That Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the comedies is preoccupied with multiple objects of desire that blur the line between hetero- and homoerotic attraction is especially evident in Twelth Night (1601). In this comedy, the stylistic flourishes often play with meaning related to social status and emotion, revealing that multiple forms of representation and affection are always in play. Consider the sensuous, erotically ambiguous relationship between Antonio and Sebastian. Antonio’s passionate and exaggerated plea—‘If you will not murder me for my love, let me your servant’ (2.2.32)—elicits a similarly charged response from Sebastian: ‘If you will not undo what you have done, that is kill him whom you have recovered, desire it not.’ (2.2.34-5). As Keir Elam notes in his excellent edition of the play, the hyperbole exchanged between Antonio and Sebastian suggests that transgressive eroticism is carefully veiled within figurative language. Elam paraphrases Antonio’s lines 34-5, as ‘if you do not want me to die of a broken heart in losing you’ and argues that both men use the ‘hyperbolic language of courtly love to express their mutual affection’ (207n32). In a play where the social rhetoric of service intertwines with romantic language—Viola to Orsino as Cesario, and Sebastian to Antonio—terms like ‘service’ blur into the realm of eroticism. Antonio’s passion not only overstates his desire to serve Sebastian but embodies him as a submissive agent to him. Furthermore, Antonio plays the Petrarchan lover as he declares, ‘Come what may, I do adore thee so’ (2.2.43). The language of adoration, rooted in courtly love and Platonic-inflected Petrarchan poetics, is playfully reworked by Shakespeare to express desires circulating between Viola and Olivia, and between Antonio and Sebastian. Queer theory probes below the linguistic surface of such passionate utterances, revealing other ways in which the play—and particularly the figure of Sebastian—embodies queerness. The queerness of Twelth Night is not only expressed through language but is also symbolically built into the plot involving the shipwrecked Sebastian. Writing about Sebastian, Bruce R. Smith argues that the ‘Myth of the Shipwrecked Youth’, a youth displaced from patriarchal order and symbolic ties to the household, suggests the possibility of subjective freedom and homoerotic potential, a hallmark of the romance form that fictionalizes utopian desires in foreign lands. Smith contends that Shakespeare ‘challenges the ancient ways in which romance puts homosexual desire into discourse’, granting the shipwrecked youth libidinal and subjective autonomy—only to ultimately ‘deny it.’3 Twelth Night follows this arc, engaging Antonio and Sebastian in emotionally intense, potentially homoerotic exchange, only to resolve this fictional probability with a conservative comedic ending.
Sanchez states that heteronormativity is ‘the persistent target’ (7) of queer approaches to Shakespeare—a claim clearly borne out in these two compelling essays that explore queerness in Coriolanus and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Huw Griffiths argues that queerness in Coriolanus is expressed through the homoerotic sensibility involving Coriolanus and Aufidius—especially in their intimate, militarized language—and through the evolving reception and adaptation of the play. Griffiths highlights how late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century adaptations alternately supressed this homoeroticism, often under the influence of cultural homophobia. Later adaptations of Coriolanus showed ‘more variegated responses to the text’, acknowledging that ‘the supposition of the play’s homoeroticism has fluctuated.’ (199). In particular, Nahum Tate’s 1682 adaptation, The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, erases homoerotic bonds by shifting emotional intensity from male comradeship to family. Conversely, John Dennis’ 1720 adaptation, The Enemy of His Country, 'increases…the erotic stakes’ (206) in his adaptation of Aufidius’ speech (4.5.114-127), by allowing the admired soldier and the wife to compete as objects of desire. Jennifer Drouin similarly explores queer potential of characters in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which she calls ‘the queerest of Shakespeare’s comedies’ (213). She explores the recurring motif of ‘ocular excess’ (213), as the preponderance of verbs associated with looking, seeing, and watching express how characters frequently ‘gaze’ at one another in ways charged with ambiguous desire. From Palamon’s longing stares at Arcite, to the charged glances between Hippolyta and Emilia, to the Jailer, his Daughter, and her Wooer all watching Arcite, Drouin shows how Shakespeare’s staging blends narcissism, homoeroticism, and heteronormativity. These overlapping gazes create a dramaturgy of looking that destabilizes fixed categories of desire, performing queerness through layered and shifting visual attention.
By examining editorial decisions—such as the choice not to gloss certain queer lines at all (as in the 2013 Arden 2 edition of Coriolanus), or to explain them timidly through references to other plays and sonnets (as in the 1922 Arden 1 edition of this play) —Huw Griffiths highlights the critical control exercised over the play’s queer meanings. His essay provides a useful entry point into the relationship between editorial practice and the articulation of queerness in Shakespeare’s texts—a relationship Don Rodrigues examines in Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics: Distant Reading and Collaborative Intimacy in Love’s Martyr (Arden, 2023). Rodrigues proposes ‘a theory of authorship grounded in both queer theory and computation’ (31), applying it to Love’s Martyr, a curious poem likely composed by multiple authors, including Shakespeare. His method, which he calls queer analytics, blends quantitative, computational, and queer approaches, enabling critics ‘to see the multiple in the singular without altogether eliminating ontological boundaries—such as the authorial style of author X over that of author Y’ (33). ‘Queering computation,’ Rodrigues explains, ‘means thinking about authorship in multivalent terms that yield greater, not lesser, precision’ (37). This idea of multivalence—of voices layered and identities overlapping—resonates with the sexual and authorial ambiguities present in the passionate exchanges between Sebastian and Antonio in Twelfth Night or the fluid identities of the Athenian lovers in Rice’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
These studies together suggest that Shakespeare’s queer plays are not peripheral, but central to the history of sexuality—and that queer desire has long been a vital force in the evolution of drama.
Arden plays can be found in the Drama Online Core Collection and Pre-Modern and 19th Century Collection; the books referenced in this piece can be found in our Critical Studies and Performance Practice Collection; Emma Rice’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be found in the RSC Live Collection.
1 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (1991): 1-13, 1.
2 Alan Sinfield, ‘The Leather Men and the Lovely Boy: Reading Positions in Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 378-384, 383.
3 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 156.
Image on Drama Online homepage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed at Shakespeare’s Globe, 2016
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