. Blakemore Evans' edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Vol. II, pp. 232-9. Quoted in Purvis E. Boyette, ‘Shakespeare's Sonnets: Homosexuality and the Critics’, Tulane Studies in English 21 (1974), pp. 35-46; pp. 36-7.

32. Ramsey, p. 29.

33. Peter Levi, The Art of Poetry, The Oxford Lectures 1984-1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 137 and 320, n. 4.

34. Robert Giroux, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 20.

35. ‘Introduzione’, William Shakespeare, Sonetti (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), p. c).

36. Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-42: A Psychological Reading’, in Hilton Landry (ed.), New Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York: AMS Press, 1976), p. 25.

37. Martin Seymour-Smith (ed.) Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 34.

38. Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 9.

39. Sedgwick, pp. 34-5. Martin Green made this point a few years before Sedgwick, but then elaborated on it in an idiosyncratic manner: ‘Shakespeare is saying … that Nature added to his friend one thing which was, for his purpose, a vulva. Obviously, a penis is not like a vulva to the extent that a vulva can receive a penis, but it could for a homosexual be like a vulva to the extent that it acts as a focal point for sexual desire. Thus this nothing added to the friend is in reality for Shakespeare a something’—The Labyrinth of Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Examination of Sexual Elements in Shakespeare's Language (London: Skilton, 1974), pp. 77-8.

40. Smith, p. 248.

41. Claude J. Summers, ‘Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of Anachronism’, South Central Review 9 (Spring 1992), pp. 2-23; p. 15.

42. Rictor Norton, The Homosexual Literary Tradition: An Interpretation (New York: Revisionist Press, 1974), p. 250.

43. Seymour-Smith (ed.), Shakespeare's Sonnets, p. 130.

44. Pequigney, p. 49.