Shakespeare and Homosexuality

Goran Stanivukovic
Department of English
Saint Mary's University
Halifax
Nova Scotia B3H 3C3
Canada
Forum Mod Lang Stud (2010) 46 (2): 138-151.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqq002
Published:
10 March 2010

Abstract
This article is concerned with the intellectual and cultural constructions of homosexuality in
nineteenth-century scientific writing about sexuality as a precursor to criticism about
homosexuality in Shakespeare's works. It argues that queer early modern criticism of
Shakespeare has illuminated the valences of homoerotic desire in plays and poems, and has paid
tribute to theories that influenced it in the second half of the twentieth century, but it has
remained unreflective on the discursive and critical heritage of the nineteenth century. Thus the
article explores the influence of nineteenth-century German sex science on the development of
the psychology of sexuality and psychoanalysis in England in the nineteenth and the first half of
the twentieth century. Queer theory has in common with nineteenth-century sex science and
theories of homosexuality a focus on character and its interiority. The article examines the
development of the critical ideas about homosexuality in Shakespeare, especially in the sonnets,
as well as major figures who discussed homosexuality in their writing. Among Shakespeare
critics discussed are Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde,
Ernest Jones, Edward Dowden, Walter Thomson and G. Wilson Knight.

Shakespeare criticism, nineteenth-century sex science, queer theory

Issue Section:
Articles

“Homosexuality in the plays [of Shakespeare] has only been found in the last few years, and
doesn't cause much worry,” wrote Simon Shepherd in a 1988 essay summarising the state of
criticism on Shakespeare and homosexuality published in the first half of the twentieth century.1
Shepherd wrote at the beginning of cultural materialist criticism that was then set to change the
ways scholars wrote about Shakespeare and homosexuality. He argued that homosexuality
should be treated as a product of social and economic forces within the cultural sphere, not a
reflection of the idea of homosexuality which society created. Although Shepherd was writing
about the twentieth century, in the literary history of Shakespeare criticism at the turn-of-the-
century – indeed in the short history of queer criticism – homosexuality in Shakespeare had been
a topic before the cultural materialist turn in literary criticism. For example, Oscar Wilde's
homoerotic reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, in The Portrait of Mr. W. H., has continued to
inspire criticism on homosexuality in Shakespeare's works ever since it was first published in
1889. What does it mean, then, two decades after Shepherd's essay to write on the same subject
under much the same title?

This article is less about how critical assessments of homosexuality in Shakespeare since
Shepherd's piece have changed, and more about the “unfinished business in cultural materialism”
which takes into account intellectual and cultural constructions of homosexuality in nineteenth-
century scientific discourse as the intellectual precursor to the literary views of it in
Shakespeare.2 “A goal of cultural materialism,” writes Alan Sinfield, “is to restore literary
writing to the immediate social and political engagement that has previously and elsewhere been
taken for granted, for instance, in the early modern theatre.”3 Yet, this form of social and political
engagement represents only one side of finishing the business of cultural materialism. Changes
in the scientific paradigms and the language used to present them are also forms of material
change within a culture and are thus part of the larger project of cultural materialism. I have in
mind the traffic of knowledge concerning sex psychology between Germany and England in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a flow of ideas which transcended both “idealist”
and “literary” writing; this flow of ideas represents part of the intellectual history of queer early
modern criticism. Historical articulations of homosexuality “as a dynamic mode based on the
sum of one's erotic practice”, and not a “fixed identity”, within a variety of historical discourses
have created a varied and rich formulation of homosexuality in Shakespeare's works.4 They have
also provided critics with models of how to do the history of homosexuality.5 In these approaches
homosexuality is not merely an unchanged historical category, recognised as such at any moment
in history. There is no doubt that the new history of homosexuality has stimulated a lively and
continuing polemics about the presentation of homoerotic desire in Shakespeare's work. Yet, the
achievements of even the best contemporary criticism of homosexuality in Shakespeare come at
a cost. Queer early modern criticism of Shakespeare has illuminated the valences of homoerotic
desire in plays and poems, and has paid tribute to theories that influenced it in the second half of
the twentieth century, but it has remained less reflective on the intellectual and critical heritage
of the nineteenth century.

