SEL53, 1 (Winter 2013):53-71 53 ISSN 0039-3657 © 2013 Rice University Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse REBECCA YEARLING If it be sinne to love a lovely Lad; Oh then I sinne |, for whom my soul is sad. —Richard Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Complaint of “Daphnis” for the Love of “Ganymede” When Richard Barnfield published The Affectionate Shep- heard. Containing the Complaint of ‘Daphnis" for the Love of “Gany- mede” in 1594, it did not meet with universal approval. The poem, a pastoral work describing the love of the shepherd Daphnis for the boy Ganymede, was apparently regarded as being too overt in its homoeroticism, as can be seen from the preface to Barnfield’s next volume of poetry, Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra (1595), in which he writes: “Some there were, that did interpret The affectionate Shepheard, otherwise then (in truth) I meant, touching the subiect thereof, to wit, the love of a Shepheard to a boy; a fault, the which I will not excuse, because I never made.” This preface is rather obliquely phrased, but it seems clear that Barnfield’s aim ts to excuse and defend his previous work against detractors who felt that his subject—a homoerotic relationship—was inappropriate. His defense is that these readers have misunderstood: the subject was not a “fault” because his poem was intended as “nothing else but an imita- tion of Virgill, in the second Eglogue of Alexis.”? In other words, Barnfield attempts to protect himself and his poem by claiming Rebecca Yearling is a teaching fellow at the University of Bristol. She is working on a monograph on Ben Jonson, John Marston, and early modern dramatic satire.54 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse that his work was not intended to be a celebration of homoeroti- cism but was merely a display of respectable classical imitatio. When Shakespeare's sonnets were first published as Shake- Speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted in 1609, they too appear to have met with no notable success.‘ Very little is known about the reception of the first edition, but the sonnets were not included in the 1623 Folio, and there was no second edition until 1640.° Moreover, the publisher of that second edition, John Benson, was able to imply that the poems had never been printed before, which suggests that they had not become generally popular.° Benson's edition famously bowdlerized the sonnets, renaming some of them in order to imply that they were directed to a woman and, in three places, changing the sex of pronouns to create a greater sense of sexual orthodoxy.’ It is therefore possible that, similar to Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepheard, Shakespeare's sonnets were considered too obviously homoerotic to be entirely acceptable in their original form. However, other displays of homoeroticism in the early mod- er period seem to have met with no objections. Christopher Marlowe's erotic narrative poem Hero and Leander, published in 1598, became a hugely popular work, even though it focuses far more on describing the physical charms of its hero than those of its heroine: His bodie was as straight as Circes wand, Ioue might haue sipt out Nectar from his hand. Euen as delicious meate is to the tast, So was his necke in touching, and surpast ‘The white of Pelops shoulder.* Similarly, Shakespeare had written lingering descriptions of male beauty in his ca, 1592 Venus and Adonis: a poem that was so much in demand that it went through seventeen quarto editions between 1593 and 1641:° At this Adonis smiles as in disdain, That in each cheek appears a pretty dimple; Love made those hollows, if himself were slain, He might be buried in a tomb so simple.'? There are also numerous references to homoerotic themes and explorations of same-sex attraction in the drama of the time, and there is evidence that such works found a popular audience. Forwu w Rebecca Yearling example, the boy actors of the Whitefriars Theatre company of 1607-08. the Children of the King’s Revels, produced a number of highly successful bawdy romantic comedies, full of homoerotic innuendo and “gender-bending banter.”"' Although the Whitefriars boys seem to have been unusual in making homoerotic bawdry their principal stock-in-trade, there are also many other Renais- sance plays that engage with homoerotic or pederastic ideas and themes. |? There have been numerous attempts by critics to explain these discrepancies in reception—to find the reason why some homoerotic literary works of the early modern period should have met with popular dislike or disapproval, while others, apparently equally explicit in their content, passed unremarked—and over the next few pages, I shall examine some of these attempts and consider how far they go in explaining why the sonnets and Af Jfectionate Shepheard might have been considered less acceptable ‘than the erotic epyllia of Shakespeare and Marlowe or the bawdy plays of the public and private theaters. I will then go on to suggest my own explanation, which is that Barnfield and Shakespeare met with disapproval in great part because of the mode they used for their homoerotic poems: lyric verse rather than narrative or dramatic verse. Lyric is an unruly literary mode, which works to blur or break down the boundaries between author and text, reader and subject. It is a suggestive and ambiguous form of writ- ing. which aims to draw the reader into the fictional world to a greater degree than other forms do. As a result, it may well have been perceived as more disturbing than other literary modes when it was used to explore controversial sexual sentiments. I begin, however, with the explanations offered by previous critics. One of the most common ways for scholars to explain why some early modern homoerotic works were censured and others were celebrated is for them to cite the period's complex and often confused attitudes toward same-sex love. Sexual relationships between men had, of course, been illegal ever since 1533-34, when Henry VIII's Parliament passed the Buggery Act, proclaiming that “the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast” should become a capital offense.'* However, buggery—or sodomy, as it was also known—is famously “an ut- terly confused category.” Not just a crime in itself, it was, in the Renaissance, also an activity that was linked in the public mind to a whole host of other crimes, all of which are symptomatic of a breakdown in social and religious order, such as atheism, papism, treason, and witchcraft.!