Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/367

 it into his poetical autobiography.

That the plays of Shakespeare contain so extremely few references of any sort to homosexual love is not more than remarkable, in view of the general uncertainty of just how much of the text of any dramas that we ascribe to Shakespeare ever was from the authour of the Sonnets. There are many references to the beauty of boys; to the physical and spiritual charm of male youthfulness. We meet such in the dialogue about the supposed Fidele between the sons of Leonatus, in "Cymbeline". There is a flavour of sentimental homosexualism in the comedy that Orlando consents to play with the mysterious Ganymede. So too in the fascination which Viola, as a boy, exerts over the Duke of Illyria. But these and other passages are of elusive intent. One of the few outspoken remarks in the Plays comes in "Troilus and Cressida," where the railing Thersites calls Patroclus a "minion"; and adds explainingly, "male whore"—of Achilles. The portraits of Shakespeare himself have that curious mixture of intellectuality and sexualism met in many men of genius. But the Shakespeare of the Plays is yet a vague individual; an editorial, managerial and personal ignis fatuus.

On the English stage at the Shakespeare epoch, and much later, the custom of committing female rôles to boys of physical grace and beauty, must have exerted homosexual influences on impressionable Englishmen. "Behold divineness no elder than a boy!" found its echo in many a pederastic heart, after some performance of "Cymbeline," or of "As you Like It," or of "Twelfth Night". Samuel Pepys—not at all homosexual—speaks of seeing the famous young actor of female rôles, Kynaston, in a part that made the youth seem even to Pepys "the loveliest lady I ever saw in my life"; and Pepys was a most