[Barbara Baig]

Thanks very much Nick, Shaun, and Carl.--Barbara

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

How do you feel, Shaun, about “Shakespeare’s Metrical Art” by George Wright? It has a narrower focus, but it was an eye-opener for me, and I need to read it again (and again).

I have a copy of that at hand right now, but I must admit that I haven't done more than skim it for research purposes. It's been a busy semester, and I haven't been able to do much in the way of research, but I'll be looking into it more in the break. But I would say that if it was useful to you, then that's what matters! Robert Giroux's The Book Known as Q was my first thorough entree into the sonnets. I later realized that it's chock full of falsehoods, and probably did my later understanding of the sonnets more harm than good, but it was great at getting me in to them, and suggesting all sorts of curious possibilities.

Originally Posted by Nick McRae

Would you consider these books to be relevant to his poetic style in his plays as well? I guess in an ideal world the perfect book would analyze his writing style across all of his texts, not just his sonnets, but we have to take what we can get.

So, this is definitely one of the problems with Shakespeare studies. They are very stratified. I feel pretty confident in my ability to talk/write about Shakespeare's plays (i.e. I'm trusted to teach courses on Shakespeare and Drama), but in terms of academic research, I'm known as a "poetry guy" rather than a "drama guy." And even though this is largely a false distinction, it does actually exist. And so you can typically look at a book on Shakespeare and it will mostly talk about either his plays or his poems. There are often further stratifications too, which says more about the nature of academic scholarship than it does about Shakespeare (obviously). Since I'm working on a monograph about Shakespeare's sonnets (which has been significantly slowed due to my high teaching load), I'm currently surrounded by around 100 books that are mostly about his poems (and most of those on the sonnets in particular). Few of them get into the plays, because the field sees them as generically distinct. For what it's worth this is largely why I pushed back a bit against Susan's comments earlier in this thread about how Shakespeare's plays are poems. In a sense, I 100% agree, but from a practical generic standpoint, they're simply different beasts.

Originally Posted by W. T. Clark

I always stagger to conceive how many people have denied that Shakespeare didn't, in some sense, want to fuck men.

Right? And yet as recently as Stephen Booth's deservedly lauded 1977 critical edition, the editor hedges, claiming "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter" (p. 548). What Booth is likely going for here is that the sonnets may or may not even be biographical (something mentioned earlier in this thread), though I agree that it would be awfully strange to have 126 sonnets expressing unrequited love to and for a young man if there was no personal stake.

[Roger Slater]

Shaun, if the sonnets are the main evidence that Shakespeare was gay, isn't it strange that Shakespeare published them and (as far as I know, I'm no Shakespeare scholar) that people back then did not seem to notice or care that he was outing himself? That doesn't seem likely to me. More likely, I think, is that he used extravagant language to kiss up to a vain moneybags. What am I missing? Did Shakespeare, in effect, publicly confess to being gay in his lifetime by publishing the sonnets?

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Shaun, if the sonnets are the main evidence that Shakespeare was gay, isn't it strange that Shakespeare published them and (as far as I know, I'm no Shakespeare scholar) that people back then did not seem to notice or care that he was outing himself? That doesn't seem likely to me. More likely, I think, is that he used extravagant language to kiss up to a vain moneybags. What am I missing? Did Shakespeare, in effect, publicly confess to being gay in his lifetime by publishing the sonnets?

No, the situation is that he wrote most of his sonnets in the 1590s in manuscript circulation. It was far more common for poets to write poems by hand to send to a few friends (and receive them in turn). This was generally considered to be "private" poetry, because they weren't published (think of the word origin there -- "made public"). As a result, lots of poets wrote things that they would never imagine being seen by the public. During the Elizabethan period (and even well afterward), there was a strong sense that many transgressions were tacitly okay so long as they weren't publicly known. This could range from being a Catholic (hence the term "crypto-Catholic") to having a mistress (or many) to having a proclivity toward the homoerotic. There have been a few good monographs written about early modern sexuality. Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns comes to mind, while a few others on Shakespeare in particular are great reads: Joseph Pequigney's Such is My Love is one of the earliest to delve into the homoeroticism of the sonnets.

But the key here is that early modern England had a lot of "don't ask, don't tell" sensibilities. Keeping things secret was ideal; open secrets were often tolerated. But the trick was always to avoid something becoming common knowledge, because that could be problematic.

As to the publication of the 1609 quarto, authors frequently had little say in their works getting published. There was no copyright at the time, and a bookseller/stationer could simply apply to publish something (truly almost anything) by registering it with the Stationer's Company. With the 1609 quarto, opinions vary widely on how much input Shakespeare had into its publication. My own feeling is that his involvement was minimal. It happened rather frequently during the early modern period that someone collected a poet's works and had them published on his/her behalf, often without their knowledge. This may have been the case for George Herbert (the so-called deathbed account of him asking an acquaintance to either "publish or burn it" is quite suspect), and also for Katherine Philips -- a couple of poets I've done a lot of work on. My guess is that the same is true for Shakespeare, and I even suspect that the oft-discussed inscription in Q (that begins "To the onlie begetter of these sonnets") actually refers to the person who brought Thomas Thorpe the manuscript.

Beyond all of these practical matters, there's not enough explicit evidence in Shakespeare's sonnets for his poems to have been scandalous. There's plausible deniability that they were homoerotic, and were instead simply homosocial...which was common, and accepted. And that's the line that scholars carried for a few centuries until some started loosening up about the matter in the 20th century.