* As the literature of the time36 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse makes clear, homosexual activity was believed to stem not so much from a particular preference by a minority of individuals for their own gender—as homosexuality is generally perceived today—but rather was considered as a more general symptom of moral decay and degeneration. '® Given these associations, the usefulness of the word “sodomy” as a descriptive sexual term was necessarily limited. “Sodomy” described acts that disrupted the social order; its rhetoric had no place for variant sexual acts that did not affect the social order. Indeed, as Harriette Andreadis remarks, the rhetoric of sodomy was associated with “alterity ... ‘otherness™ to the extent that many individuals involved in same-sex erotic activities might not have made the connection at all between their own behavior and the crime of sodomy.” The situation was complicated still further by the early mod- ern period's idealization of male friendship. The ideal of male friendship—inspired partly by classical models and the concept of amicitia, and partly by society's devaluing of women as suitable companions for men—was a passionate yet chaste relationship, in which the friend was a figure both of emulation and competi- tion. Much of the Renaissance social system was based on male friendships, allegiances, and loyalties: homosociality, to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term, was a way of intensifying social bonds. of reinforcing the social hierarchy, rather than disrupting it.” From this point of view, homosociality was the very opposite of sodomy. Nevertheless, although the early moderns were keen to distin- guish between homosocial attachments and “that other, licentious Greek love,” these categories of relationships were not actually as distinct as some would have liked.'* In fact, homosoctality seems often to have involved a strong homoerotic element. Stephen Orgel refers to the “sanctioned homocroticism that played so large a role in relationships between men” during this time: male friends might declare their devotion to one another, kiss and embrace, and even share a bed.”” The homoerotic elements to these homosocial relationships do not, of course, necessarily imply anything more than friend- ship. We cannot assume that any of these close male friends were having a sexual relationship with each other. Although equally, as Stephen Guy-Bray points out, we cannot assume that any of these male friends were not having a sexual relationship either.** Charting the precise relationships between men in the Renais- sance thus seems an almost impossible task. As Sedgwick sug-Rebecca Yearling 7 gests, rather than sexuality being polarized, there seems rather to have been a “potentially unbroken ... continuum between homosocial and homosexual” in the early modern period.” Despite this continuum, the rhetoric of same-sex love and desire was polarized. On the one hand was homosexuality (or rather, sodomy): a crime against nature, God, and society. On the other hand was homosociality: a healthy, natural way for men to strengthen social bonds and assert their masculinity. As far as early modern rhetoric was concerned, there was a vast gulf between these two states—even if, as may have been the case, some homosocial relationships involved acts that would today be seen as homosexual What seems to have mattered to the early moderns, therefore, was not so much what individuals did as what social impact their behavior had: that is, whether the relationship disrupted the so- cial system. It was this that determined whether same-sex sexual relationships were sodomitical or not. Thus, the same-sex relation- ships of literature, when they are presented sympathetically, are almost invariably ones that do not pose a threat to established social structures. In other words, they are relationships that are homoerotic, or even homosexual, without being sodomitical.”* Sodomy was associated with confusion, disorder, the trans- gression of boundaries, in-betweenness, and disruptions to social norms. As a result, writers who wished to treat homoerotic re- lationships in a sympathetic way needed to present them within strict frameworks in order to render them harmless. Firstly, as | have suggested above, they needed to emphasize that the same- sex relationship in question was in keeping with propriety, not disrupting the social norms but simply corresponding with the usual relationship between two close male friends, or between a man and his servant. Secondly, many writers developed further strategies of containment in the form of distancing devices. For example, two of the most famous and influential works of the late sixteenth century—Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia and Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender—toy with ho- moerotic themes, but in both, the homoeroticism is presented in such a way that its socially disruptive power is contained and deflected within the text.?* In cach of these works, a strategy of indirection takes place as the writer flirts with homoerotic themes while at the same time essentially denying what he reveals and refusing to explore the possibilities he raises, titillating without consummating.58 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse Yet Shakespeare's sonnets and Barnfield’s poem do employ distancing devices of this kind. As I noted earlier, Barnfield at- tempts to excuse his poem's “fault” by blaming Virgil, insisting that all he was doing was imitating an carlier (and eminently respectable) writer, rather than actively choosing to write a piece of homoeroticism per se. In the same way, the sonnets employ a kind of strategy of indirection by making use of the ambiguities of friendship rhetoric: the language of courtly interchange, patron- age, and amity, which, as Orgel puts it, “implies everything and nothing.” Although the sonnets describe the speaker's love for the youth, it is often difficult to say whether that love is intended in a homosocial or homoerotic sense. Thus, by making use of the overlap between the rhetoric of sexual love and male friendship, Shakespeare managed to create a highly suggestive yet elusive impression of the relationship between the poet and the young man he addresses in the early sonnets. The young man may be the “master mistress” of the speaker's passions, yet the speaker takes care to deny any interest in actual homosexual intercourse, telling the youth And for a woman wert thou first created, Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick’d thee out for women's pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.?