By Jaya Basu ’26

Majors: English & Theatre; Minors: Creative writing

Contributor Biography: Jaya S. Basu is an English and Theater double major with a creative writing minor. They enjoy writing poetry, prose, and academically, and have a particular interest in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. They want to study Shakespeare and theater at a higher level after college in addition to working practically in the theater world.  

Brief Description: This essay examines the way sodomy and queerness are perceived and interacted with in early modern drama. The essay examines the work of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as well as their personal biographies and the history of sodomy to untangle what was queer at the time from what we view as queer today. 

The following was created for THE 202: Drama, Stage & Society I

The closeness of male friends surprises many readers of Shakespeare and other authors of the early modern period, spanning from the 15th to 18th centuries. Kissing, sharing a bed, and writing lengthy, devotional works of literature are not considered “friendly” behavior today, and the word “friend” is used now to specifically denote a relationship that is devoid of such a high level of intimacy. Those hallmarks of early modern male friendship are now considered to be indicators of romance, and therefore queerness; however, to look at it from a modern lens would ignore the historical normalcy of those relationships and would not acknowledge the actual historical perception of what was unacceptable, Othered, and thus queer. After defining queerness both for us as modern readers and for early modern men, I will examine examples from the works and lives of early modern dramatists William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, two Renaissance-era English playwrights, to establish what can be considered queer for them and for us, and the significance of the difference.

The first task at hand is to define queerness. Today, we describe sexuality in absolute terms, in which sexuality is defined by identity rather than behavior. Labels such as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc., are modern inventions that are ascribed to a person’s identity. The modern usage of “queer,” as in “queer studies” or “queer theory,” stems from the usage of “queer” as a slur for homosexuals, meaning “strange” or “peculiar.” Today, it is used to mean “denoting or relating to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms” (“Queer, n2”). The connotation of “queer” as a slur and its usage in relation to the LGBT+ community renders queer studies the study of expressions of sexual or gender identity that are regarded as singular, unconventional, or Other. In the early modern period, however, labels like “queer” or “gay” or “lesbian” were not used; the closest concept to queerness that existed was the concept of sodomy. The crime of sodomy is classified in the Renaissance period as “a range of desires and acts that the period thought anyone could have or do, sodomy in its most capacious definition including just about anything but unprotected vaginal intercourse between a married couple” (Goldberg 13). The concept of sodomy resembled more “an idea like debauchery” than an identity. Though it was infrequently prosecuted, it was “also a political and religious crime[;] it was this that explains most clearly why it was regarded with such dread” (Bray 41). For the purposes of this paper, I will be relating the terms “queerness” and “sodomy” they way Will Tosh does in Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, in which “sodomy” is used to refer to the actions that were perceived as criminal in the contemporary historical sense and “queer” “to mean sexuality that was dissident, unusual, or athwart the erotic mainstream” (Tosh 13). Through this definition, instances of sodomy may be regarded as queer today, but what we consider to be queer today does not necessarily indicate sodomy. Tosh acknowledges that “[queer] is no less anachronistic than ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ when applied to Shakespeare’s time, but unlike other modern descriptions of sexual identity, ‘queer’ encapsulates far more than it excludes” (Tosh 13). I will be following Tosh’s example, though I will be using the term queer as well. 

Though the hallmarks of a “gentleman’s friendship” may strike a modern reader as queer, they were not considered strange or outside of the social norm at the time. Two gentlemen may kiss or share a bed in public and that would be considered normal and “equally public” (Bray 41). Due to the way houses were set up, the sharing of a bed was not a private fact. It was normalized and encouraged for two gentlemen to have a passionate, adoring friendship, which can be seen in the letters written with decorum and flowery affection that were sent between friends. Antonio Perez, renegade secretary of Philip II, wrote letters while he was within the Earl of Essex’s inner circles; letters entrenched in rich descriptions of the emotional relationship between Essex and his servants, framed around descriptions of intense desire between men. While the letters were indeed passionate, and often genuine, Perez “was merely using the ubiquitous convention” (Bray 44). These relationships were not merely amative, but strategic. “Masculine friendships” or “gentleman’s friendships” were part of the system of social circles through which public life for upper class men was conducted. Performing desire between men through letters and declarations of devotion was another element of the elaborate social framework that men like Perez would be forced to play into. The relationship between a gentleman and his patron was deep, doting, and incredibly important for gentlemen of any rank.