In Shakespeare and Modernism, Cary DiPietro documents the influence that Freud's writing on
sexuality and his views on Shakespeare had on the intellectual culture of English modernism.6 As
DiPietro argues, “[t]he currency of psychoanalysis in Anglo-Irish culture was greatly accelerated
by the 1913 translations of The Interpretation of Dreams”, in which Freud applies his theory of
the Oedipus complex to Hamlet.7 The story of Freud's influence on the history of modernist
criticism of Shakespeare remains unfinished. But I want to leave the Freudian readings of
homosexuality in Shakespeare and Freud's impact on twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism
aside, not only because the significance of that topic requires separate attention, but also because
Freudian theory of homosexuality is only one aspect of the theories of homosexuality in
Shakespeare in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism. What concerns me here is how
the German psychology of sex contributed to the cultural consciousness of homosexuality in
turn-of-the-century Britain. Because of Freud's prominence in the history of homosexuality, the
story of other Continental scientists who wrote influentially about homosexuality has been either
ignored or reduced to a footnote in queer early modern criticism.

Those early scientific ideas about homosexuality are also important because they help us
complete the picture which traces the development of the historicist method in the study of
Shakespearean homosexualities. Queer theory has tended to consider itself a new, late twentieth-
century theoretical paradigm which came out of theoretical models and social conditions related
to the shifts in the ideological and political status of women and homosexuals. Yet, what queer
theory holds in common with the theories with which I am here concerned is a focus on character
and its interiority. While those nineteenth-century theories reflect the period's interest in
character criticism, current queer theory tilts its arguments at interiority and interrogates its
ambiguities against the historical and political background of the early modern period.

In an article surveying the key critical approaches to early modern sexualities, Bruce R. Smith
states that “Studies of premodern sexuality can be traced to two diverse origins: feminism and
Foucault.”8 This kind of framing cuts current historical research off from the early history of
sexuality in the twentieth century, influenced by feminism and Foucault. For a critical paradigm
grounded in social construction and dependent on historicism, queer theory's silence about its
other cultural predecessors within the history of British culture is both surprising and self-
serving, implying the historical singularity of queer theory. Debates about homosexuality in
nineteenth-century socio-legal and scientific discourses both established the foundations and
created the conditions for disagreement with subsequent theories of homosexuality. As a critical
and ideological paradigm that celebrates the experience of non-normative desire, and which
affirms homosexuality as a force that challenges sexual normativity in culture and society and
that vehemently rejects the earlier notion of homosexuality as pathology, Anglo-American queer
theory has positioned itself theoretically and ideologically against its thematic heritage –
nineteenth-century science. It has done so largely because of the force of Foucault's theory about
different varieties of policing and controlling sexuality, and punishing homosexual behaviour in
the nineteenth century.9 It may, then, be a challenge to queer theory to argue that the socio-legal
policing and scientific pathologising of homosexuality ought to be considered part of the history
of queer theory (however uncomfortable it may be) because at certain points in that history,
especially in Britain, there existed parallel discourses which sharply contrasted the language of
policing, control and repression. I am thus suggesting a new archaeology, pace Foucault, of the
language(s) of homosexuality in the nineteenth century; one that unearths the intersection of the
pathologising and liberal discourses of homosexuality. In light of Foucault's statements that the
“[a]rchaeology [of discourse and knowledge] is much more willing than the history of ideas to
speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity,” a reconsideration of
the historical language of homosexuality in search of discontinuities helps us to discover new
ruptures within the discourse of control.10 Ideas from Continental scientific sexology represent
the earliest cultural origins of the intellectual framing of the criticism of homosexuality in
Shakespeare. Continental sexology is not treated here as a direct influence on Shakespeare
criticism. Rather, it is considered a theoretical foundation of an emerging intellectual culture
within which further ideas about homosexuality and criticism on Shakespeare took place.

Before queer theory: fin-de-siècle Vienna and

London
First named in the second half of the nineteenth century, homosexuality is a concept associated
with the scientific enlightenment of modernity; it is one way of understanding what being in the
body meant both to modern people and to society and how the period saw the body in relation to
sexual object choice. Modernity and homosexuality continue to be linked. The word
“homosexual” was first used by the German-Hungarian Károly Mária Kertebeny in a letter he
wrote to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868. The letter was later published anonymously in 1869 in
Leipzig as two pamphlets arguing for the reform of Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal code
“penalizing sexual relations between men”, on the grounds that private consensual sexual acts
should not be subject to criminal penalty.11 The emergence of homosexuality as a category of
scientific description in fin-de-siècle Central Europe occurred as part of the proliferation of
different discourses about homosexuality which oscillated between pathology and liberalism.