° However, these distancing strategies were apparently not enough. Barnfield’s and Shakespeare's lyric poems still appear to have met with distaste or even censure in a way that Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Sidney's Arcadia, and plays such as Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will, As You Like It, Ben Jonson's Epicene, and John Mar- ston's What You Will did not.2” The questions remain: what made Shakespeare's sonnets and Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepheard different? Why were they frowned upon when other explicitly homoerotic texts were not? Another possible explanation is that both Barnfield's and Shakespeare's texts were published in a way that encouraged autobiographical reading. In Affectionate Shepheard, Barnfield clearly identifies himself with his speaker, Daphnis, signing himself that way in the book’s dedication to Lady Penelope Rich: “Your Honours most affectionate / and perpetually devotedRebecca Yearling 539 Shepheard: / DAPHNIS.”* Similarly, while many other writers of sonnet sequences write under a pseudonym (as in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella), Shakespeare's sonnets name the author in the titlh—Shake-speares Sonnets—implying a direct correlation between the sentiments they express and the author's own views.” ‘The sense that both Barnfield and Shakespeare may have been expressing their own real emotions of homoerotic attraction in these poems may have repelled some readers. Both these explanations—firstly, that Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepheard and Shakespeare's sonnets did not go far enough with their distancing strategies, and secondly, that the works may have come across as somehow autobiographical—are in their way persuasive. However, | believe that neither explanation gives the whole story, and that a further explanation needs to be added: that the form itself—lyric verse—was a great part of the problem. Lyric verse is an intense, personal literary form—a first- person, present-tense take on the world, which gives the impres- sion that the speaker is directly recounting his own emotions and sensations. Lyric verse may not be confessional, but it often gives that impression; it is intimate, immediate, and emotional. The reader is encouraged to sympathize and even identify with the speaker: the voice in his ear. Moreover, lyric verse often has the effect of making the reader into the addressee. In “The Three Voices of Poetry.” T. S. Eliot sug- gests that the reader of lyric is put into the position of an eaves- dropper, overhearing the poet's address to someone else or his or her private thoughts.*! However, in some lyric verse the reader may actually be encouraged to take on the role of the person or persons being addressed, as the speaker addresses him or her as “you.” This is the case throughout the sonnets and becomes the case in the sixteenth stanza of Affectionate Shepheard. Barnfield initially begins his poem in the first and third person as the shep- herd laments “th’ unhappy sight / Of that faire Boy that had my hart intangled” (“Daphnis,” lines 3-4). However, ninety-five lines in, the speaker, Daphnis, moves into the second person: Oh would to God he would but pitty mee, ‘That love him more than any mortall wight; ‘Then he and I with love would soone agree. That now cannot abide his Sutors sight. O would to God (so I might have my fee) My lips were honey, and thy mouth a Bee. (‘Daphnis,” lines 91-6, emphasis added)60 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse The reader, who has until this point been merely in the position of confidant (or eavesdropper), is now moved into the position of love object as “he” becomes “you”; his mouth becomes “thy mouth.” As the critic Richard Bradford remarks, of all the voices of po- etry, it is the lyric that comes closest to being a performative “in which the hearer is addressed directly and drawn into the context of the utterance.”*? These works—the sonnets and Afjectionate Shepheard—pull the reader or listener into a dense network of deictic references; for example, Barnfield declares, “My lips were honey and thy mouth a bee,” while Shakespeare writes, “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, / Now is the time that face should form another” (Sonnet 3, lines 1-2, emphasis added). They also involve directly performative speech acts: they make promises, pleas, threats, apologies, or requests, which demand a response. They imply an ongoing relationship between speaker and listener, and there is no space for the reader within the poem unless he assumes the position of the person being addressed. With heterosexual lyric, of course, this may be brushed off more easily: the speaker is clearly addressing a woman, and the male reader is not really the love object. However, obviously homo- erotic lyrics may have been more disturbing to the male reader.** Moreover, ironically in the case of Barnfield’s poem, if the listener or reader proves an unwilling love partner—if he refuses to be seduced by Daphnis's elaborate rhetorical displays and tearful pleading—then he is placing himself in the exact position of the lovely but unwilling Ganymede.** Barnfield’s Daphnis has built the listener's own response into his poem, explaining how he will react if his listener, the poem's “you,” does not succumb to his blandishments: But if thou wilt not pittie my Complaint, My teares, nor Vowes, nor Oathes, made to thy Beautie; What shall I doo? But languish, die, or faint, Since thou dost scorne my Teares, and my Soules Duetie. (‘Daphnis,” lines 199-202) ‘The reluctant male reader is thus placed in an impossible situ- ation as both to resist and to submit to the poem's charms is to be implicated homoerotically. By contrast. Elizabethan erotic narrative poetry—such as Hero and Leander—avoids the lyric’s sense of intimacy. Hero and Leander is, in fact, brought to us by a first-person narrator, but this narrator is, for the most part, detached and ironic, creatingRebecca Yearling 6 a sense of distance between the reader and the subject. Accord- ingly, although the reader may enjoy the lingering descriptions of Leander's beauty, the eroticism is undercut by our awareness of the narrator's presence, as he teases us with his revelations: I could tell ye, How smooth his brest was, and how white his bellie, And whose immortall fingers did imprint, That heavenly path, with many a curious dint, ‘That runs along his backe, but my rude pen, Can hardly blazon forth the loues of men. Much lesse of powerfull gods. (Hero and Leander, sig. A4r) The “I could tell you—but I won't” formula tantalizes the reader, simultaneously inviting him or her to share in the pleasure of ogling Leander and frustrating that desire.