Homoerotic Desire and Same-Sex Bonding: Challenges to Heterosexual Partnership?

Abstract

Chapter 7 discusses how far homoerotic same-sex relationships and close friendships (male and female) challenge heterosexual norms of romance. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which explore bisexual passion, privilege love for the ‘fair youth’ above lust for the ‘dark’ mistress. In Shakespeare’s theatre the transvestite convention of a boy actor playing a girl (who then pretends to be a boy) generates same-sex desire, as when Orsino in Twelfth Night is attracted to Viola dressed as Cesario. The chapter also shows how extreme devotion to a close male friend, the case with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice and Antonio in Twelfth Night, excludes these characters from the comic resolution of marriage. Meanwhile male friendship partly trumps heterosexual romantic attachment in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen, whereas strong bonds between females (Celia for Rosalind in As You Like It) only temporarily disrupt the progress toward traditional marriage.