Melville, James, Proust, Wilde, Forster, Gide, Whitman, Jenet, Mann, Lorca, Mishima, Baldwin, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein...

homos are worse than niggers when it comes to claiming authors unjustly

and shakespeare was Sir Francis Bacon who absolutely was not gay

>Shakespeare, Melville, DeLillo, Tolstoy, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Joyce, O'Connor, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Pynchon, Aeschlyus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Emerson, Sam Hyde, Martial, Seneca, Catallus, Updike, Salinger, McCarthy, Nabokov, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Goethe, Schiller, Borges, St. Paul, Twain, Dickens, Petrarch, St. Augustine

When makes being straight so Veeky Forums?

You can delete all the Greeks. And that's still a disgustingly short list, assuming homofags only make up 5% of the population.

>“Three out of four poets in America are gay or bisexual,” he says. “More than half of all the great poets are”

No you can't, stop repeating memes you saw on Veeky Forums, Plato especially hated homosexuality.

looking at a culture through a different lens makes for good art. It's the same reason most artists are weirdos
also

Plato was a fascist fagboi who got daddy issues about Socrates

Homosexual men see women as the parasites they truly are. Male bonding and male love will conquer and crush the matriarchy. They shall be used only to breed.

Greek love is not equivalent to modern day homosexuality. I didn't feel like writing names down all day, so I wrote enough to match OP's bait.

>>Melville
Christ that shit with queequeg was so gay, especially when they had first met

b8 was not my intention. It seems to me that homos (well, people not completely straight at least) are over-represented among the greatest writers in history. I wanted to know if people agree and if so, why they think it is that way.

There's nothing gay about pumping sperm with your bro

>Greek love is not equivalent to modern day homosexuality.

High egocentrism, high libido and high self awareness are all needed to be a writer.
I think its not necessarily that homos are just overrpresented among writers though they are to a degree but also that being a writer means you're highly more likely to be aware and reveal your sexuality
Like if Melville wasn't a writer but was say a US General nobody ever have known his apparent bisexuality.

Not at all
It was not exclusive, you still had a wife to reproduce.

how many gay bars and how many pride parades were in ancient Greece?

>how many gay bars
all of them

is this b8

Oh I guess Oscar Wilde wasn't a homosexual then

I wouldn't say they're overrepresented, and I'm sorry for calling your post bait, but it seems silly to me for someone to not think of all the authors I didn't name in this post Idk why you're posting this but I'll assume the best of you and assume you don't know, and instead you think that Greek love and modern day homosexuality are the same. Short answer: Read some Plato, especially the Symposium and Phaedrus.

correct

If the balls touch its gay

More than half of those are bisexuals

prob not. He's almost surely a /pol/tard and they're that stupid

What happens to the straight men?

whatever you say, satan

homosexuality was different then because there wasnt as much lifelong gay partners as if they were married walking through the market place with their collared pink button down shirts tucked in and aviator shades on their head with hand bags laughing whereing speedo thongs and foam parties with a lexicon worth of gay words

when they want to unload they seed they will visit the facility with the stables housing females unfit for breeding

Modern gays are promiscuous degenerates though. I guarantee those in stable relationships are a tiny minority and just presented in media to hide the ugly truth of their lives

straight men are mad at gay men for attempting to take the easy way out of life, so that is why gays have been given a hard time, because they are like, fucking hell if you are going to try to escape trying to deal with the hell that is woman you deserve us giving you a little shit for it...well, damn... you might actually like that if we gave you a little shit.... so you deserve us fucking with you a little...damn, you might actually like us fucking with you a little... you deserve some hard times ok... damn... you might actually like us giving you some hard times.... you deserve... not having such a fun time

Half of the list made me go wait hold on... I guess I could see that

Sonnet 20 is a pretty good bit of evidence for Shakespeare desu

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

Faggots need to burn at the stake

I forgot to add laughing obnoxiously and speaking in a fake uberfeminine slurred inflection voice

Flattering your boss was the rule of the day. Means very little

How do you know Plato didn't do this

explain one piece of evidence in there (more than one would be preferred)

Someone do an audiobook reading Plato's works in gayvoice

Homo is patrician

yikes on the Dorian Gray assessment dude. Wilde's morality and conversion to Catholicism is interesting but Wilde was a huge faggot during and after Dorian Gray and its morality is not so "Christian" - as in one-sided. It's depiction of homofaggotry is expressive, the immoralism Dorian falls into contrasts with Basil's more naive and altruistic homogay

Also Shakespeare and Byron are indisputable. Too bad you are probably subhuman

>It's depiction of homofaggotry is expressive
>someone expressively writing a murder mystery must be a murderer

Wilde said that all 3 characters - Lord Henry, Basil and Dorian - were different parts of him.

