queer masculinities

246 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
writing (‘The trickling tears doth fall so from my eyes, / I scarce may
write, my paper is so wet.’). The cumulative effect of mourning
intensifies the speaker’s solitude and enables Wyatt to construct the
relational terms between the speaker and the friends in the language of
intimacy and grief for its interruption. Thinking of friends in emotional
terms is not uncommon for Wyatt. Wyatt resorts to an ‘affective
plea’ for friends ‘by using an intimate and embodied register’ in some
other poems, too. 41 What is at stake in this poem is not homoerotic
desire. Rather, at the emotional center of this poem about mourning
and loss is a passion for men. The figure imagined here is what Alan
Bray calls ‘the masculine friend’, a type that stands ‘in stark contrast to
the forbidden intimacy of homosexuality.’ 42 The masculine friend is
the figure that shares the all-male space of courtly culture with other
men. Both Wyatt, his historical friends and their poetic characters
belong to it – and their loss is thus both personal and collective.
Lament for the lost friend intensifies the ambiguous passion that
binds men in Anthony and Cleopatra. It is a play characterized by many
levels of emotion and yearning. Among those levels one that stands
out in particular is the heroic friendship between Anthony and Caesar.
This is how Caesar reacts at the news of Anthony’s death:
O Anthony,
I have followed thee to this; but we do lance
Diseases in our bodies. I must perforce
Have shown to thee such a declining day,
Or look on thine: we could not stall together
In the whole world. But yet let me lament
With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts
That thou, my brother, my competitor
In top of all design, my mate in empire,
Friend and companion in the front of war,
The arm of mine own body, and the heart
Where mine his thoughts did kindle – that our stars
Unreconciliable should divide
Our equalness to this. (5.1.35–48) 43
This is the only moment in the play at which Caesar relinquishes his
sense of duty and ambition and allows emotion to speak out.
Beginning by imagining a kinship relationship with Anthony (‘my
brother’), Caesar’s memorial lament for a heroic friendship (‘my competitor
/ In top of all design, my mate in empire, / Friend and compan-