First the ghost of Dryden berates modern audiences who prefer "French Grimace, Buffoons, and Mimics" to British drama:

Sponsor Message.

     'Thro Perspectives revers'd they Nature view,
Which gives the Passions Images, not true.
Strephon for Strephon sighs; and Sapho dies,
Shot to the Soul by brighter Sapho's Eyes....

The ghost of Shakespeare is horrified:

      These Crimes unknown, in our less polish'd Age,
Now seem above Correction of the Stage....

The message here hardly needs restating: Shakespeare is a British hero, and as a British hero he most certainly is not a sodomite. In the cultural language of the eighteenth century, the homoeroticism in Shakespeare's works became unreadable and unspeakable.

To this campaign of cultural imperialism, Shakespeare's sonnets proved stubbornly resistant. Benson's decorous version of 1640 kept readers of the sonnets--such readers as there
were--out of harm's way until 1766, when new editorial principles demanded an edition based on the original text of 1609. Suddenly there was some explaining to be done.

Concerning sonnet 20 ("A woman's face with nature's own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion") the editor George Steevens felt compelled to append this note: "It is impossible to read this fulsome panegryick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation."

Edmund Malone, the first great Shakespeare scholar, saved the day by explaining that "such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our author's time, and neither imported criminality nor were esteemed indecorous."

The history of Shakespeare criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the history of one desperate attempt after another to prove Malone right. Attempts to reclaim the sonnets in works like Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Mr W. H." (1889) have been written off by the Guardians of Culture as anachronistic fantasies.

Unwillingness to acknowledge homoeroticism in works by the paragon of British literature persists even in the public remarks of W. H. Auden. Making a play on bed-secrets and Red-secrets, Auden told friends in the early 1960s that "it won't do just yet to admit that the top Bard was in the homintern"--and stood by that conviction when he wrote a preface to the New American Library paperback of the sonnets the same year.

Homosexual readers, he complains in this preface, have ignored the fact that the sonnets to "the dark lady" are unmistakably sexual and that Shakespeare, after all, was a married man and a father.

That we are confronted in the sonnets by a mystery rather than by an aberration is evidenced for me by the fact that men and women whose sexual tastes are perfectly normal, but who enjoy and understand poetry, have always been able to read them as expressions of what they understand by the word love, without finding the masculine pronoun an obstacle.

That may be true. "Obstacles," on the other hand, often provide the key to significant historical differences.

It is precisely the masculine pronoun in the sonnets, like all the other markers of homoerotic experience in the plays and poems, that accounts for William Shakespeare's importance in the history of sexuality. His importance in the politics of sexuality is clear enough in Auden's attempt to explain it all away.

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

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.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

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.

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.

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

British dramatist Peter Shaffer emerged in the 1960s in the paradoxical guise of the last great twentieth-century poet of the numinous who was also capable of writing commercially successful plays that could be turned into equally successful films.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.