** Moreover, it mocks the reader's own implied salaciousness for being frustrated, for wanting to know more. There is here, therefore, a kind of complic- ity or understanding between speaker and reader, but it is quite different from that of a poem such as Affectionate Shepheard. In Hero and Leander, the narrator and the reader may be united in their momentary desire for Leander, but there is no deeper bond between them. The narrator is certainly not attracted to the reader in the way that Barnfield's shepherd appears to be attracted to his reader, his “you.” This is not to argue that all male readers of Shakespeare's sonnets to the youth or Barnfield/Daphnis's erotic pleadings with Ganymede imagine themselves directly addressed. It is merely to suggest that the intimacy of the lyric form could make the reading experience uneasy in a way that reading the same sen- timents expressed via another medium—such as in a narrative poem—would not be. Another reason why homoerotic lyric poetry might be seen to be more disturbing than homoerotic narrative poetry might be be- cause of its play with gender boundaries. Homoerotic desire in the early modern period was frequently associated with androgyny, with sexual indeterminacy, and so the fact that, in the sonnets, Shakespeare is employing a poetic form far more conventionally associated with addressing women than men might also add to the sonnets’ perceived disturbingness. As M. L. Stapleton has suggested, the sonnets’ turning of sonnet convention on its head, using the form to describe male beauty rather than female, has62 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse the effect of feminizing their subject as the youth is forced to play the traditional female role as the object of beauty and worship.°° Moreover, the youth is effeminized in other ways. He not only has a “woman's face,” but he is also described as resembling his mother: “Thou art thy mother's glass” (Sonnet 20, line 1; and Sonnet 3, line 9). There are comparable moments in Barnfield in which Daphnis beseeches Ganymede to “be my Boy, or else my Bride” and offers him the gift of “[a] silken Girdle, and a drawn-worke Band, / Cuffs for thy wrists, a gold Ring for thy finger” ("Lamentation,” lines 78 and 90-3). Ganymede Is, it appears, being made into a kind of surrogate wife, complete with wedding ring. The male reader of these poems, who is placed in the position of the youths, is there- fore feminized in turn. In addition to transforming the listener into the love object, these lyrics transform the love object into a pseudowoman, unsettling notions of sexual identity still further. In fact, Leander and Adonis, the heroes of the homoerotic epyllia, are somewhat similar to Shakespeare's youth and Barn- field's Ganymede in that they too are presented within their texts in a feminized manner. Leander, who looks like “a maid in man's attire,” and Adonis, that “[s|tain to all nymphs. more lovely than a man,” are sexually titillating, opening out erotic possibilities by appearing to be both masculine and feminine at the same time (Hero and Leander, sig. A4v; and Venus and Adonis, line 9). However, within these narrative poems, gender ambiguity is only allowed to go so far. In both Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, the literal homoeroticism of the situation—male poets describing beautiful youths, who themselves seem neither entirely male nor entirely female—is deflected because the descriptions are set within heterosexual frameworks. We may be teased by sug- gestions of homoeroticism within the poems, as with Marlowe's description of Neptune's attraction to Leander: [Neptune] clapt [Leander’s] plumpe cheekes, with his tresses playd, And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayd. He watcht his armes, and as they opend wide, At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide, And steale a kisse. (sig. D4r) Yet although Marlowe acknowledges the existence of homoerotic desire, he insists that it will not be actualized within the poem:Rebecca Yearling 63 “Leander made replic, / You are deceau'd, I am no woman I’ (sig. D4v). Leander is a heterosexual who apparently cannot conceive of male-male sexual relationships. Venus and Adonis is a more complex case, given Adonis’s reluctance to engage in heterosexual activity with Venus and his preference for the company of his male friends. Nevertheless, this disillusionment with heterosexual love does not correspondingly lead to a celebration of homoerotic love. Adonis's relationship with his friends is restricted to the manly homosocial pursuit of hunting. It is thus harmless for the male reader to admire the beauty of Leander, or of Adonis, because nothing will ever come of that admiration. The heroes may ap- pear androgynous, but in their behavior they are unambiguously heterosexual or—at most—youthfully uninterested in sexual play of any kind. Thus, similar to Sidney in the Arcadia or Spenser in Shepheardes Calender, Shakespeare and Marlowe play with ho- moerotic themes and ideas in these poems yet never allow them to come to any real fruition. Moreover, the fact that both Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis are told in the past tense emphasizes the sense of them as closed and completed forms. In Venus and Adonis, the sexual ambiguity of the situation—will Adonis eventually succumb to Venus's demands, or will he reject her permanently?—is resolved by his death. He will never experience full heterosexual love, but he will never engage in homosexual encounters cither. Marlowe's poem is left slightly more open as it ends before Leander’s drown- ing, but nevertheless, his readers, who would know the classical story, would be aware that he will not be engaging in further erotic adventures, either hetero- or homosexual. after his final encounter with Hero.