Thank you, Rob Dyer, for the notice of my book. I probably have underplayed homosexuality, though my chapter 5 is on Richard Barnfield, and see page 73 on E. K. and pederastice love. But I think it was less a feature of a ‘gay culture’, more a pervasive practice in a culture in which adult males (and therefore perforce everybody else, since adult males had the power) saw it as fairly indifferent whether a man had sexual relations with a boy, a young man or with a woman. (See Alan Sinfield, passim, but recently in Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality, and especially in that volume his chapter 4 on Merchant of Venice.) Of course, questions of children and inheritance cut across this; and I don’t know if we are clear as to how reprehensible sexual relations between adult males were considered, in England. There must have been tensions as women gained in status, companionate marriage increased, religion condemned homosexuality, the classics encouraged it, intimate friendships between men were normal and there had been no Puritan revolution, which has had such an enormous effect on our culture.

 

(I’m afraid I’m already forgetting what is in my book, and moving on to new projects, though it hasn’t been reviewed yet. So any notice of it like yours is welcome.)

 

Best wishes, and good luck with your research.

Penny McCarthy