Sexual science, which in Austro-Hungary and Germany emerged from forensic science and
psychiatry, was concerned “with defining and identifying forms of behaviour and diseases
considered deviant and criminal”.12 The overlapping of psychiatric and legal fields gave rise to a
combined pathologisation and criminalisation of homosexuality which continued to frame
discourses of homosexuality throughout the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century. This
view culminated in Richard von Kraft-Ebing's treatise Psychopathia Sexualis (1889), intended
primarily as a medico-forensic compendium for doctors and lawyers on matters of sexual
aberration, since at the time of publication homosexuality in Germany was still punished by
imprisonment. Kraft-Ebing, professor of psychiatry and diseases of the nervous system at the
Royal University of Vienna and a leading doctor in scientific sexual pathology, saw
homosexuality as the most peculiar form of the sexual impulse, to his mind a form of neurotic
disturbance and perversion leading to the degeneration of character. Yet this particular
aberration, Kraft-Ebing acknowledged, was of such great social and legal significance (because it
occurred frequently among children and their parents) that it ought to be of interest to both
medical and legal experts.13 Kraft-Ebing's treatise was the first of many to emerge in Vienna's
medical circles describing sexual inverts (individuals who turn to their own sex for sexual
gratification) and “autoerotics”. This term “autoerotic” was first used by J. Konrad Sadger, an
Austrian doctor for nervous diseases and a psychoanalyst, in his 1913 article “Die psychoanalyse
eines Autoerotikers” (Psychoanalysis of an Autoerotic).14 In Britain, the term “autoerotic” was
less common than “sexual invert”, even if both terms referred to sexual object choice of the same
gender. Following (but also augmenting) the tradition of Kraft-Ebing, Sadger assembled
numerous cases of sexual aberration in children and their parents, as his focus was on familial
homosexuality. Both Kraft-Ebing's and Sadger's theories of sexual pathologies reflect the fear
over, and the danger of, the nudging force of sexuality that was characteristic of fin-de-siècle
intellectual culture and its bourgeois life.15 It is worth emphasising, however, that shortly after
Kraft-Ebing, and just before Sadger, there appeared a challenge to scientific Vienna's promotion
of the pathologisation of homosexuality.

In 1903, the twenty-three-year-old Otto Weininger published his account of gender and desire,
Geschlecht und Charakter, which became one of the most popular books on gender and sex in
the first half of the twentieth century.16 The first English translation was done from the German
original published in 1906. This book provokes by its pronounced misogyny and impresses by its
perceptive approach to the structure and unconscious organisation of male friendship and
homosexuality. It is enough to recall a short paragraph from this work to illustrate its challenge
to the dominant position on homosexual aberration:

It is utterly reprehensible and, moreover, entirely incompatible with the principles of the penal
code, which punishes crime but not sin, to forbid homosexuals to pursue their way of sexual
intercourse while allowing heterosexuals to pursue theirs, if both do so equally without creating a
“public nuisance.”17

The power and clarity of Weininger's views on homosexuality are independent of Kertebeny's
position and clearly oppose the prevailing scientific discourse of the pathologisation of
homosexuality. Nonetheless, the abruptness of Weininger's discourse in this narrative reminds us
how the medical establishment of Vienna ignored his views.

In another memorable passage, Weininger argues for the sexual basis of male friendship:
Nor is there such a thing as a friendship between men that completely lacks an element of
sexuality, although, far from representing the essence of friendship, the very thought of sex is
embarrassing to friends and opposed to the idea of friendship. That this is correct is sufficiently
proved by the mere fact that there can be no friendship between men if their external appearance
has not aroused any sympathy at all between them and they will therefore never come closer to
each other. A great deal of “popularity”, protection, and nepotism among men derives from such
relationships, which are often unconsciously sexual in nature.

The unconscious processes suggested here contrast with the scientific discourse of pathologised
homosexuality, as well as reveal something crucial about the organisation of Vienna's patriarchal
establishment. Yet these quotations suggest that Weininger's book, which mixes psychoanalysis
with social analysis, was a breath of fresh air amid the negative tone of prevalent psychiatric
arguments concerning homosexuality. The refreshing modernity of his view is expressed in the
rejection of the dominant discourse of homosexuality as either criminal or pathological and in the
theorisation of the homosexual impulse as the basis of male friendship. But Weininger's work
reminds us of the parallel and conflicting ideas concerning homosexuality and the progress in
thinking that it marked.

