ABSTRACT
If same-gender practice was something that anyone might do, it bulked far larger in the imaginations of some writers than others. Katrina Bachinger has made a case that the love of Philip Sidney’s life was Hubert Languet, the Burgundian diplomat, who sought to guide his early career; even Stella should be read as a stand-in for Languet (Bachinger 1994). (This would be the earliest instance of Proustian closeted gender substitution.) I see Languet as the more devoted one, in the manner of the Poet and the Boy in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. Fulke Greville, Sidney’s schoolfellow, also seems to have been in love with him, but we have no evidence of requital.
