![]() In Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1985), the critic Joseph Pequigney notes of Malone’s theory: ‘No supporting instances of these customary addresses are cited by Malone.’ Even C S Lewis, who remained unwilling to believe that Shakespeare engaged in ‘full-blown pederasty’, admitted in 1954 that he could find no heterosexual explanation for the sonnets: ‘ language is too lover-like for that of ordinary male friendship … I have found no real parallel to such language between friends in 16th-century literature.’įurthermore, sonnets were strongly associated with sexual love throughout this period. While close and passionate friendship between men was normal at the time, it was not usual for men to dwell obsessively on the beauty and sexuality of their platonic friends, much less to write more than 100 sonnets about it. This argument has the weakness of being false. For instance, in 2014, in a scholarly tiff in the letters page of The Times Literary Supplement, the critic Sir Brian Vickers called a reference to the sonnets’ homosexual content an ‘anachronistic assumption’. ![]() The idea is still current among deniers of Shakespeare’s queerness. Cover illustration by Mary Jane Gorton for an edition of Shakespeare Sonnets © 1959 by Peter Pauper Press, Inc. That is, Shakespeare and the Fair Youth were just good friends, and writing such poems to a male friend was absolutely standard for Tudor heterosexuals. His colleague Edmond Malone defended the sonnets with the handy idea that ‘such addresses to men were customary in our author’s time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous’. The battle lines on the subject were first drawn in the 18th century, when George Steevens stated that he had deliberately omitted the sonnets from his 1793 edition of Shakespeare’s works because their homoeroticism filled him with ‘disgust and indignation’. Many critics have found this so painful they simply refuse to believe it. To make a long story short, the sonnets appear to describe a bisexual love triangle where Shakespeare’s true beloved is the man. ![]() Which like two spirits do suggest me still: In sonnet 144, Shakespeare makes it clear which of the two he prefers: Two loves I have of comfort and despair The poet-narrator is nonetheless having sex with her in sonnet 133, more remarkably, it transpires that the Fair Youth is sleeping with her too. Shakespeare carps about the Dark Lady’s dishonesty, her reeking breath, promiscuity, venereal disease, and dark complexion (synonymous with ugliness in the Elizabethan period). These poems are again surprising in their content. It’s hard to believe the poet sees this penis as a deal-breaker, though, given the 125 other sighing poems he addressed to his ‘master mistress’.Īt the end of the cycle (sonnets 127-154), a woman suddenly appears, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’. He ends the sonnet bemoaning how nature slipped up at the last moment and added a penis to the youth, or, ‘pricked thee out for women’s pleasure’. In sonnet 20, Shakespeare begins: ‘A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted,/Hast thou the master mistress of my passion…’ and goes on to lovingly inventory the points of the Fair Youth’s androgynous beauty. In various sonnets, Shakespeare (or his poetic counterpart) swears fidelity stays up all night, consumed by jealousy harps on the youth’s beauty again and again despairs histrionically when they are briefly separated. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’ for example, was written to the Fair Youth. ![]() The first 126 sonnets (out of 154) are addressed to a male character known to Shakespeare scholars as the Fair Youth, and include some of the most famous love poems in the English language. Like most sonnet cycles of the time, they follow a loose but discernible narrative about ideal love but, unlike any other known sonnet cycle, the lover and his beloved are both men. William Shakespeare’s sonnets are among the most disputed works in literary history.
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