% No matter how erotically complex or ambiguous the male protagonists’ lives may have been up until that point, by the time we finish reading, the ambiguity is over. The past tense of these narrative poems emphasizes that the situation as it has been recounted is fixed and unchangeable. By contrast, the lyric poems are far more structurally open-ended. The present tense of lyric verse allows for the possibility of changes happening in the future. The lyric poems open out erotic possibilities, rather than shutting them off.°* This is not to say that these narrative poems met with no censure at the time. The epyllion was a controversial form, be- lieved to be potentially dangerous in its ability to inflame lust in its readers. Gabriel Harvey, for example, criticized the *brothell Muse” that produced such works, while in A Mad World My Mas- ters, Thomas Middleton has a character refer to “wanton pam-64 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse phlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis ... two luscious mary-bone pies.” Such reading, he implies, is not appropriate for innocent young people. Nevertheless, although the epyllia were potentially transgres- sive, in their explorations of the fluidity of desire and their ten- dency to blur the boundaries between hetero- and homosexual, they did this in a fundamentally “safe” manner. The narrative form acts as a way of keeping the sexual ambiguity in check. The reader is allowed to play with homoerotic emotions and enjoy them because they never become too real or immediate. ‘The situation is much the same within Shakespeare's cross- dressing plays. Twelfth Night, for example, is in some respects a saturnalian comedy, celebrating confusion and the blurring of conventional social boundaries, and in it, Shakespeare tantalizes his spectators with suggestions of same-sex love and sexual at- traction, both between men and between women. Akin to Leander and Adonis, Viola's Cesario appears neither like a man nor like a woman but somewhere in between. Orsino believes that she is male, but comments that “Diana’s lip / Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound.” Jan Kott remarks on how this description “oscillates between the anatomy of a girl and boy” with its references first to a “pipe” and then to a “maiden’s organ."* Cesario is a provocative figure because s/he can be all things to all men (and women), suggesting the possibility of shifting, polymorphous pleasure. However, the play ultimately steps back from this to reaffirm heterosexual norms. At the conclusion, the saturnalia is over: Viola, the androgynous cause of all the play's confusion, stops being ambiguous and becomes properly female again. It has been frequently noted that her union with Orsino never actually takes place within the text; rather, it is explicitly delayed until she has been put in her woman's clothes once more.** As Orsino remarks: Cesario, come— For so you shall be while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy's queen.“ Twelfth Night is transgressive in its questioning of gender roles and constructions, yet it also suggests that gender confusion and homoerotic playfulness cannot be allowed to continue forever.“ Viola must ultimately be returned to her woman's “habits” in order to become a heterosexual bride. As in Shakespeare's otherRebecca Yearling 65 main cross-dressing comedy, As You Like It, the characters pass through same-sex desire and experimentation with gender am- biguity only in order to realize ultimately their orthodox, hetero- sexual destiny. These early modern plays. similar to the early modern nar- rative poems previously discussed, are thus both self-contained and closed fictions. They create a world that is, for the most part, separate from that of the reader or spectator, The presence of the reader or spectator may be acknowledged, and he or she may even. occasionally be addressed directly by the narrator or characters, but otherwise there is little real overlap between fictional world and real world. Moreover, at the end of each work, the problems and conflicts that have been raised during its course are ended or resolved, either happily or unhappily, and there is a sense of completion and closure. Even though the texts may have played with issues of gender ambiguity and same-sex attraction, their conclusions tend to negate that possibility. Disguised women such as Viola, Rosalind, and Portia reveal their true gender and go on to marry men; the boy Epicene has his sodomitical marriage to Morose dissolved; and the pederast Simplicius is crowned as a fool. Heterosexual norms are reestablished. By contrast, as I have discussed above, the world of erotic lyric is neither self-contained nor closed. The use of the first person and the tendency to refer to the beloved in the second person mean that the fictional world overlaps uneasily with the real world. The reader becomes the beloved, the “you” whom the speaker addresses—or, at least, he becomes uneasily aware that this possibility of interpretation lies open to him as there are no clear distinctions between character, author, and reader. Ad- ditionally, the present tense of lyric and the fact that lyric verse usually lacks a linear plot create a lack of textual closure. The form is open, suggesting that the story could go on, that anything might yet happen. 1 suggest that it is this quality of lyric verse that made Barn- field's poetry and Shakespeare's sonnets potentially disturbing and unsettling for readers. In the early modern period, sodomy was perceived as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable state, and consequently, those writers who wished to explore homoerotic sentiments, situations, or behavior were required to create the appearance of control, to limit and codify the way in which homo- eroticism expressed itself, so that it could be clearly distinguished from its flip side, the disruptive and disturbing category of sodomy. In a narrative poem or play, homoerotic desire is controlled and6 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse rendered safe by being presented within very clear boundaries. Writers could play with the theme of same-sex erotic attraction, yet they were careful never to allow it to go too far. Ultimately, Jack shall have Jill. Moreover, the reader or spectator is frequently held at arm's length: