As You Like It or What You Will:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus
Is queer history a continuum, or is it best understood as a discontinuous series of moments, of interventions, of gestures? When searching for evidence of queer practices, passions and affections in the pre-modern period, should one attempt to construct a genealogy, finding evidence of continuity and tradition, or is it better to focus on individual moments, texts and pieces of evidence?1 There is no genealogical connection whatsoever between Antonio Beccadelli’s collection of Latin epigrams, Hermaphroditus (c. 1425) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (published 1609). And yet, juxtaposing the two allows one to interrogate notions of queer historiography and to query what useful relationships can be established between texts across temporal and linguistic boundaries within the larger culture of late medieval and early modern Europe. Beccadelli’s collection draws on models of classical epigrams to express a range of licit and illicit desire in a socially prestigious mode of discourse: elegant Latin poetry. Shakespeare’s sonnets do the same work in the later elite genre of the English sonnet sequence. What is to be gained by bringing these two collections into dialogue with each other? While Beccadelli’s and Shakespeare’s collections of poems both centre on questions of queer desire, sonnet sequences as a genre have little to do with collections of epigrams and there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare had any knowledge of Beccadelli’s work. Yet both collections can serve as crucial markers for the possibilities of articulating queer desire in early modern Europe.
The title of Beccadelli’s collection, Hermaphroditus, touches on the issue of gender ambiguity – an idea that was central to Shakespeare’s poetry.2 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 famously plays with gender categories in its description of a ‘master-mistress’ who is a ‘man in hue’ with a woman’s face and heart; who has been ‘pricked out’ for woman’s pleasure by the belated endowment of a ‘thing’ which is also ‘nothing.’3 (‘Prick’ and ‘nothing’ were early modern slang for male and female genitalia.) In his extant writings, Shakespeare never uses the word ‘hermaphrodite,’ but his sonnets are – among many other things – an extended meditation on the blurring of gender boundaries. Sonnet 20 is just the most explicit manifestation of a theme that runs throughout the sonnets, and is a major focus of much of Shakespeare’s drama as well.
The term ‘hermaphrodite’ originates as the name of a mythological figure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,4 and it appears in English as early as 1400 to describe beings that combined male and female features and characteristics.5 The term was commonly used in Shakespeare’s lifetime, often with negative or ambivalent connotations.6 In Ovid, Hermaphroditus is a male youth beloved of the nymph Salmacis. He rejects her advances (as Shakespeare’s Adonis rejects Venus), but bathes in her pool. Salmacis leaps in and seizes Hermaphroditus, asking the gods to let them be together forever. The two of them are then transformed into one united being, ‘you could not call it a woman or a boy; it seemed neither, and both.’7 Then, in response to Hermaphroditus’ prayer, his parents Hermes and Aphrodite curse Salmacis’ pool, so that any man who enters it will lose his virility, ‘quickly softened by the touch of the water’.8
In this mythic version, the hermaphrodite is an image of heterosexual union, but also of the loss of masculinity. A moralized English translation of the Ovidian tale by Thomas Peend, published in London in 1565,9 identifies Hermaphroditus as representing ‘such youths as yet be greene’ (sig. B1r) and Salmacis as ‘eche vyce that moveth one to ill’ (sig. B1v). Peend provides the following moral to the story:
We change our nature cleane,
being made effemynat.
When we do yeeld to serve our lust,
we lose our former state.
(sig. B2v)
The implication is that, for men, sexual contact with females is effeminizing, and leads to unmanly softness. Heterosexual union is thus not a source of strength or fertility, but of sterility and weakness.10
A similar dynamic occurs in the conclusion of the 1590 first edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the hermaphrodite embrace of Amoret and Scudamore. Recalling the Biblical injunction that man and wife shall ‘become one flesh’,11 as the two long-separated lovers are reunited, they are described as if they have become a single being with two genders:
Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
And streightly did embrace her body bright,
Her body, late the prison of sad paine,
Now the sweet lodge of love and deare delight:
But the faire Lady overcommen quight
Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt,
And in sweete ravishment pourd out her spright:
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceless stocks in long embracement dwelt.