I'm not going to defend this too passionately because I mostly just wanted to see what you guys would make of it. Personally I buy it, but I recognize the evidence isn't great. pic related

lel. might be the case

no no noanfonsofnsdognodng
I literally do not see a line or series of words that have anything to do with gayness in sonnet 20 you provided. Thats why I asked to provide evidence in that sonnet....which line/s.... which series of words precisely....

Is this one of those mozart was black things?

>sam hyde

>you can never be redeemed
o-ok satan

fug maybe I should read Plato, I was just gonna start at Aristotle.

i used to think sam hyde was a total john green tier retard until i finally watched that ted talk then i was like ok this guy keeps it dumb for the plebs but he can think

It is explicitly about a man, user. Whether the love it speaks of is sexual can be debated I suppose.

NOOOOOO

>A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
About a woman
>Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
about a woman

>A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
about a woman

>With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
about a woman

>An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
about a woman

>Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
about a woman

>A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
about what the womans gliding eye sees

>Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
woman steals mans eyes, about a woman

>And for a woman wert thou first created;
about a woman

>Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
about a woman

>And by addition me of thee defeated,
about being defeated by a woman?

>By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
about him?

>But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
about a woman

>Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
about him and woman

forgot Burroughs and all the other butt-pirating beats

>>master-mistress
>>But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure
>about a woman
A woman was "prick'd" out for women's pleasure? So you're saying Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about pining for a lesbian?
>A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted with shifting change, as is false women's fashion; an eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling
In other words, he has the positive attributes of a woman but not the negatives.

For the last time, Shakespeare was not gay, you God damned fucking retards fall for the retarded meme that these cunts who want to claim everyone throughout history was a fucking fag every fucking time. "Hurr durr look the greatest writer of all time was gay! Hurr durr!" God damn it.

Not an argument

This may be either the straightest or gayest thing I ever read on this board, congratulations! Either you're so straight you don't realise that many fags also love women, or so gay the thought never occurred to you.

>humans don’t change bro just keep sinning lol don’t try and better urself

Fuck off Satan, Veeky Forums is a Catholic board

It's fact.

Submit your interpretation of Sonnet 20.

SO WHERE IS THE ASPECT OF THE SONNET THAT HAS TO DO WITH BEING FAG

reply to my post you fucking dilettante

>im a gay and it would really make me feel better about my decision if shakespeare was gay too, so it cant be that this one tinest bit of """"""evidence""" that my warped mind has been twisted towards me by other warped minds who have this same urge has told me has some """""""evidence""""""" of shakespeare being gay cannot be proven false oh please dont let it no no no please dont omg omg it cant be... play it cool... play it cool.... ok

That's a very neurotic rebuttal. I don't care much about whether or not Shakespeare was "gay" or "straight" - too much of a focus on identity separates you from the art - what matters is the interpretation of sonnets such as 20. I can understand being annoyed at the "everyone is gay" mentality. At the same time, just because an irrational tendency exists doesn't mean every claim along those lines is irrational or not worth following. Shakespeare's plays, which are his primary contribution, are largely irrelevant to this. His sonnets on the other hand are strongly homoerotic.

Do you care more about Shakespeare's art or a culture war thing? Just because some people may make false claims about the homosexuality of other figures doesn't mean that there hasn't ever, in history, actually been an important person whose homosexuality has played a part in their cultural legacy.

cliffsnotes.com/literature/s/shakespeares-sonnets/summary-and-analysis/sonnet-20

How do you know that shakespeare was not gay but wanted to write a sonnet from the perspective of a gay person?

Didnt shakespeare have a wife and kids? Young men were popular to dress up and perform female roles in plays then right?? So what if shakespeare screwed a few, traps arent gay

What is the utility of 'master' here? I only point it out in conjunction with the rest. Since the poem is undoubtedly referring to a young man, the "mistress" is the important part.

See >The youth's double sexuality, as portrayed by the poet, accentuates the youth's challenge for the poet. As a man with the beauty of a woman, the youth is designed to be partnered with women but attracts men as well, being unsurpassed in looks and more faithful than any woman.
>Sonnet 20 is the first sonnet not concerned in one way or another with the defeat of time or with the young man's fathering a child. Rather, the poet's interest is in discovering the nature of their relationship. Yet even as the poet acknowledges an erotic attraction to the youth, he does not entertain the possibility of a physical consummation of his love.
WTF...

My evidence has absolutely zero to do with the content of sonnet 20 and everything to do with the fact that shakespeare wrote the sonnets for money and to gain the confidence of wealthy patrons.

