The unmistakably allegorical action meaningfully joins the opposed worlds of eroticism and political violence. It combines elements of sexual desire and violent "policy" and juxtaposes the world of erotic freedom represented by Edward's love for Gaveston with the cynical world of power politics symbolized by the union of Mortimer and Isabella, whose love "hatcheth death and hate" (l.1801).

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The sodomitical murder is not merely gratuitous violence or simply a grotesque parody of homosexual lovemaking; still less is it the embodiment of a moralistic justice, as critics have alleged. Rather, the fatal rape at once exposes the brutality of a corrupt society that values power above all else, mocks the moralists who would justify a ruthless competition of wills with preachments, and reveals the suffering king as the bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man, an emblem of shared humanity.

Homosexuality is writ large in English Renaissance literature, but its inscription is only rarely direct and unambiguous.

Both the elegiac and the romantic pastoral have been associated with homoerotic desire from their beginnings in classical literature to their echoes in contemporary literatures.

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.

Burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno has been seen as a martyr to religious intolerance; only recently has he also been recognized as a queer hero.

Edward II, an early fourteenth-century king of England, formed intense relationships with his favorites, which ultimately cost him his throne and his life.

Henry III, the last French king of the Valois dynasty, was widely accused of sodomy, but such charges were probably not true.

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.

The ancient Greek poet Theocritus is the first great voice in the homoerotic pastoral tradition in Western literature.

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