Machine generated contents note: INTRODUCTION 1. FIGURING SEX BETWEEN MEN 5 Reading the Past 5 Definition and Indefinition 16 Potential Spaces 38 2. SHAKESPEARIAN FIGURES 62 Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Rhetoric of Possession and Dispossession 62 Shakespeare's Plays and their Italian Sources 87 The Erasure of Homoeroticism from Shakespeare's Texts 101 3. POLITICS AND 'SODOMY' 117 Edward II and Gaveston 117 James I and his Favourites 128 Sodomy and Civil War 150 Titus Oates 155 William III 172 4. MARVELL'S AMBIGUITIES 186 The Pamphlet Attacks on Marvell 187 Marvell's Poetry 204 5. ROCHESTER AND RESTORATION HOMOEROTICISM 226 Restoration Homoeroticism 226 Rochester's Male Relationships 235 Sex between Men in Rochester's Poetry 241.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-276) and index.

"This book explores the ways in which sexual relationships between men were represented in English literature during the seventeenth century. It is built around two principal themes: firstly the literary strategies through which writers created imagined spaces for the expression of homosexual desire; and secondly the ways in which such texts were subsequently edited and adapted to remove these references to sex between men. The book begins with a wide-ranging analysis of the forms in which both homosexual desire and homophobic hatred were expressed in the period, focusing on the problems of defining male relationships, the erotic dimension to male friendships, and the uses of classical settings. Subsequent chapters offer four case studies.

The first focuses on the way Shakespeare adapted his sources to introduce the possibility of sexual relations between male characters, with special attention to Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and the Sonnets, and shows how these elements were removed in later adaptations of his plays and poems. Subsequent chapters chart the often satirical representation of homosexual rulers from James I to William III; the ambiguous sexuality figured in the poetry of Andrew Marvell; and the libertine homoeroticism of the poetry of the Earl of Rochester. The book draws on a wide range of poems, plays, letters, and pamphlets, and discusses a substantial amount of previously unknown material from both printed and manuscript sources."--Jacket.

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