ABSTRACT
On the subject of homoerotic desire, people are willing to say yes to Shakespeare's plays. But they are inclined to say no to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Playing Antonio as the disappointed lover of Bassanio has become a virtual cliché in productions of The Merchant of Venice since the 1980s. More recently, Celia has been cast in the same position vis-à-vis Rosalind in productions of As You Like It, notably in Lawrence Boswell's production with the Shakespeare Theater of Washington in 1997. Homoeroticism as a subtext in Coriolanus has become so securely established that directors of productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company have been able to pursue increasingly subtle readings: in-your-face leather-and-chains sadomasochism in Terry Hands's direction of Alan Howard in the title role in 1979, an Aufidius (Malcolm Storry) who conveyed “the almost sexual nature of his rivalry with Coriolanus” (bare-chested Charles Dance) in Terry Hands's and John Barton's production of 1989, a psychologically compelling contrast between Aufidius's fervor and Coriolanus's icy detachment in David Thacker's production of 1994 (Osbome 18). With the Sonnets, however, such openly sexual readings still inspire resistance. It has been more than a generation since W. H. Auden wrote his introduction to the Signet edition of the Sonnets (1964), but the position he takes there still informs much contemporary criticism of the poems. Making a play on bed-secrets and Red-secrets, Auden privately told a group of friends that “it won't do just yet to admit that the top Bard was in the homintern”—and acted on those reservations when he wrote his preface later the same year (Pequigney 79–80). Shakespeare, after all, was a married man and a father:
That we are confronted in the sonnets by a mystery rather than by an aberration is evidenced for me by the fact that men and women whose sexual tastes are perfectly normal, but who enjoy and understand poetry, have always been able to read them as expressions of what they understand by the word love, without finding the masculine pronoun an obstacle.
(Auden xxxiii)