Despite the normalcy of these hallmarks of friendship, there were still instances of friendship that were too close for comfort for contemporary observers and set off alarm bells as indicators of sodomy. The openness of male friendship does not, tragically, indicate a degree of progressiveness; anti-queer sentiment as we know it today was expressed through the virulent and heated distaste for sodomy. Accusations of sodomy were thrown towards traitors and the despised, like they were for Piers Edmunds and the Third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley. Following a failed rebellion backed by Southampton, William Reynolds, a paid informer, throws accusations towards Piers Edmunds of backing that same rebellion by insinuating that their relationship was more sodomitical than friendly. Reynolds, however, in his evidence, fails to effectively point out what would be considered signs of sodomy. He notes “the common tent in which they slept, the embraces” which were public–it would seem his evidence consisted of “the conventional signs of friendship,” which all involved perceived in this way (Bray 48). However, several features of their relationship may differentiate a sodomitical relationship from a friendship. One is the fact of the birth of both men; the other being the nature of the relationship as either personal or transactional (Bray 50). Piers Edmunds was a soldier of common birth, making his relationship with Southampton a stretch between social worlds, and thus not indicative of a reciprocal friendship. While it was normal for the relationship to be between a man and his servant, they must both be gentlemen, or it would be considered a common man reaching above his station. Additionally, in his accusation, Reynolds claims that Edmunds would “[tell] me what pay, graces and gifts the earls bestowed upon him, thereby seeming to move and animate me to desire and look for the like favour” (Reynolds qtd in Bray 48). His imploring of Reynolds to “look for the like favour” implies that his intentions were not pure in his relationship with Southampton and that he had formed that relationship in order to gain the advantages that come with the Earl’s affection. These two characteristics, according to Reynolds, indicate that Edmunds was both a sodomite and a traitor, tying the social crime of sodomy to the political crime of treason. 

With these aspects of sodomy and friendship established, I move now to the lives and works of William Shakespeare. Readers of Shakespeare have been discovering homoerotic undertones (and overtones) in his work for as long as Shakespeare has been read. Despite the historical scrubbing of this notion, recent scholarship has made it harder and harder to deny that Shakespeare can be perceived as queer by modern standards. While “[h]is queer lives–his own, and those he created for his plays and poems–remain little understood…outside of the scholarly community,” students and scholars alike continue to recognize queerness in Shakespeare’s works (Tosh 3). In “Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy,” Casey Charles explores the question through a pedagogical lens, wondering how we might answer a student who reads homoerotic subtext in works such as Sonnet 20, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, among many others. Charles, too, acknowledges the anachronism and “naivete” of the titular question, but also understands that “behind what we might call…the naivete of this student’s inquiry, lies a desire to understand a text within a cultural framework of ‘gayness’ that has been largely ignored or dismissed by the academy until recently” (Charles 36). In other words, the anachronistic nature of the question does not erase the pertinence of the answer. Rejecting Casey’s ambivalence, Tosh has a straightforward answer: quoting Don Paterson, “of course he was” (qtd. in Tosh 12). Tosh goes on, saying “I don’t see anything wrong in taking it for granted that he was a queer artist, working in a culture that both enabled and frustrated his imaginative exploration of same-sex desire” (Tosh 12). Queerness can be found not only in Shakespeare’s works but in his biography as well.

Shakespeare was never formally accused of sodomy, but there are moments in his biography that suggest it. As an artist, Shakespeare needed a patron and chose the aforementioned Earl of Southampton, perhaps because of the evidence suggesting that “Southampton was almost certainly sexually attracted to both men and women” (Tosh 165). Southampton clearly liked the way Shakespeare wrote about him, as he never objected to the flowery, affectionate dedication to him in Venus and Adonis and a flowerier, even more affectionate dedication appeared in The Rape of Lucrece (Tosh 163). He liked it so much, in fact, that allegedly, “Southampton once gave the young poet £1,000–an implausible sum equivalent to one third of the earl’s annual revenue” (Tosh 164). Shakespeare’s book of sonnets, addressed to a mysterious unidentified young man, “took the conceit of a beautiful youth receiving life advice from a wise elder and transformed it into a love story between the two men,” an action that may have raised a few brows both then and now (Tosh 183). While any of the above could be evidence of queerness today, with Shakespeare’s search for an approving patron ringing many bells for queer people searching for solidarity and safety today, there is very little suggesting he would have been viewed as sodomitical for it. Most of his actions fell within the bounds of friendship, except perhaps the fact that at the point where he requested Southampton’s patronage, “Shakespeare wasn’t even a gentleman, a status he didn’t achieve” until a few years later (Tosh 163). As few as they may have been, for those years Shakespeare was a man of common birth, initiating friendship with an Earl in order to form a transactional relationship–the same markers of sodomy that had Southampton and Edmunds accused of sodomy a few years later. Still, no formal accusations of sodomy were made, and Shakespeare’s queerness remains a modern projection. 