Because, facts of the matter are, his best friend from Stratford, Richard Field, who just so happened to eventually become the most respected printer in all of London, first published big willy's work, Venus and Adonis and also Lucrece, which were the first works to make big willy semi famous and start getting attention. Right after, he goes to make his work in the theater where he meets degenerates like Henry Wriothesly, a well known nobleman frequenter of the London theater scene, as well as many others. What happens? A particularly strong outbreak of the plague happens and the theaters were shut down by the gubmint. All the sonnets, literally all of them, were written during this outbreak.

He wrote the sonnets for horny nobleman and probably noble women so they could get laid and he could get paid. It got him financing and a patron like Henry Wriothesly, and that's why he dedicates them to him. For keeping him working. Henry was good looking as fuck, btw. Big willy isn't the only one to say so. Dude was like the best looking dude in London at the time. Everybody wanted that dude's dick. Shakes wanted to eat.

I only care about the true interpretation of the sonnet 20 and what evidence could possibly be gleamed from that to make any definitive (or educated guess) statement about Shakespeares character.

I am cranky because of how difficult it is to read and interpret what he means in the writing.

What do you think these lines mean:

"And by addition me of thee defeated"

"By adding one thing to my purpose nothing."

"Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure."

>Ended up renouncing faggotry in later life.
hahahaha

As interesting as that all is - and I don't know how much of it is conjecture and how much accepted fact - in the context of the argument there's not much relevance. The sonnets deal with largely similar, intensely personal topics, and develop very slowly thematically. It might be facetious to use their quality as evidence of the author's sincerity, but they are really pretty evocative and true to very deep introspection and strong feeling. The stuff about the onslaught of time and the futile wish to preserve beauty, the .

Dedicating a poem to someone is also different from addressing the poem to that person, as far as I'm aware. Of course, it's something to take into account, and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. You seem to be working it into a narrative of le evil homo noble takes advantage of the hetero artist though. Was Henry Wriothesly a 'degenerate'?

Regardless of the context of the poems, a homoerotic interpretation is far from outrageous. Very few concrete things can be divined about Shakespeare's life and personality , which I prefer, but I don't think vague guesses at Shakespeare's personal life from the content of his sonnets is too far-fetched. Your interpretation is equally as valid, though. We cannot definitively say how much the sonnets correlate to anything "autobiographical". It's one thing to have felt those feelings (however distantly) and put them into poetry - it's another for those poems to have concrete relations to immediate personal relationships and events etc.

I could be wrong, but I think the narrator is sorrowful over the fact that the youth's beauty and its consummation is by nature meant to be directed toward women, so he can only observe the object of his admiration from a distance.

"Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure" - his conjugal faculties the treasure of women. He is his love, but he cannot have his love's "use".

sonnet 20 was the only thing by Shakespeare written by Francis Bacon, and was snuck in after his death

>"Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure" - his conjugal faculties the treasure of women. He is his love, but he cannot have his love's "use".

"And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting"
reference to adam and eve I assume.

"And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing."
By addition of woman, me of you defeated.

adding woman, added nothing to his purpose?

"But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,"
obvious dick innuendo, prick'd,

"Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure."

what does he mean by 'mine' here.. my love be your love? May your love be mine? Be your love, mine?

And your love's use their treasure?

>What is bisexuality or closeted homosexuality

>Elizabethan theater
>not literally 'a game of pretend'
C'mon man

"Shakespeare's sonnets is the title of a collection of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare, which covers themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality."

"The first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man;"

"The sonnets to the young man express overwhelming, obsessional love. The main issue of debate has always been whether it remained platonic or became physical. The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid."

"The Sonnets include a dedication to one "Mr. W.H.". The identity of this person remains a mystery and, since the 19th century, has provoked a great deal of speculation.

The dedication reads:"

"“
TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSUING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH."

"Its oblique nature has led Colin Burrow to describe it as a "dank pit in which speculation wallows and founders". Don Foster concludes that the result of all the speculation has yielded only two "facts", which themselves have been the object of much debate: First, that the form of address (Mr.) suggests that W.H. was an untitled gentleman, and second, that W.H., whoever he was, is identified as "the only begetter" of Shakespeare's Sonnets (whatever the word "begetter" is taken to mean)"

"126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to a young man, often called the "Fair Youth." Some theories concerning the identity of Mr. W.H. take him to be that youth, while others assert him to be a separate person."

