SOURCE: "Queering the Shakespearean Family," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 269-90.

In the essay below, DiGangi analyzes homoeroticism in As You Like It as it relates to the early modern family and the mythological narrative that recounts Jupiter's desire for his page Ganymede.

Is there anything queer about the family in Shakespeare's England? Until the mid-1980s, scholarship on early modern marriage and domestic life had proceeded as if homoerotic desire were largely irrelevant to its concerns. An obviously significant example of this tendency is Lawrence Stone's influential The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, which, despite its monumental scope, has very little to say about the relation of homosexuality to the family, sex, or marriage throughout three hundred years of English history.¹ As gay, lesbian, feminist, and queer scholarship have demonstrated with increasing subtlety and cumulative force, however, to ignore the place of same-sex...