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102 The Renaissance 1485–1660
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate . . .
(Sonnet 29)
There is a truth of emotion and of constancy in the affections of the
poetic ‘I’. Homoerotic the attraction to his male love certainly is:
. . . my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
(Sonnet 29)
The more modern word ‘homosexual’ does not really apply, as Sonnet
20 makes clear in its final, sexually punning lines:
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
Shakespeare has been staged, adapted, studied and adopted throughout the
centuries. It is a mark of his universality that his plays have survived all the
appropriations, attacks, uses and interpretations made of them. They are
used institutionally in education to show what is best in high-cultural ideology;
they have been read as nihilistically modern, incorrigibly reactionary, and as
‘a cultural creation which has no intrinsic authority and whose validity is
wide open to dispute’. It is true that Shakespeare has been made into something
he was not in his own lifetime, a cultural institution and an emblem, whose
quality and artistry are not in doubt. So he will no doubt survive radical and
systematic counter–interpretation just as he has survived institutional
appropriation from Victorian times to the present. He can be, as critics have
described him, ‘our contemporary’, ‘alternative’, ‘radical’, ‘historicist’,
‘subversive’, ‘traditional’ and ‘conservative’. But his plays continue to speak
to audiences and readers, as ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things
unknown’, and he explores the known and the unknown in human
experience. Reinterpretation, on a wide scale of opinions from radical to
hegemonic, will always be a vital part of Shakespearean study. As long as the