In 1914, one year after Sadger published his treatise about the autoerotic, the Hungarian
psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi introduced what later became a famous essay in the history of
homosexuality: “On the Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoeroticism)”. Augmenting
Sadger's observation about autoerotics and Freud's theory of homosexuality, Ferenczi was the
first to refine a conception of homosexuality along the lines of identity – and not character
pathology. Ernest Jones, who read Sadger and who was once analysed by Ferenczi, keenly
endorsed Ferenczi's theory and promoted its author in England. At the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth century, we witness the tension between the tendency in the 1880s
to pathologise homosexuality – it is most notably the subject of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of
Dorian Gray (first edition, 1890; revised with emendations in 1891) – and the propensity to
present a more liberal view of homosexuality, evident in some early twentieth-century novels,
such as E. M. Foster's Maurice (1914), D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) and Virginia
Woolf's Orlando (1928).
Critics have documented the hostility toward psychoanalysis in Britain, especially before Ernest
Jones's successful institution of it.18 There is an assumption that compared to Continental
psychiatric writing homosexuality was very little written about in Britain before Havelock Ellis.
Yet, as Ivan Crozier has recently demonstrated in an essay assessing “the missing story” of
British psychiatric writing on sexuality, British sexology was at once dependent on the
Continental theories as it developed its own arguments. While German sexologists were
publishing, British writers produced a significant body of work on homosexuality. Although
British writing about homosexuality was “less theoretically sophisticated and less sexually
explicit than Continental sexology”, it was precisely the former characteristic that extended its
appeal to a larger circle of British intellectuals.19 Assumptions about the perverse nature of
homosexuality made in the British writing about it were less rigid, and British discourses of
homosexuality were less a subject of theology and more a “legitimate scientific object”
interested in describing both object choices and gender inversion.20

While British writing on homosexuality was by the 1890s influenced by theory from the
Continent including Kraft-Ebing's work, “it is not sustainable,” as Crozier points out, “that these
home-grown works were largely the product of either conversations with homosexuals [as in the
Continental psychiatric writing], or the challenge of outmoded sexual stereotypes by feminists.”21
In other words, despite the traffic between Britain and the Continent of scientific ideas about sex,
writing by free-thinkers also contributed to the development of cultural discourses in society.
Certain books did a lot to liberalise views on homosexuality, even if the impact of that
liberalisation was not immediately apparent – for example, the 1915 expanded edition of Studies
in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, in which Havelock Ellis and John Addington
Symonds “depathologize homosexuality” and thus rescue it from “the medical profession which
took over social control by converting sin into sickness”.22 Edward Carpenter's pamphlet
Homogenic Love, printed privately in 1893, as well as his book The Intermediate Sex: A Study of
Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908), also promoted an unorthodox view of
homosexuality from a popular point of view. If looked at from our perspective in time, some of
the views expressed in these works appear as an emerging, although not yet coherent, system of
ideas which contrasted homosexuality (or sexual inversion, as the late Victorians would call it) to
the normative category of heterosexuality.23 “A utopian philosopher” who wished to enhance
human self-knowledge about sexuality, Ellis was also crucial in raising awareness of German
sexology theory in Britain and “graft[ing] it onto the already strong tradition of writing about sex
in his home country”.24

Sexual Inversion, the fourth part of the first volume of Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex, is
important to the literary history of homosexuality in Shakespeare criticism because of Ellis'
interest in the subject. Ellis writes that the “sonnets are written in lover's language of a very
tender and noble order” and adds that “They do not appear to imply any relationship that the
writer regarded as shameful or that would be so regarded as shameful or that would be so
regarded by the world.”25 He continues: “There is no other evidence in Shakespeare's work of
homosexual instinct such as we may trace throughout Marlowe, in which there is abundant
evidence of a constant preoccupation with women” (44). Subsequent queer criticism of
Shakespeare would show that there is much more evidence of “homosexual instinct” in
Shakespeare and would reject the autobiographical approach, making redundant such comments
by Ellis as: “Shakespeare […] narrowly escapes inclusion in the list of distinguished inverts”
(44). But at least Ellis addressed the possibility of homosexuality as a theme in the sonnets.

Prior to Ellis, British psychiatrists of homosexuality such as George Savage, Charles Mercier and
Hack Tuke, who took up the study of homosexuality “as a legitimate scientific object rather than
a discursive object of theology”, conducted studies on both “mentally healthy” and “mentally
disturbed” persons.26 Crozier argues that the burgeoning interest in homosexuality evident in the
work of medical practitioners suggests that “contrary to a number of other studies, there was a
significant sexological problem of homosexuality in Britain”.27 Ellis-Addington Smith's and
Carpenter's liberal writings about homosexuality formed the obverse side of that reality. Thus the
libero-cultural and psychiatric discourses of homosexuality constitute the background against
which critical debates about homosexuality in Shakespeare were formulated.