Unlike Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was accused of sodomy. Marlowe was considered the foremost playwright of his era, both coming to prominence and dying before Shakespeare became well-known. Marlowe died under mysterious circumstances, his death wrapped up with accusations of atheism, espionage, treason, and sodomy. He was posthumously accused of claiming that “they that love not tobacco and boys were fools” (Barnet xvii). As we have seen with Piers Edmunds and Southampton, accusations of sodomy were often wrapped up with those of treason. Before his death, Marlowe’s play Edward II is often accused of depicting a sodomitical relationship. In it, the soldier Gaveston appeals to Edward II as a friend returning from combat. Their relationship is charged with the same “intense emotion,” “passionate language,” and “embraces” that characterize a standard gentleman’s friendship. However, their relationship contains the “dark suggestions of sodomy” that trouble the social and political waters of the play (Bray 49). There are ambiguous sexual undertones in the imagery and description of characters. The play opens with a procession of people acting as Greek gods, including a boy who is playing a goddess and using a bush “‘to hide those parts which men delight to see;’” it is unclear if the parts “men delight to see” refers to the parts of the imagined goddess he portrays, or of the boy himself (Bray 49). Gaveston is also described compared to Ganymede, the young man raped by Zeus in classical mythology, and a word that functions as a synonym for a sodomite (Bray 49). Bringing all these points to a head, the fear of sodomy as a threat to the nation and society itself manifests in Edward’s murder; he is stabbed through the anus with a poker, a murder method that both leaves no marks on the body and suggests the sodomy he was accused of. Marlowe’s inclusion of these facets of sodomy and not-sodomy creates an uneasy ambiguity in Edward and Gaveston’s relationship, both socially and politically, which is never resolved. The queerness in Marlowe’s life is constructed on baseless accusations that were designed, like the tension he writes between Edward and Gaveston, to muddy the waters of his political innocence, and we can never know how truthful they were. Regardless of whether or not Marlowe may be considered queer, he was undeniably defying the convention of early modern dramatic, societal and sexual norms, undeniably queering his work.

While Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s biographies merely suggest queerness, both of their bodies of work contain suggestions of early coding of queerness. Jeffrey Masten, a queer theorist and Shakespeare scholar, describes a sort of coding in “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship.” Masten observes the repeated use of “sweet” as an address between male friends, both in drama and in personal letters. He notes that “sweet” is effeminizing, and that “the address of sweetness between male friends would seem…to fit so uncomfortably with a standard modern conception of male-male relations” (Masten). In that sense, it brings in the modern meaning of queer. Masten cites the example of “perhaps the most explicitly pederastic literary text of the period[;] Richard Barnfield’s 1595 sonnets address ‘Sweete Ganymede,’ a ‘sweete youth’ and ‘sweet boy’ with ‘hony-combs’ ‘dropping’ ‘from his lips’” as well as the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe (also citing the way Gaveston and Edward address each other in Edward II) as examples of how “sweet” recurs in the context of affectionate address between not only men, but also between women and between men and women (Masten). Masten goes on to describe the way “sweetness” plays in Hamlet between Hamlet and Horatio: 

The sweetness of the friend, I would argue, is immersed, embedded; it circulates; it inhabits. Hamlet reminds Horatio near the moment of his death of the early heart exchange: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity a while” (5.2.351-52, p. 415; my emphasis). Further, Horatio invokes as his own Hamlet’s “mouth” twice in the final speeches of the play: “Of that I shall have also cause to speak, / And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more” (5.2.396-97, p. 418). The rest is not silence, but Horatio. (Masten)

The “embedded” ever-presence of sweetness as well as the repeated use of “mouth” evoke the closeness of Hamlet and Horatio’s friendship, a point emphasized by Horatio’s last address to Hamlet of “sweet prince.” While sweetness here may indicate a modern sort of queerness, Hamlet and Horatio’s relationship does not betray the markings of sodomy as we had discussed earlier, and any signs there may be are in no way as blatant or subversive as Marlowe’s Edward II. 

Early modern English drama, as with nearly every historical period of writing, is rife with what we would today consider queer. What we have to consider as scholars is the relationship the word “queer” has with the contemporary social, political, and personal systems that dictated contemporary life. The expression of “queerness” in Renaissance-era drama should not be mistaken for any kind of progressiveness or heightened, romanticized amorousness–as Will Tosh points out, crediting scholars like Alan Bray and Eve Sedgewick, “the study of sexuality in the Renaissance [was transformed] by suggesting that male same-sex desire was a constituent aspect of patriarchy” (Tosh 10). At the same time, it should be acknowledged that queerness has always existed, both within and outside the bounds of what is socially accepted. Though scholarship surrounding canonical authors such as Shakespeare and Marlowe has historically been sanitized and distanced from queerness, the last few decades have been monumental in dismantling that preconceived notion and reintroducing queerness to the scholastic ecosystem. It’s healing for scholars, queer people, and curious students alike to know that today, it’s nearly impossible to deny connections between Shakespeare, friendship, and queerness. Though queerness is difficult to define in a historical context, and we will always be assigning modern, anachronistic labels to a society they don’t apply to, there will always be tensions between what is acceptable and what is Othered when expressing unconventional desire, and it will always be useful to attempt to untangle them.

Works Cited

“Queer, n2.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2024, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/queer_adj1?tl=true. Accessed 3 December 2024.

Bray, Alan. “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England.” Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 40-61.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Introduction.” Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 1-14.

Charles, Casey. “Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy.” College Literature, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 35–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112402. 

Barnet, Sylvan. Introduction. Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe, Signet Classics, 2010, pp. Vii-xxv.

Masten, Jeffrey. “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 10 no. 3, 2004, p. 367-384. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/169789.