Had ye them seene, ye would have surely thought,
That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite,
Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought,
And in his costly Bath causd to be site:
So seemd those two, as growne together quite,
That Britomart, halfe envying their blesse,
Was much empassiond in her gentle sprite,
And to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse,
In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse.
Thus doe those lovers with sweet contervayle
Each other of loves bitter fruit despoile.12
As in Ovid, the hermaphrodite here represents the union of a heterosexual couple. This hermaphroditic body then inspires heterosexual desire in Britomart, the female knight of chastity who longs for her destined husband Artegall.
But the figuring of the couple as hermaphrodite is ambivalent; it at once idealizes their union and suggests there is something unnatural about it. And as Lauren Silberman has pointed out,13 Spenser is careful to compare the lovers not to an actual hermaphrodite, but to a marble statue of a hermaphrodite from an ancient Roman bath.14 The comparison of a living couple to a statue suggests both stasis and sterility, and the context of a pagan Roman bath lends overtones of exotic eroticism and voyeuristic excess.
One might say that this is a queer way to imagine the customary heterosexual embrace that concludes traditional romance narratives. In any case, it proved to be a lame and impotent conclusion; the entire passage describing the hermaphroditic embrace was famously excised in the second edition of The Faerie Queene, ostensibly to defer the couple’s union for narrative purposes. Whatever the motivation, Spenser’s removal of the hermaphrodite erased its provocative representation of heterosexual union as lascivious, unnatural and oddly sterile – not a living being but a cold stone statue.
Thus, rather than providing an idealized image of heterosexual union, in both Ovid and Spenser the hermaphrodite embodies an unnatural and sterile confusion. These negative connotations of the term are clear in Thomas Nashe’s use of the word ‘hermaphrodite’ in his 1593 pamphlet Strange Newes to mock Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey for using overly learned terms like ‘addoulce’ and ‘entelechy’:
Doe you knowe your owne misbegotten bodgery: Entelechy and addoulce. With these two Hermaphrodite phrases, being halfe Latin and halfe English hast thou puld out the very guts of the inkhorne.15
Nashe does not specify which language – Latin or English – is masculine or feminine. Perhaps Latin, the language of masculine erudition is male, and English, the mother tongue, female. Or perhaps it is the other way around – English is the manly language of the streets, and Latin the effeminate language of the cloister and university. The indeterminacy is part of the point. Harvey’s misbegotten bodgery makes nonsense of the very concept of category. The guts are out of the inkhorn and everything is a sticky mess.
While Shakespeare was quite familiar with the concept of the hermaphrodite, it is extremely unlikely that he (or Nashe, or Spenser) had ever heard of Antonio Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus, a collection of obscene Latin epigrams written in Italy in 1425. Beccadelli’s text, divided into two books containing over eighty poems, is a deliberately irreverent, crude and offensive work. Its title is explained in a poem near the end of the first book that comments on the volume’s structure:
I have divided my book into two parts, Cosimo,
For the Hermaphrodite has the same number of parts.
This was the first part, so what follows is the second.
This stands for the cock, the next will be cunt.16
The organizational principle articulated here seems clear, but it does not work in practice. Although both cocks and cunts appear frequently throughout the text, they are in no way separated into one book or the other. Both books are filled with both.
Holt Parker, the text’s most recent editor, suggests that in calling his volume The Hermaphroditus, Beccadelli may be thinking of Boccaccio’s description of Hermaphroditus in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods (Genealogia deorum gentilium, started in 1360):
Hermaphroditus … born from Mercury and Venus, [may] symbolize speech that is unnecessarily lascivious, which when it ought to be manly, seems effeminate because of the excessive softness of the words.17
This explanation too, does not quite fit. Many readers have judged Beccadelli’s volume ‘unnecessarily lascivious’ but his tone, diction and prosody are anything but soft.
