After the age of 31 Barnfield wrote no more, but, being in easy circumstances, retired to his beautiful manor house and country estate in Shropshire, lived there for twenty years and died leaving a wife and son.[85] It seems probable that he was of bisexual temperament, and that, as not infrequently happens in such cases, the homosexual element developed early under the influence of a classical education and university associations, while the normal heterosexual element developed later and, as may happen in bisexual persons, was associated with the more commonplace and prosaic side of life.  Barnfield was only a genuine poet on the homosexual side of his nature.

Greater men of that age than Barnfield may be suspected of homosexual tendencies.  Marlowe, whose most powerful drama, Edward II, is devoted to a picture of the relations between that king and his minions, is himself suspected of homosexuality.  An ignorant informer brought certain charges of freethought and criminality against him, and further accused him of asserting that they are fools who love not boys.  These charges have doubtless been colored by the vulgar channel through which they passed, but it seems absolutely impossible to regard them as the inventions of a mere gallows-bird such as this informer was.[86] Moreover, Marlowe’s poetic work, while it shows him by no means insensitive to the beauty of women, also reveals a special and peculiar sensitiveness to masculine beauty.  Marlowe clearly had a reckless delight in all things unlawful, and it seems probable that he possessed the bisexual temperament.  Shakespeare has also been discussed from this point of view.  All that can be said, however, is that he addressed a long series of sonnets to a youthful male friend.  These sonnets are written in lover’s language of a very tender and noble order.  They do not appear to imply any relationship that the writer regarded as shameful or that would be so regarded by the world.  Moreover, they seem to represent but a single episode in the life of a very sensitive, many-sided nature.[87] There is no other evidence in Shakespeare’s work of homosexual instinct such as we may trace throughout Marlowe’s, while there is abundant evidence of a constant preoccupation with women.

While Shakespeare thus narrowly escapes inclusion in the list of distinguished inverts, there is much better ground for the inclusion of his great contemporary, Francis Bacon.  Aubrey in his laboriously compiled Short Lives, in which he shows a friendly and admiring attitude toward Bacon, definitely states that he was a pederast.  Aubrey was only a careful gleaner of frequently authentic gossip, but a similar statement is made by Sir Simonds D’Ewes in his Autobiography.  D’Ewes, whose family belonged to the same part of Suffolk as Bacon’s sprang from, was not friendly to Bacon, but that fact will not suffice to account for his statement.  He was an upright and honorable man of scholarly habits,