I’ve known this since high school. William Shakespeare’s love sonnet #144 is about having sex with another man.
I have no problem with that. But what I don’t understand is how the authorities at the time just let it go.
There is an undeniable record of it. And the punishment for it was brutal from what I understand (being burned alive I believe).
Thank you in advance for your kindly replies:).
:):)
First off: most likely all of the sonnets were written to a man.
They may have been love poems in the way that we think of them but they were most likely poems of adoration and respect for a man of greater stature than the writer.
Making love, back then, did not mean the same thing that it does today. It meant wooing. To bring yourself into favor of the one you are talking to.
It was common in Shakespeare’s day (as it is today) to woo men that are in a position of power. To profess your admiration and adoration and undying fealty to them.
While there may actually have been a physical relationship between Shakespeare and is adoree, the sonnets are evidence of Platonic love and nothing more.
mc
This is like wondering why the authorities haven’t arrested Bruce Springsteen for singing “Nebraska,” considering that the punishment for being a serial killer is brutal in modern-day America. Writing poetry about committing a crime is not the same as actually committing a crime. And, just like popular songs today, there was no particular expectation in early modern England that poetry was autobiographical. It could be, but it usually wasn’t. Robert Herrick, a respectable bachelor clergyman, wrote dozens of poems, some of them very erotic, to dozens of mistresses who seem to have been entirely imaginary. When he got short of money, he published them. Nobody seems to have been particularly scandalized.
(Also, while sodomy did carry the death penalty in early modern England, most actual prosecutions were for situations that we would today consider rape or child molestation – it wasn’t the sort of crime the authorities were especially interested in pursuing if it was consensual. And strictly speaking, Sonnet 144 isn’t actually about having sex with another man – it’s about being in love with a man and a woman at the same time and suspecting, but not knowing for sure, that they are having heterosexual sex with each other behind your back. But the more important point is Elizabethan poets felt free to write about same-sex desire, and other kinds of illicit sex, because nobody thought it was evidence that they were necessarily doing those things in real life.)
It’s not at all clear that Shakespeare is admitting to homosexual acts in his sonnets. He is admitting to loving another man, and alluding to sex, but he’s not admitting to having sex sex with another man. You can kinda tell this from your question. The sonnets had zero controversy surrounding them when published. However, as someone mentioned this could be due to the ignorance of those reading them.
Under the reign of James I England’s sodomy laws were tightened. The previous century or so no-one(as far as I believe) was prosecuted for adult male on male sex. Those prosecuted for sodomy during the Tudor period were for what we would today call child rape.
All of Shakespeare’s works are in the public domain, so let’s just make this conversation a little easier, shall we?
And at the moment, I suppose this is still a GQ question, concerning the laws of 17th-century England, but it’s likely to drift to Cafe Society. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Actually apparently he was. This is what I remember from high school…
refers to an STD.
My only question, actually, is whether oral sex was treated the same way under the law then. I don’t know if he was referring to oral sex. But it is still a good question.
And BTW, thank you Chronos for posting the actual poem. As I said before, for some reason I can’t copy and paste with my smartphone on this site. I guess I could do it by hand. But mercifully I won’t;).
How in God’s name does that refer to an STD?
It’s what he remembers from high school. And we scoff when we read that American schools rank 497th in the word.
No, they are * dedicated* to a man.
Big difference: Isaac Asimov dedicated one of his books to John W. Campbell; that doesn’t mean they had a sexual relationship. There are many reasons Shakespeare might have dedicated the sonnets to Mr. W. H. He could have been a patron, or merely encouraged Shakespeare to publish.
You cannot draw any conclusions as to Shakespeare’s sexuality from the dedication.
No, he’s right – or at any rate, this is a perfectly standard interpretation. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for example, footnotes this line as “I.e., until she infects him with venereal disease.” Personally, I would have added a few more qualifiers if I were one of the Norton editors – there is a tendency among Shakespeare critics of a certain stripe to assume that anything that could be bawdy necessarily is – but it’s certainly a plausible reading, since it’s common in this era to refer to infecting someone with syphilis in terms of “fire” or “burning.”
I have to ask what edition you have. My Norton Anthology, The Major Authors, Sixth Edition, footnotes the line as “drive out by fire,” a back allusion to the mention of hell in line 12.
