ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the uses of sexual innuendo in contemporary pamphlet attacks on Andrew Marvell, asking what and how the allegations signify as ways of imagining a man's sexuality which are simultaneously ways of scoring political points. As Steven Zwicker, Paul Hammond notes how sexuality became a key area for satiric comment after the restoration, what interests Hammond, though, is the contemporary innuendoes and accusations about Marvell's own sexuality. Marvell is seen as sexually ambiguous, of double or indeterminate gender. This leads Hammond to a wide-ranging consideration of the narcissistic in Marvell: a gaze involved both with the self and distinctly with the male self. Careful to avoid declaring an authentic sexual biography for Marvell, the chapter concerns how little scope seventeenth-century culture offered for voicing male desire for men and the various ways Marvell's different types of writing may have approached this.