Shakespeare at the turn of the century

Continental and British ideas about homosexuality shaped the intellectual climate under which
nascent work on homosexuality in Shakespeare began to appear in literary criticism. Given the
relative novelty of the term “homosexuality” and the tacit cultural censorship of using it outside
the domain of science, homosexuality is not named as such in this criticism, but rather is
suggested rhetorically through the language of love and beauty. Critics writing about
homosexuality in literature at the end of the nineteenth century seemed particularly interested in
the lives of poets and the relationship of biography to literature. In 1878, John Addington
Symonds stated in his book The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonaroti and Tommaso
Campanella that Michelangelo's sonnets devoted to Tommaso de' Cavalieri, one of the two
“most intimate friends of his [Michelangelo's] old age in Rome”, were autobiographical records
of “the love […] of his youth” expressed in the style of “worshipped Beauty in the Platonic
spirit”.28 Symonds' book expresses the period's interest in biographical criticism, which in
Shakespeare scholarship is best illustrated by Edward Dowden's study, Shakspere: A Critical
Study of His Mind and Art (1875).

A landmark of twentieth-century Anglo-Irish Shakespeare criticism, Dowden's book was

celebrated both in Europe and in the United States. As a study that traces the development of
Shakespeare's work in relation to his life it now appears dated, but the novelty of some isolated
critical points places the book at the threshold of modernity and indeed preserves its value.
Indications that homosexuality is the subject of a cluster of sonnets is one such critical point in
Dowden's study. Reflecting an age in which the word “homosexuality” was rarely conjured
outside of narrow scientific circles, Dowden employs rhetorical circumlocutions to uncover the
tell-tale signs of homosexuality, expressed through the emotional effect of thwarted desire. Here
is Dowden:

Were there in the life of Shakespeare certain events which compelled him to a bitter yet precious
gain of experience in the matter of the wrongs of man to man, and from which he procured
instruction in the different art of bearing oneself justly towards one's wrongs? 29

The speculation is open to interpretation, but against the background of Dowden's analysis of
sonnet 94 (“They that have power to hurt and will do none”) it raises more questions than it
attempts to answer. Dowden's speculation, that in it “we may perhaps discover the sorrow which
first roused his heart and imagination”, suggests that the object of the speaker's grief is of
ambiguous gender. Yet the footnote accompanying this analysis hints at other meanings. First, it
opens with Dowden's disclaimer that “I shall not enter into the controversy as to the
interpretation of the Sonnets” (394) – when one has just been offered. Then he proceeds to list
the “principal theories” of a number of critics, only to cast them aside in the name of a
biographical reading, which is itself problematic and dismissed nowadays. But Dowden's critical
willingness to consider that all the critics listed in his footnote looked for safer explanations to
the sonnets because they were both “jealous of his honour” and “unable to suppose that any
grave moral flaw could have impaired the nobility of [Shakespeare's] life and manhood” (395–6)
leaves room to see more critical weight in his assessment. Yet, if Dowden in fact has
homosexuality in mind, we should consider his assessment of the sonnets – for which no. 94, a
sonnet about the cruelly narcissistic young lover, is his most telling illustration – as a distant
precursor to queer approaches to the sonnets.

What Dowden hints at so elegantly if inexplicitly in his assessment of the sonnets becomes the
subject, which borders on fiction, in Walter Thomson's 1938 privately published edition of the
sonnets. Literary historians, Shakespeare critics and queer scholars have neglected Thomson's
book, which contains a lengthy critical introduction, for reasons that may lie outside literary
historiography, since Thomson did not leave a mark on the history of English literary criticism
and since his book is an expressly whimsical defence of the now discredited theory that the Earl
of Southampton wrote many of the sonnets. Reading his book it is hard not to notice, page after
page, the escalating neurosis about the possibility that Shakespeare might be thought to be
homosexual. Yet his main argument – he calls it “the main purpose” of his monograph – “to
express strong and earnest expostulation against the allegations that Shakespeare in his Sonnets
or elsewhere made confession of moral perversity” and “[t]o expose the hoax perpetrated by
Oscar Wilde and Samuel Butler about the ‘beautiful boy actor, Willie Hughes’” leaves us with an
important record not just of the reaction against the increasingly convincing critical argument in
favour of the homoerotic reading of the sonnets, but also of how such paranoid counter-reactions
could be read as cultural hiding places for precisely the kind of ills they are trying to discredit.30
Might it be that by denying homoeroticism in the sonnets (especially using flimsy critical
methods) Thomson is acknowledging that it may be there, since the larger culture seems to
recognise its existence in those lyrics? Witness Thomson:

