ENGL 431 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Homoeroticism, Heterosexuality
Document Summary
John benson chose the most radical response to the scandal of the shakespearean sonnets: changed pronouns and introduced false titles. Made the young man a mistress: changed a homosexual love into a heterosexual. Was reprinted this way many times: hyder e rollins is the rst to detail these changes. An exaggerated claim: only directly altered 3 out of 75 of the sonnets, used to avoid solecism rather than homoeroticism, sonnet 101 is altered to keep clear the di erence between truth and the beloved. Thesis: it is not shakespeare"s text, then, that has been falsi ed by benson but rather. Benson"s edition that has been falsi ed by the modern tradition: it has been rather that of shakespeare criticism which for the past two centuries has been repeating variants of the repression it obsessively ascribes to benson. This repression has, as i will proceed to argue, produced the very scandal it would deny.
