Shakespeare's Use of Homosexual Imagery in His Sonnets - Essay Example

Homosexual Imagery in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Shakespeare’s sonnets break the established code for sonnets established during his lifetime and transformed them into something different, altogether more disturbing and capable of questioning to an even greater extent the idealistic romantic concepts of his time. Although the modern perception of poetry frequently holds that the only ‘real’ poetry consists of words and emotions that come straight from the heart in a burst of feeling, the poetry of Shakespeare and his contemporaries actually followed a relatively strict formula in writing their poetry known generally as the Petrarchan convention. Within the typical formula, an idealistic feminine figure was presented as both the cause and the balm for all of the male lover’s sorrows. This forces him to endure any numbers of agonies and extremes of emotion even while she serves as a moral dynamic to impel him to new spiritual heights. Although Shakespeare’s sonnets differ from this tradition in terms of content, critics such as Stephen Booth recognize strong connections between Shakespeare’s sonnets and the traditional approach in terms of its technical elements. “In nearly two-thirds of Shakespeare’s Sonnets there are vestigial remains of the continental octave” (Booth, 1969: 36), pointing out how Shakespeare’s careful blend of Continental tradition (sestet followed by an octet) within the English vogue of three quatrains and a couplet served to introduce an element of discomfort into his poetry that was then reinforced through its content. A look at the entire canon reveals of the 154 sonnets written, Shakespeare wrote 126 to an unidentified ‘Young Man’. This shift in focus from the traditional angelic woman, particularly as she is replaced, when employed, with a Dark Lady rather than the chaste princess of virtue of other poets, has led many to assume that Shakespeare might have been homosexual, or was writing for a homosexual crowd. While there are valid reasons why this claim might be made, in the final analysis, it seems Shakespeare was, at most, possibly addressing a homosexual young man in an attempt to convince him to take up a more traditional heterosexual lifestyle. The idea that Shakespeare’s sonnets depict homosexual desire has a long history, based primarily upon the dark imagery and the bitter tone brought into the sonnets, particularly as compared with the more common Petrarchan approach. As has been described, the traditional sonnet relayed some form of an anguished lover as he struggles with attempting to attain the attentions of a particular idealized and eternally unattainable beloved. As Shakespeare’s contemporaries took these ideals further and further into the realm of the fantasy, Shakespeare himself was bringing them brutally back into the real, focusing on the mundane realities of life and the logical means of accomplishing the idealistic dreams of eternal love. In re-contextualizing the ideals of his contemporaries and addressing subjects that were outside of the conventional, Shakespeare’s poems often focus perhaps too much on the male figure as he attempts to find ways of illustrating his ideas in a non-traditional discourse. In Sonnet 55, for example, the object of the poem, the Young Man, is placed in the position of the Immortal Beloved as he is promised to exist forever in the words of the poem. “But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time” (3-4). Throughout the poem, the Young Man’s attributes are compared in terms that evoke sexual connotations as he is compared against ‘sluttish’ time, outreaching the sword of Mars with its now recognizable Freudian connotations and is promised to outstrip the ultimate male figure and Greek god of war. Further sexual overtones exist in the concept of posterity with its suggestion of children and procreation and in his final ability to also “dwell in lover’s eyes” (14) even as he lives forever in the words of the poem. It is this focus on the male within the sonnets, rather than the female, that cause questions of the poet’s sexuality to arise. Shakespeare’s language consistently places the young man in the position of the chaste lover with such lines as “Or I shall live your epitaph to make, / Or you survive when I in earth am rotten” (81: 1-2) in which it is suggested that the two men cannot live without each other or might grieve the loss of a soul-mate in the death of the other. “Where formerly the lover sang to the pale moon, the limpid fountains, the brief rose of spring and the wounding child god of Love, Shakespeare shows a lover burdened by age, toil and regrets – sad for lost friends and failed achievements, weary of gossip and scorn, sick with futility, ready to flee ‘this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell’” (MacEvoy, 1998). It is the relationship between the poet and the young man as compared with the poet and the Dark Lady that the concept of homosexuality emerges. According to Norrie Epstein (1993: 267), “There’s no getting around it: the Sonnets are clearly addressed to a young man, and even allowing for what professors call the ‘Renaissance cult of male friendship’, many of the poems are quite ardent.” When Shakespeare speaks of the young man, he does so using the language of love and desire, attributing all that is beautiful and worthy in the world to the young man while indicating his encounters with the Dark Lady serve only to make him ill with the degradations of the world. Perhaps the sonnet most often singled out as evidence of Shakespeare’s homosexual fantasies is Sonnet 20. In this poem, he is obviously comparing the Young