SOURCE: "Traditional and the Individual Sodomite," in Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton, Cornell, 1991, pp. 141-85.

In the excerpt below, Bredbeck proposes that Shakespeare 's sonnets represent a critique of language as a means of restricting expressions of desire to a single gender or sexuality. Focusing on Sonnets 1-21, he explains that although each poem demands a gendered interpretation, each one simultaneously frustrates our attempts to construct such a reading.

. . . The history of commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets is also the history of how to read humanistically.³⁷ Questions of the identity of the dark lady, the rival poet, the boy;³⁸ debates on the identity of W. H.;³⁹ biographical arguments over what is sexual, what is platonic, and what was Shakespeare's sexual preference:⁴⁰ these questions, which form the bulk of criticism about the sonnets, all presuppose that the importance of the text is in its ability to act as a...