ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's Sonnets, perhaps poetry's supreme achievement in representing erotic love, and certainly unsurpassed in presenting its homoerotic manifestation, seem currently to be attracting more attention than at any other time since their publication in 1609. The policing of 'homosexuality' and the promotion of sodomy in so much lesbian and gay criticism are elements of a group effort to take interpretative control of the Sonnets, and to use that control to disaffirm overt sexuality in the poet's confessed passion for his master mistress. Until fairly recently 'bisexuality' was rarely mentioned in the commentary on the Sonnets, even though the poet is passionately attached to both his master mistress and a female mistress. On the sexual nature of the male love in the Sonnets, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick takes a view that is at once negative and agnostic. Her view has been widely accepted by lesbian and gay critics.