Man favorably to the beauty of women. In the second line, he makes reference to the youth as the “master-mistress of my passion” (2), often acknowledged as being an admission of the depth of Shakespeare’s erotic love for this man. As the poem is read, the Young Man is described as having the lovely face of a woman, a woman’s gentle heart and “an eye more bright than theirs” (5) without the negative qualities the other gender holds, such as a changing nature or a rolling eye. It is in the second half of the poem, however, that the greatest debate has been held. In this portion of the poem, Shakespeare describes how nature has made a mistake in creating this person in the figure of a man but, since he was created to please women, Shakespeare indicates he is content to love the Young Man properly and leave the sexual love to the women. Critics such as Steven Spender suggest “the meaning is conveyed not just by what is said but by the tone. The argument may serve to clear Shakespeare of the charge of a serious offense...” in the homophobic culture of his time (Spender, 1962: 99). It is pointed out that even though the poet is refraining from actually engaging in sexual activity with the Young Man, he is thinking about it from the tone and direction of the verse. “From what we soon learn about the friend, with his ‘sensual fault’ and lasciviousness, it seems unlikely that, to him, such a relationship would be unthinkable” (Spender, 1962: 99). With plenty of material and emotion devoted to the young man suggesting homosexual tendencies on the part of the poet, it is helpful to compare these with the poems dedicated to the Dark Lady. The flattering verse of the earlier poems addressed to the Young Man are characteristic of the typical tone and approach taken by Shakespeare’s contemporaries in writing about their lady loves, but the tone taken by Shakespeare in writing about his Dark Lady take on an almost nihilistic flair. In Sonnet 130, for example, he describes her attributes in direct opposition to the false comparisons offered by other poets. He says, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” (1-4). In describing her in such terms, Shakespeare takes all the romance out of the poem, refusing to see in his woman the same sort of heavenly divinity he found in the Young Man. While the young man was earlier given the sweet breath of flowers in Sonnet 99, but the Dark Lady here is denied such attributes as “in some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks” (7-8). In every possible way is the woman of the poem brought down to base, human levels, never permitted the transcendent love or expression so often provided other subjects of the Elizabethan sonnets. However, in the final couplet, Shakespeare asserts that his love for this woman is “as rare / As any she belied with false compare” (13-14). In making this statement, he seems to put all other poets to shame in their love because it is based upon idealistic foundations rather than reality. While the poem begins in such a way as to suggest that Shakespeare’s emotions are tied up in young men while his body delights in the attention of women, the sentiments of the poem seem to reach to a much deeper level because of their dependence upon truth rather than idealism. With so many of his sonnets dedicated in such glowing terms to this young man, it becomes clear that whoever he was, he figured strongly in Shakespeare’s mind regardless of the nature of the associated feelings. While the first 17 sonnets are attempts to get the young man to marry and settle down with a family and children, Shakespeare changes his advice with Sonnet 18, from then on exploring the idea that the young man will be better immortalized within the lines of Shakespeare’s poetry than in the creation of future generations. This has been interpreted to suggest that Shakespeare is attempting to replace the necessary creative powers of the woman with his own intellectual creativity and thus keep the young man to himself. This idea is supported further with the idea that “the London of Shakespeare’s time had a homosexual culture which included writers and actors, as well as theatre patrons who paid their pennies to see boy actors playing the parts of women” (Cummings, 2003). While the language Shakespeare uses in his poems continues to present the concept of a passionate desire to a modern audience, suggesting latent homosexual desires, there have been many other interpretations explaining both the use of language and the real intentions of the poet. It is argued that in the sonnets, the issue is not a concern of the young man’s sexuality or a lover’s lament to his male beloved, but is instead a concern with the passing of time and the changes it brings about. The main thrust of Sonnet 55, discussed above, indicates that the beauty of the young man will be preserved in the verse of the poem far more eloquently and completely than it could be if he were preserved in stone or other form of monument. This same concentration can be found in Sonnet 81 where Shakespeare tells the young man, “your memory death cannot take” because “Your monument shall be my gentle verse” (55: 3, 9). According to Gerald Hammond, Shakespeare’s poems are “a claim for the immortality of his subject” (1981: 35). This is illustrated in the ‘monuments’ of Sonnet 55 and Sonnet 81 as well as numerous others while earlier poems, such as the first 17 all dedicated to encouraging the Young Man to marry and have children as a means of capturing some small part of eternity. “William Shakespeare was one of the first poets to recognize that his own work would transcend the ‘gilded monuments / Of princes’” (MacEvoy, 1998). In preserving the ideal of the young