SOURCE: “William Shakespeare,” in A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 93-107.

In the essay below, Woods discusses homoerotic and homosexual interpretations of several Shakespearean plays, particularly Troilus and Cressida. He also offers a synopsis of the critical debate about whether Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man delineate homosexual desires, and contends that the sonnets are profoundly concerned with the distinction between male friendship and male sexual love.

What we read in Shakespeare is never pure text, any more than the staging of one of his plays can ever be innocent of the hermeneutics of production. As so many recent critics have pointed out, William Shakespeare is far from being just an author with a body of texts to his name. He is a major cultural institution. In ways which are not true of Christopher Marlowe, he is expected to serve the purposes...