Shakespeare, Sonnets of

From Philosopedia

Shakespeare, Sonnets of

“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” was, in the past, said to have been written for a fair-haired, wealthy young woman, Viola de Lesseps. However, as pointed out by Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, it was one of a group of 126 sonnets written to a fair-haired, wealthy young man, whom he once described as “the master mistress of my passion.” The first seventeen of the sonnets clearly address a man, and not until the 127 does “the Dark Lady” appear. Greenblatt in response to the question, “How is it that a miserably undemocratic, unenlightened culture 400 years ago could be more tolerant of expressions of same-sex love, or the appearance of it, than our own?”, responded that

• Elizabethan England was not in fact more tolerant; our laws on sexual relations, inadequate though they may be, are models of sweet reasonableness compared with the viciously punitive statutes on the books in the 1590’s. But there is considerable evidence that those statutes were rarely, if ever, enforced: charges were rarely brought, juries were consistently unwilling to convict, and many of the most politically powerful figures in the realm were altogether comfortable with expressions of same-sex desire. We, by contract, have prominent politicians like the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, who voice the opinion that homosexuality is akin to alcoholism and kleptomania.

(See entry for Shakspere—the Oxford Argument, in which the homosexual Richard de Vere is thought to have written the sonnets.)

{The New York Times, 6 February 1999}