Taking a break from the political anger for a little academic anger!

[felis_ultharus]

So I was reading this delightful little piece about how Sidney's Amoretti sonnets are all about political advancement, not love. And I came to this delightful little passage:

"The first [of the two betrayals dramatized by Shakespeare in his sonnets] is rationalized with relative ease: in a collection in which erotic love and the affectionate friendship of males are kept strictly separate, as in sonnets 20 and 144, and in which the latter relationship is portrayed as the only one of moral and spiritual value, the young man's libertinism can be excused, even when it involves the woman with whom the poet has a liason."

Anyone who's read Sonnet 20, who can read Elizabethan English comfortably, and isn't extremely homophobic can be pretty sure that the "erotic love and the affectionate friendship of males" is not "kept strictly separate." At the very least, it isn't obvious, and in fact it's a counter-intuitive point that needs defending.

Finding ways to circumvent the obvious homoeroticism in this sonnet is a tradition almost as old as the sonnet form in English. As always, the author of this piece (an Arthur Marotti) merely dismisses the possibility of homoeroticism a priori, without feeling the need to support his point with quotations and argument.

I feel like I read stuff like this every other week. I used to think university professors would be above this kind of knee-jerk refusal to admit even the slightest possibility of homoeroticism in a favourite author, but in turns out that that isn't the case.