man he immortalizes in his poetry, Shakespeare is said not to be writing about his secret love for a young man of his acquaintance, but is instead attempting to preserve his idealistic image of a perfect young man whom he admires and wishes to have duplicated many times over as the epitome of the grand Englishman. “Ideals he [Shakespeare] hopes to see embodied in the ‘fair youth’ are betrayed by the youth’s ‘common’ and vicious character … in response to these degradations and betrayals, the poet affirms his belief that his constancy, humanity and the power of his verse – his spirit in words – will triumph against time and decay. This is the vision of love and faith that the sonnets immortalize, a vision that the pathetic realism makes even more radiant” (Cummings, 2003). The love presented, then, is something much deeper and more profound than the merely homosexual desire of the flesh. While it is not argued that the language used in the sonnets is deliberately phrased in terms of erotic love and reverence, there is a need to place oneself in context of the Elizabethan England of Shakespeare’s time rather than the modern world of the 2000s. Cummings (2003) explains how the language of Shakespeare in depicting the Young Man “is not homosexuality in the erotic way, but something entwined with the pursuit of spiritual, cultural and masculine ideals: rebirth in an admirable brother. It’s beside the point to say that sodomy was a mortal sin in the Renaissance. By focusing on sexuality or impiety, we kill this manly virtue with a modern misinterpretation.” According to Hallet Smith, “The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion. Sonnet 20 makes quite clear the difference between the platonic love of a man for a man, more often expressed in the sixteenth century than the twentieth, and any kind of homosexual attachment” (Smith, 1974: 1746). This statement is verified by numerous other scholars, including Harrison, who says “it was a common belief in Shakespeare’s time that the love of a man for his friend, especially his ‘sworn brother’, was stronger and nobler than the love of man for woman” (Harrison, 1952: 366). While homosexuality was strongly condemned, men expressing love for other men in a platonic sense was exceedingly common. The final indication that Shakespeare was not homosexual or that he was writing for a homosexual audience per se can be found in his chastisement of his female lover for having taken presumably the young man as lover also. This is especially evident in Sonnet 134. In this poem, Shakespeare hopes to convince his female lover to stop seeking the attentions of his younger male friend. “But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, / For thou art covetous, and he is kind” (5-6). That the poet is saddened by the conflicting desires of his friend and lover is obvious, yet the poem reinforces his heterosexuality in the final couplet: “Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me; / He pays the whole, and yet am I not free” (13-14). It is only in this poem and those following that he begins to bring in the concept of sexual desire and carnal actions. In Sonnet 135, for example, Shakespeare playfully puns off of his first name in a way that “actively fantasizes literally about placing his erect penis in the carnal desire of his mistress, where he imagines so many others to have been” (Meloy, 1998: 90). The sullied nature of the mistress thus explains, in part, Shakespeare’s unwillingness to place her in the same sort of idealistic imagery so common for poets of his time period while reinforcing his heterosexual desires as compared to his idealistic spirituality. As this discussion has shown, Shakespeare’s sonnets written to a young man are full of loving verse that idealizes the subject and turns him into an object of spiritual desire. At the same time, his poems dedicated to a lady are dark and bitter, laced with the type of condescension and contempt, particularly when compared to other poets of his day, which would suggest a misogynistic, anti-female attitude. While this has often been interpreted as meaning Shakespeare was at least a closet homosexual, investigation into the social conventions of his time reveal that these approaches were common during the Elizabethan period. Men were much more open about their affections for other men, even when on a strictly platonic level, and women were held in much lower regard than they are today. When assessing Shakespeare’s work, as this study suggests, it is important to understand the cultural differences between the sixteenth century and today. References Booth, Stephen. (1969). An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Yale University Press. Cummings, Michael J. (2003). “The Shakespearean Sonnet: An Overview.” Cummings Study Guides. Available January 10, 2008 from Epstein, Norrie. (1993). The Friendly Shakespeare. New York: Viking. Hammond, Gerald. (1981). The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets. New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Publishers. Harrison, G.B. (Ed.). (1952). Shakespeare: The Complete Works. New York: Harcourt. MacEvoy, Bruce. (December 5, 1998). “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Handprint. Available January 10, 2008 from < http://www.handprint.com/SC/SHK/sonnets.html> Meloy, J. Reid. (1998). The Psychology of Stalking: Clinical and Forensic Perspectives. Burlington, MA: Academic Press. Smith, Hallie. (1974). The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans (Ed.). Boston: Houghton. Spender, Stephen. (1962). “The Alike and the Other.” The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. E. Hubler (Ed.). New York: Basic Books: 91-128. Read More