Modelled on the second century Latin epigrams of Martial as well as the works of more recent Italian poeti giocosi such as Cecco Angiolieri,18 Beccadelli’s collection deals with a wide range of sexual activity from various points of view. Women are generally seen as objects of sexual desire, often in a negative and misogynist context. There are several poems mocking a woman named Ursa, a grotesque embodiment of aggressive feminine desire, who has an enlarged clitoris (1.8),19 prefers to be on top and insists on anal sex (1.5). She has insatiable appetites and sexually exhausts the speaker (1.21); he is afraid her vagina will swallow him (2.7); and he is disgusted by her smell (2.8, 2.10). And yet there is also a breathtakingly hypocritical poem where he comforts her hurt feelings and swears his devotion to her (2.9). Other poems, written to an ‘ideal’ mistress named Alda, are more complimentary:20 ‘Alda is the equal of any goddess in beauty and morals’ (2.5). But even the poems to Alda are at times ironic and derogatory: ‘She doesn’t piss, but if she did piss, she pisses balsam. / She doesn’t shit, but if Alda did shit, she shits violets’ (1.18). Other poems deal with brothels and whores: there are two epitaphs for a whore named Nichina (2.30, 2.32) and a lengthy poem that imagines Beccadelli’s book being accepted as a customer into a Florentine brothel (2.37).
While many of Beccadelli’s epigrams are bawdy or sexualized, others are not. There is a poem mocking cuckolded husbands (1.6), but there are also several epitaphs for children dead of the plague (1.24, 1.25, 1.32, 2.32), a scatological poem about a defecating peasant (1.40), poems dedicated to friends (1.21, 1.27, 1.38, 1.41, 2.22, etc.), poems attacking enemies (1.10, 1.11, 1.16, 1.17, 1.20, etc.), poems on drunkards and misers (2.12, 2.36), one on an old horse dying of hunger (2.36) and another praying that a mistress’s childbirth be easy and safe (2.25). The enormous variety of tone and subject matter echoes the classical precedent of Martial, but Beccadelli’s collection also fits Thomas Hobbes’ later characterization of ‘hermaphrodite’ writing as ‘partly right and comely, partly brutall and wilde,’21 though on the whole, the brutal and wild get more emphasis than the right and comely.
Almost one fifth of the poems in Hermaphroditus deal with sexual relations between males. Several poems praise male homoeroticism – either explicitly or implicitly. Poem 1.9 compares a Frenchman who fucks boys to an Italian who fucks girls, implying that there is little to choose between them – both are voracious, but the speaker himself is even more so. Poems 1.14 and 1.15 both argue for the superiority of sex with boys over other forms of sexual activity. In poem 1.28 the speaker (identified with the author of the volume) says he is held captive by his love for a boy named Carlo, from Perugia. And poem 1.34 invites the poem’s recipient, Amilus the Pederast, to ‘butt fuck’ the messenger who brings him the text.
There are several poems that are critical of men who desire males, but they are either condemnations of men who are attracted by ugly partners (1.26, 1.36, 2.6) or men who enjoy being penetrated themselves rather than taking pleasure from penetrating others (1.12, 1.13, 1.33). Epigram 1.19 combines both themes, attacking a man named Coridon for loving an ugly and foul-smelling boy named Quintius (‘If you smell his mouth, you’ll think you’ve smelled his ass / but even his ass is cleaner than his mouth’), and then attacking the boy Quintius for taking pleasure in being anally penetrated:
Who can count the number of members your gaping asshole has swallowed?
As many ships that Scylla devoured by the Sicilian shore.
He openly takes the woman’s passive role for any man (the shame of it!)
There are also seduction poems from men to adolescent boys (2.17, 2.18, 2.28, 2.34) – though these are always coyly presented as being written for Beccadelli’s friends rather than for the author himself. These poems written to lovely boys are no less romantic and effusive than traditional poems written to lovely girls:
You are more beautiful than silver, but you will be handsomer than gold, if you return kind words, generous boy.
Your family is good: brothers, sisters, parents;
you should be just as gentle, since your whole family is good.
