Shakespeare's Sonnets As Homosexual Love Discourse

The relationship between the poet-speaker and the Youth to and with whom most of Shakespeare's Sonnets are directly addressed or concerned has been a critical focus in Shakespeare studies. A major group of critics, especially of the 17th and 18th centuries, were apt to believe that it was asexual, while a minor group, especially from the late 19th century, began to interpret it sexual. But there has not yet a systematic and persuasive research on this point. The present thesis proposes that the relationship is rather homosexual than pure male friendship by considering the 154 sonnets to be an interrelated quasi-dramatic sonnet sequence instead of two or three sonnet-groups collection. The "dramatic" effects will be displayed in the characterization of the poet-speaker, the Friend, and the Mistress, and in the development of their internal relationships.Chapter One introduces the critical theme of sex in Shakespeare's Sonnets studies. The terms "homosexual" and "male friendship" are carefully distinguished since it is the starting point of the present study. Although the essence of the relationship between the poet-speaker and the Youth is connotatively different from that of the modern homosexual defined by gene science, the thesis adopts the term "homosexual" in order to emphasize the sexual implication conveyed in the Sonnets.Chapter Two, the central part of the thesis, interprets 154 sonnets as a homosexual love discourse from three aspects. Section One argues that the sonnet sequence is mainly addressed to a male beloved from the poet-lover through a statistical analysis of the distribution of the male and female addressees, the deliberate switching between the pronoun "thou" and "you," and the distinction of affectionate vocatives: "lover" and "friend." Section Two examines the four sub-sequences: sonnets 1-19, sonnets 20-126, sonnetsl27-152, and sonnets 153-54 into a three-stage homosexual love journey. In the first stage, the poet-speaker persuades the Youth to marry and beget chidden, which is a subtle way to express love by directly praising the Youth's beauty; the second stage overtly records the various sensual and spiritual...