For all its importance as a legal and ideological category used to define and police sexual behavior in the Renaissance, “sodomy” fails to describe a variety of same-sex relations that were central to the social organization and literary culture of early modern England. This book provides a sustained demonstration of why this should be so, and offers the concept of “homoeroticism” as an alternative foundation for the literary and historical analysis of early modern sexuality.

Lesbian and gay scholarship has shown that in the early modern period “sodomy” was neither a neutral description of a sexual act nor a synonym for homoerotic relations generally, but a political category deployed to stigmatize and control a multitude of social disorders. “Sodomy” identified the apparent violation of dominant religious, gender, economic, or social codes in conjunction with sexual transgressions often but not exclusively involving homoerotic intimacy. While recent scholarship has superbly exposed the ideological contradictions and political operations of sodomy discourses, it has not fully explored the implications of these findings for the study of other forms of Renaissance homoeroticism. The complex interplay between sodomitical and nonsodomitical forms of homoeroticism deserves a more detailed and nuanced account than it has heretofore received. In the interests of advancing a materialist understanding of early modern sexuality and society, this book will examine the full range of sodomitical and nonsodomitical homoerotic relations represented in English drama from about 1590 to 1620.