Your appearance is handsome; let your mind be beautiful too
(2.17)
In a much cruder register, Epigram 1.7, an ‘Epitaph for Pegasus, the Lame Pederast’ openly praises anal sex with boys. Written in the traditional style of an ancient Roman tomb inscription, the passage pleads with passing travellers to stop for a moment and pay their respects:
When you’re about to butt fuck your submissive youth,
please do it on this tomb, traveler,
And so honor my soul with fucking, not with incense.
Grant this rest to my spirits, I pray.
The poem goes on to approvingly cite Achilles and Hercules for buggering their partners and suggests that anal sex is part of an ancient and sacred tradition:
This type of solace counts the most among the shades,
as established by the fathers of old.
Thus Achilles satisfied the ashes of Chiron,
and your ass felt it too, blond Patroclus,
Hylas knew it, spitted by Hercules on his father’s burial mound.
Perform for me the rites our ancestors taught us.
At no point in any of the poems, no matter how ironic, sarcastic or vituperative they may be, is it suggested that sex with boys is any more to be condemned than sex with women. In Beccadelli’s text, a pederast may be attacked for being a slave to his passions, but in this he is no better or worse than a man who is obsessed by sex with women. One poem, in fact, argues that once a man has had anal or oral sex with boys he will never go back to vaginal sex:
Lepidinus Asks the Author Why Once Someone Begins to Butt Fuck He Never Stops
O author of trifles, why is a man never able to give it up
once he’s fucked someone in the ass or mouth?
In fact, even a blockhead Breton, when he’s barely had a taste,
willingly competes with Siena itself in this sort of love.
Naples yields to the French, Florence to the Germans,
once they get a chance to touch a boy.
(1.14)
As long as men take the active role, for Beccadelli their object choice – boy or woman – is not particularly important. Men who take pleasure in being anally penetrated, on the other hand, are mocked for being effeminate. Epigram 1.13, ‘Against Lentulus, the Effeminate, the High and Mighty, and a Man of the lowest Vice’ concludes:
You keep everything to yourself, except for one thing.
That one thing is your asshole, Lentulus, which you do not keep to yourself, but share with everyone, effeminate Lentulus.
On the whole, Hermaphroditus comes across as a scholarly humanist effort to revive a classical view of sex which sees adult male sexual desire as natural, somewhat foolish, pleasurable and vulgar, but not by any means sinful in itself.22 In this view, men naturally seek pleasure in the sexual penetration of the bodies of others. This may make them ridiculous if they overindulge, or if they become obsessed with a particular partner, or choose an inappropriate one (old, hairy, foul-smelling or ugly), but the desire itself is accepted and can be celebrated. The key to appropriate behaviour, in sexual pleasures as in other desires, is moderation: enough sex, but not too much, all penetrative, and ideally with an appropriate partner, male or female, under appropriate circumstances. As one poem puts it:
Even if my cock often desperately wants cunt,
or sometimes my dirty dick goes after boy’s thighs,
nevertheless my lust is not so crazy or swollen,
that I would ask for a bang openly or in company.
I wouldn’t want to bugger Hyacinthus in public,
I wouldn’t fuck Helen herself with a lot of people around.
(2.24)
The poem that jokingly contrasts the sexual tastes of a Frenchman and a Tuscan, says that the Frenchmen fucks all the boys in the city, whereas the Tuscan fucks any female, including new mothers, widows and members of his own family: ‘In short,’ Beccadelli concludes, ‘you want for your own everything in the whole city that pisses. / He wants everything in the whole city that shits’ (1.9).23 Neither is better or worse.
Although the subjects and language of Beccadelli’s poems may frequently be crude, from a poetic point of view, such low topics and language are perfectly decorous for the genre of the epigram. The Roman poet Martial’s twelve books of epigrams are often rude and sexually explicit, but they are also by turns humorous, solemn, self-deprecating and satirical. They combine poems in praise of the Emperor with poems on oral and anal sex as well as serious and solemn epitaphs for dead children.24 The range of Beccadelli’s tone and subject matter mirrors Martial’s in many ways. Technically speaking, Beccadelli’s poems are not particularly impressive, but they tend to be metrically and generically correct according to rules of Latin poetics deduced from classical models. Thus, Beccadelli, a sophisticated courtier and scholar could think not only that a volume dealing with cocks, cunts, assholes, catamites, whores, peasants, farts and shit was decorous, but he could also dedicate it to the most powerful man in Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici. As indeed he did. In a poem advising de’ Medici how to read the volume, Beccadelli suggests that it is an ideal after-dinner diversion, ‘something for you to read to a guest after lunch, Cosimo … reading material for those in their cups after dinner is done.’
