queer masculinities

Goran V. Stanivukovic: England 245
increase’), composed ‘after May 1536’ 39 and the dramatization of the
relationship between Caesar and Anthony in Shakespeare’s Anthony
and Cleopatra, performed in 1607, are what interest me here. Both
Wyatt’s elegy on the death of friends and Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy
turn friendship, specifically feelings among absent friends, into a site of
passion. What interests me about this odd literary pair is how the
rhetoric of mourning enables ambiguous emotions (of love, longing,
despair, loss – queer emotions) that bind friends, even dead friends.
Wyatt’s elegy for dead friends may appear an unlikely poem for a discussion
of male passions, especially since the cause is the execution of
four men (Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton,
and Mark Smeaton) charged with adultery because they were implicated
in a sexual involvement with Anne Boleyn. Yet it is precisely in the
realm of heterosexual desire, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown
through the example of Shakespeare’s sonnets, that one looks for love
between men in early modern English literature. 40 The lyrical subject,
the mourning friend, in Wyatt’s elegy dismisses a collective claim that
the deaths are justified because they are seen as treason (‘… some perchance
would say will say, of cruel heart, / “A traitor’s death why
should we thus bemoan?” / But I, alas, set this offence apart, / Must
needs bewail the death of some be gone’). The poem privileges the sense
of loss of friends, and the friends’ worth, over the collective injustice
because of the offence (‘Alas, thou [Norris] are far overseen / By thine
offences to be thus dead and gone.’). With every stanza the speaker’s
solitude for the loss of friends intensifies, as he remembers his dead
friends for faculties and pleasures that exceeded the world around him.
Thus Weston is missed because ‘he was pleasant … and young’ and
incomparable in ‘active things.’ Because ‘Great was [Brereton’s] love
with diverse’, his friends mourn his death and ‘other hear their piteous
cry and moan.’ Mark is lamented most, and the speaker’s rhetorical
question about the nature of his own lament for the dead friend:
Ah, Mark, what moan should I for thee make more
Since that thy death thou hast deserved best,
Save only that mine eye is forced sore
With piteous plaint to moan thee with the rest?
suggests the magnitude of his loss. In the final stanza, the poet contrasts
the gruesomeness of the friend’s death (‘… farewell, each one in
hearty wise. / The axe is home, your heads be in the street.’) to swelling
emotions that cause creative paralysis and bring out tears that stop