SOURCE: "The Secret Sharer," in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 225-70.

In this excerpt, Smith describes some features that distinguish Shakespeare's lyrics from other sixteenth-century English sonnet sequences, including his subjectivity, his focus on love after sexual consummation, and his use of erotic images in poems addressed to another man.

Me neither woman now, nor boy doth move,
  Nor a too credulous hope of mutuali love;
 Nor doth it please me to contend with wine,
 Nor with fresh flowers my temples round to twine.
 But why, O Ligurinus, why alas
 Doe my rare seene teares ore my cheekes thus passe?
 Wherefore in silence, no way fit at all,
 Amids my words dos my smooth tongue thus fall?
 Now close-cling 'd in my nightly dreames I wooe thee,
  Now through the grasse of Mars his field pursue thee
 So swift...