Walking into a bookseller's shop in the City of London recently, we met a studious-looking
youth of 18 or 19, and the bookseller told us that the young man had called to ask the number of
the Sonnet in which Shakespeare made confessions of homosexuality. During the last three years
we have asked forty-three people, whom we have casually met, for their views on the question of
the charge of perversity and its bearings. Twenty of them had never heard of it. Twenty-three
had. About half of these did not believe the charge to be true. The remainder believed or were
“inclined to believe there must be something in it,” and the majority of these said that
Shakespeare had lost all charm for them in consequence. (10–11)

Apocryphal or not, the studious-looking youth seems to know what (and why) he is seeking:
whatever attracts him in this sonnet is what the slightly bewildered Thomson and his anonymous
companion are keen to debunk. If Thomson's statistics, invented or not, prove anything, it is that
the “charge of perversity” is missed on at least half of his sample; that acknowledging the fact
that there is something perverse about the sonnets is not clear ground to dismiss these poems
with confidence and conviction. But to return to the bookish youth, titillated by the sonnets:
which sonnet is he looking for? Earlier on the same page on which the above quotation begins,
Thomson draws attention to “Hundreds of quiet unobtrusive students all over the world who may
have mastered satisfactorily for themselves the meaning of the 20th Sonnet” (10), without telling
us what that meaning is, except that it is “unpleasant” (for Samuel Butler) and that it has
“enjoyned reticence” which has ceased to be virtue (10). (Given that this narrative vignette is
framed by the discourse of neurotic rejection of homosexuality in Shakespeare, for Thomson a
quiet and unobtrusive student already signifies a reader who hides perverse feelings.31) That
sonnet – “A woman's face with nature's own hand painted” – has remained at the centre of
debates about stylising homosexuality in the Sonnets. Its speaker “can […] for one reason or
another, afford to be relaxed and urbane […] on the subject of sexual interchangeability of males
and females – as long as the addressing is male.”32 Thus “the master-mistress of my passion”
which appears gender-ambiguous becomes at once the source of pleasure as well as of anxiety
because it evades clear homo- and heterosexual distinction for the modern reader, or, more
precisely, the anxious reader like Thomson.33 Because the sonnet presents this “sexual
interchangeability” under the guise of heterosexual “socialisation”, it could be said to frustrate
the anxious reader, like Thomson, but not the eager seeker of it, like the studious-looking youth,
because of the perversion which unfolds only in the act of reading: it makes homoerotic longing
constituent of heterosexual desire (“since she [the nature] pricked thee out for women's
pleasure,/Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure” [11–12]).34 Even Thomson's heavy-
footed argument against homosexuality in the sonnets cannot defeat the fact that homoeroticism
of the sonnets is in the act of reading, as the youth in the bookshop seems already to know. That
argument only reveals Thomson as the neurotic reader of Shakespeare, one whose outlandish
theories about the nature and authorship of the Sonnets are a reminder of the anxiety which
progressive cultural and psychological discourses of homosexuality (and consequently of
Shakespeare criticism) engendered in the early twentieth century.
Despite the theoretical resistance to reading homosexuality in Shakespeare's person, and then
projecting that reading onto his poetry, the autobiographical method of assessing love and desire
(these words were preferred over sex and sexuality) in Shakespeare's sonnets culminates in the
1955 publication of G. Wilson Knight's book, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare's Sonnets and
The Phoenix and the Turtle. Simon Shepherd has written a short but lucid account of Knight's
intimation of homosexuality in the sonnets, considering The Mutual Flame a precursor to cultural
materialist writing on the subject.35 This is the moment to return to the opening remark about
Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H., paying particular attention to the nature of desire attributed to
the addressee, which has started to preoccupy the attention of modern critics. In a recent
psychoanalytic reading of Wilde's essay, Richard Halpern uses Freud's work on Leonardo and
the Freudian theory of the repression of the homosexual instinct to argue that for Wilde
“aesthetic experience [of the Sonnets] is both the ‘truth’ and the origin of sexual desire”, a
principle which Wilde “borrows from Shakespeare”.36 Whilst Halpern is primarily concerned
with how homosexuality speaks not through art but as art in Shakespeare's sonnets, his argument
is potentially a sketch for reconstructing how literary ideas about homosexuality in Shakespeare
defined the modernist writing about desire at the turn of the century; how modernist theories of
desire, primarily psychoanalysis, shifted the modernist writing from an idealistic writing about
characters to a more specific assessment of desire and sexuality with a noticeable interest in
homosexuality. This new turn in the modernist criticism of Shakespeare was largely stimulated
by the provocative and explicit writing about sex psychology and the physiology of the sexual
experience of both genders that came to Britain through the tradition of varied writings about
sex. This tradition started with Kraft-Ebing, Freud, Ferenczi and Weininger outside Britain, and
then exerted influence on Sadger, Ellis, Carpenter and Ernest Jones in Britain.

