That Night at Farnham

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 16 · 1 September 1983

From William Empson

SIR: ‘That Night at Farnham’ (LRB, Vol. 5, No 15) remarks, speaking of James I: ‘The king and the labouring man both seem to have made the same extraordinary psychological separation between sodomy and what they themselves felt and did.’ Sodomy has been defined, not long before, as ‘sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast)’, and we are told that it was ‘officially’ regarded as so unnatural that it shocked even the Devil, who was therefore not its patron. I think that the solution of this puzzle is obvious, though to explain how the confusion became so general might take a bit of psychology, or politics.

Anal penetration was what shocked even the Devil, and many homosexuals can satisfy one another without it. Consider the ‘labourer’ (so-called) who was shocked and indignant at being accused of sodomy with his apprentice, who slept in the same bed, for want of another no doubt. If each of them was masturbating himself it would seem rude not to ‘give a hand’ to the other, a process undoubtedly not so unnatural as to shock the Devil. Of course there are stages between that and the accursed thing, but it is hard to get evidence about them. As to Shakespeare saying ‘to my purpose nothing’, he was always careful to avoid possible legal trouble, and seems at that age to have been rather prone to boast of success with the girls, and might well feel it would be bad taste to express hope for success with an earl. The phrase is comical rather than sanctimonious. In general, a theatre with boys acting as girls must be expected to extract fun from the charms of boys; this was regarded as innocent, so long as it was remote from anal penetration.

I agree, however, that so widespread a confusion was not likely to survive against the intention of a Tudor or Stuart government, or even without its active support. The trick seems rather a healthy one. Young people are to grow up believing that there is one really dreadful thing about love between men, but if you keep right away from that it is good, as we are told by Christ and Plato. The penalty for the dreadful thing is death, but it never has to be inflicted in London, whatever the JPs in Somerset may get up to. One must expect so appalling a thing to be rare. In this way a decent moral tone may be preserved, without running into a great deal of public indecency, let alone the reprisals from important people which might be expected.

It was a civilised arrangement, and ought not to be regarded with blank astonishment, merely emphasized by an appeal to ‘psychology’, which presumes that they were all mad.

William Empson
Hampstead

Vol. 5 No. 19 · 20 October 1983

From Norman Stevenson

SIR: In her illuminating, wide-ranging review of Homosexuality in Renaissance England (LRB, Vol. 5, No 15), Anne Barton expresses astonishment at Marlowe’s open presentation of homoerotic feelings in his work. Could it be that his characteristic manner, the rhetorical striking of attitudes, was itself both a shield to audience susceptibilities and a screen to the author’s self-revelation? When Jupiter, in Dido, Queen of Carthage, addressed his lover/page-boy in the lines,

Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me;
I love thee well, say Juno what she will,

an Elizabethan spectator might surely think it harmless enough stuff – not only because Gods on Olympus are a law unto themselves but also because Jupiter’s declamatory posturing reassures the audience that there is little danger that intimacy will take place. When, however, Orlando (the ‘fruit’ of Jove) is wooing his Ganymede, the rhetorical variety of the language admits considerably more possibility of realistic feeling. Shakespeare, therefore, it might be argued, made his homosexual references in a much more veiled way. Which is not to deny, of course, that Shakespeare seems by temperament to have been a much more private person, anyway. He undoubtedly had the subtler mind. This being so, the suggestion that Shakespeare didn’t notice the discrepancy between the apparent homosexual disclaimer in Sonnet 20 and his erotic feelings for the young man leaves one uneasy. It is one thing for King James, playing his kingly and paternal role, to forget his own post-prandial behaviour in younger days but another entirely for our greatest love-poet to forget the context in which he was writing. It is a little depressing to find the finest Shakespearean commentator of our day lending even indirect support to the simplistic Rowsian view that Sonnet 20 can be read as a repudiation of any homosexual interest.

Norman Stevenson
Belfast