At least some of the sonnets are certainly addressed to a man – 19 and 20, for example – and 20, at least, is definitely about homoerotic desire, although this desire seems to go unconsummated on the speaker’s part.
There are basically two schools of thought on the sonnets, one of which is that they form a coherent sequence, with a sort of underlying story line and a consistent cast of characters. (We know that many poets in this era, such as Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth, did write sequences of sonnets like this, and that some of Shakespeare’s sonnets clearly link up to the one before or after them, suggesting that they’re meant to be read in order.) Most people who believe that this is the case tend to interpret them more or less as mikecurtis’s link does: sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a beautiful young man whom the speaker urges to marry and have children, but the speaker himself also desires him. 127-154 introduce a new character, the “Dark Lady,” who seems to be, at various moments, the lover of both the speaker and the young man.
The other school of thought is that the arrangement of Shakespeare’s sonnets is much more haphazard and they’re not necessarily connected to one another, although there are certainly some running themes and some that definitely seem to be written as pairs. If you lean toward this interpretation, you’re probably a lot less confident about the gender of the beloved in many of the sonnets, since only in a few cases do we have unmistakably masculine pronouns – much of the time, the beloved is only “you” or “thou.”
Both the current (10th, 2018) edition and the previous (9th, 2012) edition have the footnote I’ve quoted. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed (2008), offers the same reading as one of a range of possibilities: “Until my bad angel expels my good one, who has become an animal to be smoked out of a burrow; until my bad angel infects my good one with venereal disease; until bad money (“angel” = gold coin) drives out good.”
That’s pretty much all the editions I have within arm’s reach without getting up from the sofa.
Even that footnote, though, only suggests that the author contemplates his male friend having sex with a woman; not that he himself has sex with, or wants to have sex with, his male friend.
Shakespeare is pre-Romantic, remember; he and his audience don’t start out with an assumption that an intense and meaningful friendship and a sexual relationship should go together. In his day it was unremarkable for a married man to have his most intense and meaningful social relationships with other men, rather than with his wife, and this didn’t imply that those homosocial relationships were homosexual, or repressed-homosexual. The author clearly has a meaningful relationship with this guy, which is being adversely affected by the guy’s infatuation with a woman. But it’s our cultural presumptions, not Shakespeare’s, which lead us to speculate or assume that the author-guy relationship must be homosexual.
[Moderating]
Yup, the discussion is dominated by analysis of the poem, just like I expected would happen. Moving.
So, more general now, I guess.
Here’s an earlier thread which relates to the current one:
and which brings in the subject of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, a sponsor of Shakespeare who is speculated to be the Mr W.H. (geddit?) that RealityChuck mentions. Also speculated to be the subject of sonnets.
Just in the general context of sexuality, it’s worth taking a look at his portrait.
Aside: When I go to National Trust properties, I play a game where I have to decide which painting I’m going to steal. Sometimes it’s hard to decide; but at Hatchlands I copped one glance of this portrait and…Holy Shit - That one is coming home with me!
I don’t think any reproduction of the portrait can do full justice to just how startling Henry’s appearance is. For many years the portrait was mistakenly assumed to be of a woman.
It’s a commissioned painting, not a candid snapshot. I therefore assume it presented him exactly how he wanted to be seen.
j
Except that all Shakespeare would have had to do was to deny that he had written it.
Which actually isn’t such a facetious answer. Even if one doesn’t accept the old theory that the sonnets were published without Shakespeare’s permission, contemporaries were fully aware that unscrupulous printers sometimes put the names of celebrity poets on poems to make them more marketable. It was a problem with which Shakespeare had direct experience. A defence of ‘It’s not by me, m’lud’ would almost certainly have worked.
In any case, although the 1533 and the 1563 Buggery Acts were not exactly the best examples of precise legal drafting, everyone accepted that they clearly applied only to physical acts.
Interesting. Makes me wonder if the earlier editions were Bowdlerized or the interpretation is a recent one.
Makes me wonder even more about the VD interpretation being taught in high school. Jim B. when were you in high school?
I don’t like dating myself, because I think age is relative:). But since you asked, 1982-6. And it was a Catholic high school too. Go figure.