Sonnet 144 - Homoeroticism in Sonnet 144

Homoeroticism in Sonnet 144

Shakespeare addresses many of his sonnets to a young male, whom many have assumed to be identical with Mr. W.H., the person to whom the Sonnets as a whole are dedicated. Scholars debate about the nature of Shakespeare’s relationship with his male companion and question whether it was a close friendship or a romantic love. The sonnets indicate that a woman who Shakespeare describes as the dark lady comes between the poet and Mr. W.H. Sonnet 144 addresses this conflict.

Critics have been unsuccessful at pinpointing the exact identity of Mr. W.H. Douglas Trevor points out that the young boy mentioned in the sonnets may not be a specific person: “Scholars puzzled over the identity of the speaker’s male friend, debating whether or not he is one male or a composite, rooted in real life or a purely literary conjuring”. Scholars developed a few possibilities for the identity of Mr. W.H such as William Herbert and Henry Wriothesley. Critics have also wondered about the woman who came between Shakespeare and the boy: “And of course there is the dark lady, identified alternatively as a nameless aristocrat, a commoner, Queen Elizabeth, her maid of honor Mary Fitton, the London prostitute Lucy Negro, the poet Aemilia Lanyer, and so on.”.

The identities of these two characters are still in question but modern scholars tend to focus more on the sexual eroticism and implication of homosexuality in the Sonnets: “The reality of the poet’s purported bisexual identity now figuring more prominently than any speculation about real figures with whom Shakespeare might have actually been involved, amorously or otherwise”. On the other hand, there are critics who view Shakespeare’s relationship with the young boy as a friendship rather than romantic love. This is the view that K.D. Sethna holds: “The problem, of course, is the two main characters round whom Shakespeare’s Sonnets exult and agonize with a passionate quixotism of friendship and a frantic fever of love- or, as G. Wilson Knight sums up in the current jargon, “homosexual idealism and heterosexual lust’”. John Berryman, on the other hand, understands the first line of Sonnet 144 to be Shakespeare’s way of confessing his romantic relationship with the boy and the dark lady: “This is the sonnet of which the poet John Berryman remarked, in his comments on Lowell in The Freedom of the Poet, ‘When Shakespeare wrote reader, he was not kidding”. Helen Vendler agrees with Berryman’s analysis: “Sonnet 144 has an air of confession”.

If evaluated through queer hermeneutics, Sonnet 144 can appear to have homoerotic overtones. For example, Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." is a critical analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets that emphasizes their potential homoeroticism. Wilde believed in the theory that the young man addressed in the sonnets was an actor in Shakespeare's troupe named Willie Hughes. The sonnets are thus a love letter from Shakespeare to Willie Hughes. Wilde writes, “ finds that what his tongue had spoken his soul had listened to, and that the raiment that he had put on for the disguise is a plague-stricken and poisonous thing that eats into his flesh, and that he cannot throw away. Then comes Desire, with its many maladies, and Lust that makes one love all that one loathes, and Shame, with its ashen face and secret smile,”. Wilde writes of Shakespeare’s mental and emotional battle of whom to love and how to love that person. Wilde writes specifically of Sonnet 144,“ has his moments of loathing for her, for, not content with enslaving the soul of Shakespeare, she seems to have sought to snare the senses of Willie Hughes,”. In Sonnet 144, the second quatrain is full of dislike toward the Dark Lady, “To win me soon to hell, my female evil / … / and would corrupt my saint to be a devil,”.

However, Wilde recognizes that the Willie Hughes theory is that, just a theory. One will never know what Shakespeare was thinking when he was completing the sonnets. “Shakespeare’s heart is still to us a ‘a closet never pierc’d with crystal eyes,’ as he calls it in one of the sonnets. We shall never know the true secret of the passion of his life,”.

C.B. Cox writes, "In Elizabethan times the crime of buggery was punishable by death. Today this legal term for homosexual intercourse offends our ears, but its use draws attention to the abhorrence with which many Christians of the time (and since) regarded physical intimacies between men. In these circumstances it's difficult to believe that Shakespeare would not only participate in an active homosexual relation with a handsome young man, but broadcast this affair to the world in sexually explicit sonnets pass round among his friends,". The competing view of a bisexual Shakespeare conflicts with Wilde's view. Cox bases his argument on the verb "to have." He argues that why must the verb usage of "to have" mean sexually possess? Elizabethan people had trouble believing "had" meant to have sexually when it came to the young man, but Cox writes, "It's difficult to refute Pequiney's contention that in these three examples (Sonnet 52, Sonnet 75, and Sonnet 87) there is a sexual innuendo in 'had,' particularly when in Sonnet 129, which concerns heterosexual love for the Dark Lady, everyone agrees that there is such an implication,. Elizabethan society feared homosexual desire, but embraced heterosexual conquests. Cox writes, "The poems may be based on personal experience but still that doesn't actually prove that Shakespeare 'had' the youth. There's an element of playfulness in the sexual innuendoes, a delight in wit as if Shakespeare is enjoying his own virtuosity and may not have expected to be taken literally... In his poems to the youth he may be using sexual innuendo as a kind of joke, a playful but at times almost serious hint that his affection may even extend to physical desire,".