Hermaphroditus was widely and fiercely criticized, but Beccadelli had a very successful life and career all the same. Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471), also known as Panormita,25 was a humanist scholar who spent his long life in the service of various Italian princes. He was court poet to the Visconti in Milan, was crowned poet laureate by the Holy Roman Emperor, and spent his later life in Naples at the court of King Alfonso V, where he was instrumental in the founding of Academia Neapolitana, the first of the great Renaissance Italian academies.
The Hermaphroditus, composed when Beccadelli was in his late twenties, was clearly written to draw attention to its author, demonstrating his mastery of a wide range of subject matter as well as his daring choice of material. The project proved more controversial than Beccadelli probably intended. A host of humanist writers and church authorities spoke out against the volume, and the popular preacher Bernardino da Siena staged public burnings of the book. Beccadelli was burnt in effigy in both Bologna and Milan. Beccadelli and his allies defended the book, but in the general manner of humanist quarrels this only provoked greater outrage and accusations. Beccadelli was accused not only of sodomy, but of having murdered his wife and of pimping out boys.26 Some claimed the Pope himself threatened readers of Hermaphroditus with excommunication. Eventually, to silence the criticism and end the controversy, Beccadelli issued a retraction and recanted his dedication to Cosimo de’ Medici.27
Contrary to what some critics had claimed, de’ Medici had not burned his own copy – the presentation copy of Hermaphroditus is still safe and sound in the Medici library.28 But neither did de’ Medici give Beccadelli any patronage or protection. Like Thomas Nashe’s later attempt to become the English Aretine by writing erotically explicit verse,29 Beccadelli’s gambit had failed. The remainder of his literary and scholarly output kept both cunts and cocks to a minimum. His most successful and influential work ended up being De dictis et factis Alphonsi regis (1455), a volume in praise of Alfonso V of Naples that represents the King as an ideal humanist prince, who reads Virgil and Livy and spends his spare time debating philosophy with the many scholars at his court.
Over time, Hermaphroditus was largely forgotten. Manuscripts of the collection gathered dust in libraries and Hermaphroditus did not appear in print until the French Revolution. It was first published in 1790 in a rare edition attested in collections in Berlin and Vicenza. A larger edition attributed to Abbé Mercier was published in Paris in 1791. Another edition, with extensive scholarly annotations, appeared in Germany in 1824. Beccadelli’s collection was not translated into English until 2001. Most surviving manuscripts of the text date to the fifteenth century and are found in Italian collections.
So what does Hermaphroditus have to do with Shakespeare’s sonnets? Sonnet sequences as a genre have little to do with collections of epigrams. Beccadelli was a courtly humanist writing in Latin. Shakespeare was a popular dramatist writing in the vernacular. Shakespeare’s sonnets are revered as being among the greatest lyric poetry in English. Beccadelli’s Latin verse is not nearly so distinguished, and for centuries the critical consensus on the Hermaphroditus was well represented by Ludwig Pastor’s statement that it embodies ‘the spirit of the false [heathen] Renaissance … in all its Hideousness’.30
Yet Beccadelli’s and Shakespeare’s collections of poems both centre on questions of queer desire, and both can serve as crucial markers for the possibilities of articulating queer desire in early modern Europe. In both collections, models of sexual and affective relationships are put forward that challenge and contradict prevailing modes of accepted relations, as well as subverting fixed categories of gender and desire. Shakespeare turns Petrarchism on its head by having a male poet pine for an unattainable (and not particularly virtuous) young man instead of a distant virtuous lady. Then in the so-called ‘dark lady’ sonnets he explores the frustrations and pleasures of a consummated relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman rather than Petrarchan longing for a chaste ideal. Beccadelli’s poems equate boys and women as objects of desire, and posit a world where sexual object choice (for elite men) is irrelevant rather than a matter of life and death.