allowed to enjoy the fiction but seldom al- lowed to get too close to it or involved in it in any literal sense. As a result, drama and narrative verse were clearly not sod- omitical. They were ultimately orderly. controlled. contained forms: the opposite of the chaos of sodomy. By contrast, lyric verse was a disorderly and uncontained form. It was open, its boundar- ies were fluid, and it suggested that anything and everything was possible. It is thus easy to see why their kind of homoerotic lyric poetry might have given early modern readers pause. Other writ- ers of the period may have realized this; the early modern period seems to have been one fascinated by the transgression of gender roles and the possibility of diverse sexualities, yet it is striking how infrequently these subjects are explored in lyric verse other than by Shakespeare and Barnfield, especially when compared with their popularity as themes in narrative verse and drama. Lyric verse was dangerous: Barnfield’s poem and Shakespeare's sonnets explore man’s capacity for slippages—between male and female, love and lust, homosocial and homosexual, homosexual and heterosexual—in a way that links them uncomfortably with the slippages and indeterminacies of sodomy. NOT! ‘Richard Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepheard. Containing the Com- plaint of “Daphnis” for the Love of “Ganymede,” in Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems, ed. George Klawitter (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 77-111, “Daphnis,” lines 11-2. Subsequent references to Affectionate Shepheard are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text and notes by short section title and line number. The short titles are as follows: section 1 is “Daphnis,” section 2 is “Lamentation,” section 3 is “Content,” section 4 is “Sonnet,” section 5 is “Chastitie,” and section 6 is “Hellens Rape.” 2 Barnfield, preface to Cynthia. With Certaine Sonnets, and the Legend of Cassandra, in Richard Barnfield, pp. 115-6, 115. “Barnfield, preface to Cynthia, p. 116. “Shakespeare, Shake-Speares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted (London: G. Eld for Thomas Thorpe, 1609); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 22353. The sonnets may, of course, have been well received among those to whom they circulated in manuscript, prior to publication; in Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth (1598), Francis Meres refers favor- ably to Shakespeare's “sugred Sonnets among his private friends” (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598), sig. Oov-Oo2r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 17834.Rebecca Yearling 67 * For the 1623 Folio, see Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Com- edies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies (London; Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 22273. For the second edition of the sonnets, see Shakespeare, Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-Speare. Gent. (London: Tho. Cotes, 1640); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 22344. “In the address “To the Reader” that John Benson added to his edition, he wrote that the sonnets “had not the fortune, by reason of their infancy in his death, to have the due accommodation of proportionable glory with the rest of his ever-living works. [ ... | I have been somewhat solicitous to bring this forth to the perfect view of all men, and in so doing, glad to be service- able for the continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his poems.” Reprinted in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery. Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, 2d edn. (Oxford: Oxford Unwv. Press, 2005). p. Ixxv. * For example, Benson alters the last line of Sonnet 101 from “To make him seem long hence as he shows now” to “To make her seem long hence as she shows now’; and gives Sonnet 125 the title “An Intreaty For Her Accep- tance.” However, it should be noted that while some critics have condemned Benson's edition as intentionally fraudulent, Margreta de Grazia has argued that Benson may not have been trying to cover up the sonnets’ homoeroticism but merely trying to make the poems more consistent and/or conventional by making them resemble a collection of Cavalier lyrics (Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare's Sonnets [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004], p. 118; and de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer [New York: Garland Publishing, 1999], pp. 89-113). It is interesting to note that Benson's actions had a prec- edent: when Michelangelo Buonarroti's homoerotic sonnets were edited for their 1623 publication, the editor, Michelangelo's great-nephew (Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger), similarly changed feminine pronouns to masculine ones. See Rime Di Michelangelo Buonarroti: Raccolte da Michelagnolo suo Nipote (Florence: I. Giunti, 1623). * Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander (Men- ston UK: Scolar Press, 1968), sig. Adr. Subsequent references to Hero and Leander are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by title and signature number. Hero is also described in the first section of the poem, but Marlowe is seemingly more interested in describing her clothes and adornments than her body or face. ®Michacl Schoenfeldt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), p. 20. "Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J. M Tobin, 2d edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), pp. 1799-819, lines 241-4. Subsequent references to Venus and Adonis are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by title and line number. "Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 78. Although the Whitefriars Company was short-lived, its eventual closure seems to have been due to economic factors outside of its control rather than to the unpopularity of its material or moral censure from the authorities.68 Homperotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse 1 See, for example, John Marston's comedy What You Will, written in 1601, in which the gallant Simplicius takes the boy Holifernes Pippo as his page, announcing, “I am enamour'd on the, boy. Wilt thou serve me?” The scene then culminates with Pippo returning triumphantly from offstage to announce that his new master “has bought me a fine dagger, and a hat and a feather; I can say as in presenti now” (Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead, Notthingham Drama Texts [Nottingham: Nottingham Univ, Press, 1980], I.1.92-3, 906-7). The pun on as/arse, in the Latin phrase the boy had not previously understood, and the surrounding dialogue, in which Simplicius repeatedly admires the beauty of the boy's face, strongly imply the erotic nature of their relationship. However, the encounter is presented as essentially light-hearted and witty: although Simplicius is eventually crowned as a fool in the fifth act after the boys trick him and steal his purse, he is presented as ridiculous, rather than wicked or debauched, in the moral scheme of the play. " Qtd. in Leslie Moran, The Homosexuallity) of Law (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 22. Under this act, buggery became a crime punishable by death by hanging and loss of property to the crown. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1978), trans. Robert Hurley, rprt. in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph P. Natoli (Albany: SU NY Press, 1993), p. 340. S Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2d edn. (Boston: Gay Men's Press, 1988), pp. 14-7. “* Robert Burton, for example, describes sodomy as the inevitable result of uncontrolled lust, which causes men to “go down headlong to their own perdition, they will commit folly with beasts, men ‘leaving the natural use of women,’ as Paul saith, ‘burned in lust towards another, and man with man wrought filthiness” (The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics & Several Cures of It (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), p. 497). Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same- Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 3. \" Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosoctal Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 1-2. Steve Patterson discusses some reasons why male friendship should have been particularly prized for social and economic reasons in the carly modern pe- riod in “The Bankruptcy of Homoerotic Amity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.” SQ 50. 1 (Spring 1999): 9-32, 11. "© Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 135-44, 138. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shake- speare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 30. 21 Stephen Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renais- sance Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 11. Certainly, as Kenneth Borris points out, the ambiguity surrounding male friendship meant that male lovers could turn it to thelr advantage: “[RJelations between early modern males could thus be highly anamorphic: so long as the genital interaction of two male lovers remained private, their relationship could publicly reflect the esteemed paradigm of relatively impassionate [by ourRebecca Yearling 69 standards) yet chaste male friendship" ("Rlichard] Blarnfield]'s Homosocial Engineering in Orpheus His Journey to Hell,” in The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, ed. Borris and Klawitter [London: Associated Univ. Presses, 2001, pp. 332-60, 333-4). 2Sedgwick, p. 1. Mario DiGang{ notes the frequency with which Jacobean drama pres- ents erotic or quasi-erotic relationships between masters and their servants, in such plays as Ben Jonson's Epicene, Every Man Out of His Humour, and Volpone; George Chapman's The Gentleman-Usher, and Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term (“The Homocrotics of Mastery in Satiric Comedy,” in The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 21 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997], pp. 64-99). Some of these plays, DiGangi writes, do indeed present male homo- eroticism as sodomitical, unsettling social hierarchies. However, according to DiGangi, others, such as Jonson's Epicene, present unproblematic homo- crotic relationships, which reaffirm, rather than destroy, social bonds. Thus, “Dauphine’s relationship with Epicoene [which may be a sexual one] is orderly because of its economic outcome—reestablishing his proper inheritance—and its maintenance of social hierarchy—Epicoene's faithful subordination to Dauphine” (p. 74). In the same way, one could argue that the relationship between Gaveston and Edward in Marlowe's Edward If is disturbing not so much because the pair are lovers as because the relationship allows the otherwise socially insignificant Gaveston to acquire political power that he should not have. In this context, sexual transgressions were only significant or dangerous insofar as they led to transgressions of social and class bound- arles (Marlowe, Edward II, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 2, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2d edn. {Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 1981)). The first eclogue of the Calender describes how Colin has recently spurned the love of “foolish Hobbinol,” another shepherd (Spenser, The Shepherdes Calender, Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems. ed. Richard Me- Cabe, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1999], “Januarye” 1.55). In Arcadia, Pyrocles spends most of the book disguised as a woman named Cleophila. which involves him in several same-sex erotic complications as he becomes an object of desire not only for hts love Phtloclea but also for her mother and father (Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, World’s Classics [Oxford: Oxford Untv. Press, 1999). Both works can, therefore, be seen as displaying a similar attitude toward variant forms of sexuality, which combines an acknowledg- ment of the possibility of homoerotic attraction with a desire ultimately to affirm a heterosexual status quo. Colin's putative romantic relationship with Hobbinol remains unexplored—he now loves Rosalind—while Philoclea’s at- traction to Cleophila is mitigated by the reader’s knowledge that Cleophila is a man in disguise. Homoeroticism is thus allowed into the texts only under highly qualified circumstances. Orgel. p. 42. % Shakespeare. Sonnets, in The Riverside Shakespeare. pp. 1839-74. sonnet 20, lines 2, 9-14. Subsequent references to the sonnets are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by sonnet and line number. * Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in The Riverside Shake- speare, pp. 442-75; and As You Like It. in The Riverside Shakespeare, pp.70 Homoerotic Desire and Renaissance Lyric Verse 403-36. Jonson, Epicene; or The Silent Woman, ed. Richard Dutton, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2003). * Barnfield, dedication to Affectionate Shepheard, p. 79, lines 13-5. 2Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). The puns on the author's first name, Will, in Sonnet 136 (lines 1-2, 5-8, and 11-2, and 14), Sonnet 136 (lines 2-3, 5-6, and 14), and Sonnet 143 (line 13) also reinforce this effect. ©That said, of course, there have been several later critics eager to save these poets and their reputations by insisting that the poems are not homoerotic, or, if they are, that they do not express the poets’ own views or emotions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, insists that the sonnets express a “pure Love,” in which there is “not even an Allusion to that very worst of all possible Vices" (Marginalia: Part 1, Abt to Byfield, ed. George Whalley, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 23 vols., Bollinger Series 75 Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980}, 42-3). Meanwhile, the critic Edward Arber in his 1882 edition of Barnfield’s poems claims that Barnfield wrote “skilful poetry, not expressing any personal feclings” (intro- duction to Poems, 1594-1598, ed. Arber [Birmingham UK: English Scholars’ Library, 1882], pp. xi~xxiv, xxii). We do not, of course, know whether either Shakespeare or Barnfield actually was sexually interested in men. "'T, §, Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), pp. 89-102, 89. = Richard Bradford, glossary to A Linguistic History of British Poetry (London; Routledge, 1993) pp. 204-15, s.v. “specch acts." There are a num- ber of other critics and theorists who have discussed the performative or quasi-performative nature of lyric. See, for example, John Henrikson, “Poem as Song: The Role of the Lyric Audience,” Alif21 (2001): 77-100; and David ‘Schalkwyk, “What May Words Do? The Performative of Praise in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” SQ 49, 3 (Autumn 1998); 251-68. “Of course, because of erotic lyric’s tendency to address the object of affection as “you.” it is often difficult to tell whether a love lyric is addressed toa man or a woman. DiGangl comments that “Daphnis not only desires sodomitically but speaks sodomitically”; his leaky tearfulness and rhetorical excess are them- selves displays of both textual and sexual disorderliness, associated with feminine emotional incontinence and lack of verbal control (DiGangi, “My Plentie Makes Me Poore’: Linguistic and Erotic Failure in “The Affectionate Shepherd,” in Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, pp. 149-73, 151). *5 Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis creates a similar effect. Unlike Hero and Leander, this poem has no intrusive “I” narrator, yet the speaker cre- ates a similar effect of mingled sensuality and humorous. tronic detachment, repeatedly building up erotic tension only to deflate it with comic undercut- ting. That said, critics have disagreed to an extent over the personality of the narrator of Venus and Adonis just as they have over that of Hero and Leander. Some see him as essentially neutral, while others argue that—for example—he Is generally benevolent and sympathetic toward the lovers, he is a detached ironist, or he is a narcissist more interested in showing off his ‘own literary powers than in telling his story. Philip C. Kolin discusses someRebecca Yearling 7 of these critical views in “Venus and/or Adonis among the Critics,” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Kolin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997) pp. 3-65, 50-2. %6M. L. Stapleton, “Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare's Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady,” TSLL 46, 3 (Fall 2004): 271-95, 271-2. "The assurances that all these can be Ganymede’s “[iJf thou wilt come and dwell with me at home’ ("Daphnis,” line 163) recall the promises made by Marlowe's “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" in The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). Again, within the tradition of pastoral persuasion poem, the boy is being placed in the role conventionally occupied by a woman. “Moreover, many readers would have read Hero and Leander in its later form, with a new ending added by George Chapman, which portrays Leander’s death. Chapman contributed sestiads 3-6 of the pocm. In this respect, Affectionate Shepheard may secm less open-ended than the sonnets. At the end of Barnfield’s poem, Daphnis returns home, gloom- ily “[florswearing Love, and all his fond delight” (‘Lamentation,” line 444). Nevertheless, the tying of the poem's structure to the action of a single day and the fact that the basic dramatic situation does not change at all during its course allow for the possibility that the poem will simply start itself over again the next day as Daphnis returns to his fruitless wooing. “Gabriel Harvey, “From Pierce's Supererogation,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), 2:215-82, 259. “Mary-bone’—marrowbone—was believed to be an aphrodi- siac. Marrowbone’s reputation as an aphrodisiac is shown in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, ed. Gordon Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 858-9. Thomas Middle- ton, A Mad World My Masters, ed. Standish Henning, Regents Renaissance Drama (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 1.11.43-5. “' Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, L.tv.31-3. “Jan Kott, The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Bach- ner, Gautier, trans. Jadwiga Kosicka and Mark Rosenzweig (Evanston IL: Northwestern Unty. Press, 1992), p. 37n4. “For discussions of this see. for example, Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 1996). p. 163: John Kerrigan, “Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare Survey 50 (Cambridge: Cambridge Unw. Press. 1997), p. 80; William Shakespeare, “Tweljth Night”: Texts and Contexts, ed. Bruce R. Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). p. 202. “Shakespeare. Twelfth Night, V.1.385-8. “This is discussed by Valerie Traub in Desire and Anxtety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 123. “At the conclusion of As You Like It, Rosalind reveals her true, female identity and marries Orlando, just as her cousin Cella marries Orlando's brother Oliver.