The Frank Homoeroticism of Marlowe's Plays

The Renaissance playwright who depicted homoeroticism most openly was not Shakespeare or Jonson but Marlowe. Homoerotic incidents are featured in most of his plays, including Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587) and The Massacre of Paris (1592); but Edward II, his great tragedy of a man torn between his hereditary role as king and his love for another man, is his most radical exploration of homosexual love.

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Ending with the murder of the king by the assassin Lightborn, who thrusts a hot spit into the monarch's bowels, the play daringly inverts the Renaissance's sexual categories. The assassin and his employers are unmasked as truly sodomitical, whereas the apparent sodomite, the suffering king, is revealed as the bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man. In the work's revised economy of meaning, as crystallized in Lightborn's gruesome imitation of homosexual lovemaking, sodomy comes to signify not homosexuality but conspiracy, rape, and murder.

The play is also noteworthy for linking the love of Edward and Gaveston with a catalogue of homosexual lovers culled from classical history and myth. By appealing to a classical past when homosexuality was not only not a grave offense, but even a mark of distinction, associated with mighty kings and great philosophers, Marlowe resists his age's dominant construction of homosexuality as sodomitical.

A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, was hanged in Ireland for sodomy under a law that he had helped to institute.

Although he condemned homosexuality in his more magisterial, philosophical works, Bacon inserted homosexual innuendo elsewhere in his writings, particularly in several essays.

The English Renaissance poet Richard Barnfield wrote two volumes of homoerotic verse.

England's supreme poet of heterosexual love in the late Renaissance, John Donne also wrote a series of homoerotic verse letters to a young man and a remarkable dramatic monologue in a lesbian voice.

Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was probably never himself involved in same-sex sexual relationships, but he deserves attention for his depictions of same-sex relationships in both dramatic and nondramatic works.

In Lucian's satiric works, homosexuality is treated as one of a related series of personal traits that characterize villainy, pretension, and ignorance, while the Erôtes of pseudo-Lucian advocates male-male love as honorable and as a sign of social progress.

Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Two-thirds of the poems of Katherine Philips, "The Matchless Orinda," concern erotic relationships among women.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.