In the 1910 issue of The American Journal of Psychology, Jones's essay “The Oedipus Complex
as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery” (1910) appeared in response to Freud's 1900 paper on
the interpretation of dreams (“Traumdeutung”). In 1923, Jones offered a continuation entitled “A
Psycho-Analytic Study of Hamlet”.37 These two essays became the foundation of his acclaimed
short book Hamlet and Oedipus, published in 1949. Although this book is “a heavily Freudian
work that has proven almost as popular with readers of Shakespeare criticism as Bradley's
Shakespearean Tragedy”, it is relevant to this discussion not so much because it applies the
Oedipus complex to Hamlet but because it openly addresses sexuality in Shakespeare – through
Jones's careful interpretation of the sexual basis of Hamlet's Oedipal complex.38 It also
documents the dependence of Jones's criticism on the German sex theories and psychology
embedded in the English (including his own) theories of sex. One work that influenced Jones is
Karl Rosner's study Shakespeares Hamlet im Lichte der Neuropathologie (1895; Shakespeare's
Hamlet in the light of neuropathology).39 Jones, who spoke German well, combined Rosner's
theory of Hamlet as a “hystero-neurasthenic” with the Freudian theory of psychoneurosis, which
“signifies internal mental conflict” (77) repressed in the unconscious.40 One of the complicating
factors of this repression stems not only from the suicidal drive but also from the ambiguity of
the sexual instinct and the object – mother/Gertrude – at which that instinct is directed. Jones
stops short of implicating Hamlet and homosexuality (and no critic, to the best of my knowledge,
has yet called Hamlet a repressed homosexual), but he introduces possibilities for further study
of sex and sexuality in Shakespeare. Jones brings up the issue of Hamlet's “sex-repression
towards Ophelia”, something he mentioned to Freud earlier, in a letter written in Toronto as early
as 1909.41 In Hamlet and Oedipus Jones wove the scientific tradition of German neurology and
sex psychology into new critical arguments about literature, marking an important moment in the
history of Shakespeare criticism in the twentieth century.

Jones betokens the end of the history of writing about Shakespearean sexualities in the first half
of the twentieth century. The history of queer early modern criticism in Britain began in the
psychological laboratories of fin-de-siècle Central Europe and London. Queer early modern
criticism of Shakespeare has borrowed from psychoanalysis and from early modern anatomy
selectively, but not from the history of psychiatry (and its debates with psychoanalysis at the turn
of the century), a methodology which narrowed the picture of its historical origins as a
theoretical paradigm. Theories do not always have either easy or positive beginnings, and
perhaps queer theory may not wish to claim its origin and heritage in the language of pathology.
However, queer theory arguably belongs both to the heritage of nineteenth-century medical
discourses of pathology and to the twentieth-century discourses which affirmed homosexuality
as a category of sexuality. Both the nineteenth-century paradigm of homosexuality and queer
theory are produced through the processes of thinking, describing, interpreting, collecting
evidence of, and speculating on, what it says about interiority. If these historical origins of queer
theory were acknowledged to be aspects of the development of a discipline, we would be able to
talk about a history of queer theory in a manner similar to how we talk today about a history of
the sciences of sexuality, or a history of Shakespeare criticism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Leah Ellingwood for her assistance with research for this article, to Basil
Chiasson for his deft reading of it, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada for a grant that supported this research.

NOTES
1
Simon Shepherd, “Shakespeare's Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality”, in: The
Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester, 1988), pp. 96–110 (p. 96).

2
I borrow this phrase from Alan Sinfield's book Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished
Business in Cultural Materialism (Abingdon & New York, 2006).

3
Ibid., p. 30.

4
Valerie Traub, “Desire and the Differences it Makes”, in: The Matter of Difference: Materialist
Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York & London, 1991), pp. 81–114 (p. 88).