"A simple printing error for Shakespeare's initials, "W.S." or "W. Sh". This was suggested by Bertrand Russell in his memoirs, and also by Foster[11] and by Jonathan Bate.[12] Bate supports his point by reading "onlie" as something like "peerless", "singular" and "begetter" as "maker", i.e. "'writer". Foster takes "onlie" to mean only one, which he argues eliminates any particular subject of the poems, since they are addressed to more than one person. The phrase "Our Ever-Living Poet", according to Foster, refers to God, not Shakespeare. "Poet" comes from the Greek "poetes" which means "maker", a fact remarked upon in various contemporary texts; also, in Elizabethan English the word "maker" was used to mean "poet". These researchers believe the phrase "our ever-living poet" might easily have been taken to mean "our immortal maker" (God). The "eternity" promised us by our immortal maker would then be the eternal life that is promised us by God, and the dedication would conform with the standard formula of the time, according to which one person wished another "happiness [in this life] and eternal bliss [in heaven]". Shakespeare himself, on this reading, is "Mr. W. [S]H." the "onlie begetter", i.e., the sole author, of the sonnets, and the dedication is advertising the authenticity of the poems."

"The "Fair Youth" is the unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1–126 are addressed.[23] Some commentators, noting the romantic and loving language used in this sequence of sonnets, have suggested a sexual relationship between them; others have read the relationship as platonic love.[citation needed]

The earliest poems in the sequence recommend the benefits of marriage and children. With the famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") the tone changes dramatically towards romantic intimacy. Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a woman.[citation needed] Most of the subsequent sonnets describe the ups and downs of the relationship, culminating with an affair between the poet and the Dark Lady. The relationship seems to end when the Fair Youth succumbs to the Lady's charms (Sonnet 144)."

"One interpretation is that Shakespeare's sonnets are a pastiche or parody of the 300-year-old tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets; Shakespeare consciously inverts conventional gender roles as delineated in Petrarchan sonnets to create a more complex depiction of human love.[30] He plays with gender roles (20), comments on political events (124), makes fun of love (128), speaks openly about sexual desire (129), parodies beauty (130) and even references pornography (151). In a dozen of the sonnets to the youth, Shakespeare also refers to his "disgrace":[31] "My name be buried where my body is / And live no more to shame nor me nor you."

Holy fuck don't ever try to read poetry again my mane

ITT desperate Veeky Forumsqueens trying to justify their perverted views.
Just go celibate you retards

homosexuality is a jewish myth created and promoted for the destruction of the western man

gays are correct because on average the spirit of male is more noble, true, and worthy of love

the primary reason females are cared about is because their womb: and thus their souls are corrupted (in a social construct way: and evolutionary construct): the need for reproduction defines all things, and this is true. Which is why gays are wrong. Possibly spiritually the rightest, materially the wrongest. What is the meaning of being intimate with another. Where does the drive, the desire come from? Is it sensical? Is it logical, rational, reasonable? Does it matter? Can a cat cuddle with its brother and it means nothing? A man wants to kiss a woman, why? that is gay. Does the mans attraction to the woman have anything to do with anything beyond evolution, beyond the need to produce? Is a straight man not attracted to a man because the man is not pretty, or beautiful? Because a man is strong, and gross? Because a man knows what can go on in another mans mind, and so is unattracted to the grotesque possibilities of his own cunning spirit? To not want to get intimate with a monster? The female has been bred, adapted, evolved, to be not a monster? To be refined, and pretty, and beautiful? What does man want with this? to kiss a vase of flowers? What is (all that is) beauty (?), what is (all that is) beautiful (?), and man wants to kiss that, man wants to cuddle with that, man wants to lick that?

Are we all but atoms floating, seeking connection? Is there any meaning beyond that (metaphysical)? Beyond loneliness and connection? It is uncomfortable to sate ones loneliness with grotesque monstery, with large and sharp and strong and brutish and slimey and dark; so small and dainty and pretty and flowery and simple and smooth must be made? For the sole purpose of dissipating loneliness? What is spirit, mind, intelligence, why does it matter, just another parameter, just another tassel, to gauge cuddlebility, to rid loneliness?

>(in a social construct way: and evolutionary construct)
is evolution just the society of natures construct? is biology just a social construct of Gods? is there any eternal meaning or significance? there are eternal concepts, and nature, taps into them, presents versions of them?

>What is (all that is) beauty (?), what is (all that is) beautiful (?), and man wants to kiss that, man wants to cuddle with that, man wants to lick that?
Would man lick a sunset if he could? Would man fuck a sunset if he could? Or a whole mountain? If man could lick the sun, cuddle it, and fuck it, would he? if he thought it were beautiful?

Underrated

>average the spirit of male is more noble, true, and worthy of love
biggest reason for thinking this is because you cant get any chicks fag

I think Shakespeare was into traps, which is not gay.

I am kekking at the idea of one of history’s greatest poets describing a woman as having a woman’s face.