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shephaestion:
midcenturymodern:
great homophobic victorian literary critic minds think exactly alike (sonnet 20, for reference)
not just the victorians either; George Steevens refused to edit any of the sonnets for his 1793 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works because he said sonnet 20 was “impossible to read without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation”
and then James Boswell in 1823 said none of the sonnets were actually written to a man because any REAL ‘distinguished nobleman’ would have been enraged and offended by all the “encomiums on his beauty, and the fondling expressions” appropriate only to a “cocker’d silken wanton” e.g. ‘these couldn’t be written to a man bc no real man would tolerate being called beautiful’ which, nice
of course they had plenty of precedent going way back…ol’ John Benson was infamously changing masculine pronouns in the sonnets to feminine ones waaay back in 1640, BUT sonnet 20 is uniquely annoying and terrible for homophobes bc no amount of pronoun swapping or “well men used to talk flowery to each other in The Old Days” can make a poem that says ‘if u didn’t have a dick we’d be married’ not queer
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shephaestion:
midcenturymodern:
great homophobic victorian literary critic minds think exactly alike (sonnet 20, for reference)
not just the victorians either; George Steevens refused to edit any of the sonnets for his 1793 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works because he said sonnet 20 was “impossible to read without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation”
and then James Boswell in 1823 said none of the sonnets were actually written to a man because any REAL ‘distinguished nobleman’ would have been enraged and offended by all the “encomiums on his beauty, and the fondling expressions” appropriate only to a “cocker’d silken wanton” e.g. ‘these couldn’t be written to a man bc no real man would tolerate being called beautiful’ which, nice
of course they had plenty of precedent going way back…ol’ John Benson was infamously changing masculine pronouns in the sonnets to feminine ones waaay back in 1640, BUT sonnet 20 is uniquely annoying and terrible for homophobes bc no amount of pronoun swapping or “well men used to talk flowery to each other in The Old Days” can make a poem that says ‘if u didn’t have a dick we’d be married’ not queer
(Your picture was not posted)