It’s All Greek to Me: The Love Triangle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and its Parallels in the Social Anxieties of Gender, Homoeroticism and Fidelity in Ancient Greece

This paper refutes the common interpretation of the sonnets as a revelation of Shakespeare’s homosexual desires, and instead posits that they are better read as an endorsement of hierarchical conceptions of sex and gender dating back to Ancient Greece. From Antiquity to Renaissance, gender was seen as a social and cultural role, not a medical or biological category. Furthermore, social structures relied on regulating female sexuality and shoring up the masculinity of powerful men, so Ancient and Renaissance societies developed huge anxieties surrounding the female libido, echoed in Shakespeare’s dark lady. The lust of women posed the issue of illegitimate births, while the lust for women destabilized reason and distracted from manly pursuits such as war and civic duty. This framework rendered women inherently dangerous, resulting in general acceptance of, and even preference for, homoeroticism. Sonnets 129, 135, and 147 clearly demonstrate the anxiety surrounding the danger of lust, while Sonnet 116 endorses male homosocial and homoerotic relationships. Viewed through this historical framework, concern about the speaker’s sexual orientation is hugely misguided—the homoerotic desire for the lovely young man and the shame and disgust associated with the dark lady clearly uphold the social and sexual anxieties of Shakespeare’s time