Shakespeare's queer 'Sonnets' and the forgeries of William Henry Ireland - William Shakespeare

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Michael Keevak

When other early authorities broached the subject of the poems' sexuality it was only in order to render it somehow innocent--which is to say normative, "heterosexual" (this term did not exist yet either): for the Sonnets, we are told, describe not a love affair between men but only an idealized friendship (Coleridge), their praise of a young man merely represents a tradition and is not really sexual (Malone), and they are not autobiographical poems anyway (John Boswell, Jr.). Peter Stallybrass has acutely noted how in all of these comments the possibility, or reality, of sodomy is always central but never explicitly named,(26) and Chalmers's theory is clearly one more attempt to circumvent this same unnamed danger--that the bard is guilty of sodomy--simply by showing that the addressee is really a woman. If the poems are addressed to someone of the opposite sex, in other words, then all their problems can be made to disappear, just as one would have nothing more to worry about if Shakespeare "himself" were really a woman in disguise. Chalmers is also neither the first nor the last to change the gender of the addressee to suit contemporary tastes; Coleridge succumbed to the same tendency,(27) and it had also occurred in what is arguably the first "reading" of the Sonnets we possess, John Benson's bowdlerized edition of 1640, which, in addition to combining and rearranging the poems and giving them titles, actually alters some masculine references to make them more "properly" feminine. Hardly a marginal phenomenon or an isolated publication, however, Benson's edition was the basis for all new versions of the Sonnets for nearly a century and a half--until, that is, Malone.(28)

Chalmers's book is thus responding not only to Malone's Inquiry but also to prevailing tastes and contemporary judgments regarding Shakespeare's poems. In his Inquiry Malone announced that a definitive Life of Shakespeare was forthcoming, and his recent edition of the poems had included a biographical sketch which was probably the first to plumb the depths of the Sonnets for biographical evidence.(29) But utilizing the Sonnets in this way also carried with it certain anxieties--namely, about sodomy--and it is in this very area that Malone disagreed most violently with Steevens. The infamous sonnet 20 was the main source of contention even then, for while here the poet seems to say that his "passion" for the male "Master Mistress" is purely platonic (since the speaker relinquishes the "pricked ... out" friend to the "use" or sexual pleasure of women only), this rhetorical act is achieved via the most titillating and suggestive sexual language of the entire sequence.(30) Steevens had grumbled that "[i]t is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation," and Malone replied with the now familiar defense that "such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our author's time, and neither imported criminality nor were esteemed indecorous."(31) Implicitly, then, Chalmers is arguing not merely that the great Shakespeareans had not found the correct "solution" to the Sonnets, but also that the poems could be rescued from "fulsome," "disgusting," "indignant," "indelicate," "indecorous," or indeed "criminal" readings. For if the addressee of all the poems is really the Queen, Chalmers says, would it not be appropriate for Shakespeare to refer to her as his "Master Mistress," since she was both his "love" and his sovereign, both a woman and a prince (A 51-52, 58)? Malone, he says, faulted the poems for "professing too much love ... to a man," but when readers realize the truth "they will be happy to find that the poet was incapable of such grossness." "Ought we to wonder," he concludes, "that in performing this great operation [of praise], he should confound the sexes?" (A 60-61).(32)