Quote:
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?
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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.