5
David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago, 2002).

6
Cary DiPietro, Shakespeare and Modernism (Oxford, 2006).

7
Ibid., p. 75.

8
Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities”, PMLA 115:3 (2000), pp. 318–29 (p. 326).

9
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, ed. Robert Hurley (New
York, 1990).

10
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse of Language, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), p. 169.

11
The title of one of Kertebeny's pamphlets is Das Gemainschädliche des §143 des preusalschen
Strafgesetzbuches vom 14 April 1851 und daher seine notwendige Tilgung als §152 im Entwurfe
eines Stafgesetzbuches für den Norddeutschen Bund [Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code
and its maintenance as Paragraph 152 of the draft of a Penal Code for the North German
confederation]. Available online at <http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com>. Last accessed 12
February 2009.

12
Kevin S. Amidon, “Sex on the Brain: The Rise and Fall of German Sexual Science”, Endeavour
32:2 (2008), pp. 64–9 (p. 65).

13
See Dr. R. v Kraft-Ebing, Aberrations of Sexual Life after the “Psychopatia Sexualis” of Dr. R.
v. Kraft-Ebing, a medico-legal study for doctors and lawyers brought up to date and issued by
Alexander Hartwich, trans. Arthur Vivian Burbury (London: Staples Press, 1959).

14
J. Sadger, “Die Psychoanalyse eines Autoerotikers”, Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und
psychopathologische Forschungen 5 (1913), pp. 467–528.

15
Harry Oosterhuis, “‘Plato war doch gewiss kein Schweinenhund’: Richard von Kraft-Ebing und
die homosexuelle Identität”, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtseissenschaften 9:3 (1998),
pp. 358–83 (p. 383). An earlier and longer version of this article appeared in Zeitschrift für
schwule Geschichte 24 (1997), pp. 2–27.

16
“Almost every year between 1903 and 1932 a new edition […] appeared.” See Otto Weininger,
Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb, ed. Daniel
Steuer with Laura Marcus (Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2005), p. xix.

17
Ibid., p. 45–6.

18
See Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland & Laura Doran
(Chicago, 1998), pp. 42–57; Brenda Maddox, Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones
(London, 2006), and The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–
1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskausas (Cambridge, MA & London, 1993).

19
Ivan Crozier, “Nineteenth-Century British Psychiatric Writing about Homosexuality before
Havelock Ellis: The Missing Story”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 63:1
(2007), pp. 65–102 (p. 67).

20
Ibid., p. 74.

21
Ibid., p. 101.

22
John Bancroft, “A History of Sexual Medicine in the United Kingdom”, Journal of Sexual
Medicine 2 (2005), pp. 569–74 (p. 571).

23
This argument is elaborated in Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual
Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920 (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of
California Press, 1994).

24
Ivan Dalley Crozier, “‘Taking Prisoners’: Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and the Construction
of Homosexuality, 1897–1951”, Sexual History of Medicine 13:3 (2000), pp. 447–66 (p. 449).

25
Ellis, Sexual Inversion, Vol. I, part four of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1936), p.
43.

26
Crozier, “Nineteenth-Century”, p. 74.

27
Ibid., p. 93.
28
Cited from Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality: A Sourcebook, ed. Chris White
(London & New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 188.

29
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875), p. 394.

30
Walter Thomson (ed.), The Sonnets of William Shakespeare & Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of
Southamtpon (Oxford & Liverpool: Printed and Sold for the Editor by Basil Blackwell and
Henry Young & Sons Ltd, 1928), n.p.

31
At another point in his book, Thomson's perverse habit of reading the sonnets climaxes in the
speculation that rumours of homosexuality in Shakespeare are part of a German-inspired plan to
soften English readers up morally prior to war (p. 33ff). I thank Philip Parry for drawing my
atttention to Thomson's book.

32
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New
York, 1985), p. 35.

33
The text of the Sonnets is quoted throughout from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stanley Wells, The
Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1985).

34
Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 35.

35
Shepherd, “Shakespeare's Private Drawer”, p. 99.

36
Richard Halpern, Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud,
and Lacan (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 32–58 (p. 2).

37
Jones states that this essay “formed the first chapter of [his] Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis”,
long out of print at the time when Hamlet and Oedipus was published. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and
Oedipus (Garden City, 1949), p. 7.
38
Michael Taylor, Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2001), p. 49.

39
Jones refers to it on p. 74 in Hamlet and Oedipus.

40
Ibid.

41
Letter no. 18 in The Complete Correspondence (p. 29).

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