By juxtaposing Shakespeare’s erotic poetry with Beccadelli’s one is made aware of the potential of elite verse forms to communicate queer relations and desires. The cultural capital of the Latin epigram or the English sonnet can be subverted to suggest ideas and explore relationships that would be unspeakable in other, less refined, contexts. These expressions were not uncontested, but they endure nonetheless. Whether or not de’ Medici read Hermaphroditus to approving friends after dinner, he kept his copy carefully, and did not burn it, whatever Bernardino di Siena might have thought.
Both Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hermaphroditus were circulated originally in manuscript, and it can be argued that this more restricted form of dissemination allowed their authors more latitude to explore risky subject matter. Besides Frances Meres’ 1598 praise of Shakespeare’s ‘sugred Sonnets among his private friends’31 we know few details of the dissemination and reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets before their publication in 1609.32 Thanks to the controversy over Hermaphroditus, the early circulation and reception of Beccadelli’s text is easier to trace. Early readers such as Guarino da Verona and Francesco Filelfo were enthusiastic, and praised the volume in letters, but as the text spread more broadly, it was widely condemned33 and its early defenders abandoned it.34 In the case both of Hermaphroditus and of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the dissemination of the texts quickly spread beyond coteries of sympathetic friends. Beccadelli’s text came into the hands of moralist preachers and was publicly condemned and burned. Shakespeare’s sonnets were printed in an edition that he presumably neither condoned nor directed. They were left out of the Folio publication of Shakespeare’s plays, and were not reprinted until 1640.
While Beccadelli’s poems were unknown in early modern England, Latin epigrams functioned nonetheless as a conduit for sexual knowledge and discourse. While many editions of Martial published in Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century were expurgated to remove lewd poems,35 a complete edition of Martial’s epigrams was published in England in 1615, edited and annotated by Thomas Farnaby, and printed by William Welby.36 The volume was dedicated to Sir Robert Killigrew, a member of Parliament, friend of John Donne and Francis Bacon, and close to James I’s favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset.37 A second edition was published in 1633.38 Included in the collection are unexpurgated poems on male masturbation, anal sex, oral sex and much else besides. Though Shakespeare may not have read Martial unexpurgated, other early modern English readers certainly did, not least Ben Jonson, whose own English epigrams – though polite by comparison – are clearly modelled on Martial’s example.39
Jonson owned at least three different complete editions of Martial,40 and his annotations show that he was well aware of the poem’s bawdy connotations. For example, Martial’s epigram 2.28 lists all the sorts of penetrative sexual activity a man named Sextillus abstains from, and then ends by saying ‘two possibilities remain’. In the margin of his copy, Jonson wrote ‘Fellator cunniling’.41 It was obvious to Jonson that Martial was suggesting that Sextillus takes pleasure from sucking men and women’s genitals. This annotation is particularly significant since early modern erotic writing in English seldom mentions oral sex in any context.42 Latin poetry was clearly functioning as a conduit for sexual discourse in a way that vernacular poetry did not.
Indeed, English readers like Jonson could only read the unexpurgated Martial in Latin. English translations of Martial were published in 1629 and 1656, though both are partial and omit the most scurrilous materials.43 Perhaps more significantly, the complete and unexpurgated Latin editions of Martial were supplanted, beginning in 1655, with a selected edition intended for use in Westminster School.44 This text was frequently reprinted during the remainder of the seventeenth century.45 No complete edition of Martial was published in England between 1633 and 1700. Even today, complete and unexpurgated English editions of Martial are relatively rare. Loeb Classics provides the complete epigrams in Latin with facing page English translations, but the Penguin and Oxford Modern Classics editions offer relatively decorous selections, even though both volumes are entitled simply Epigrams, as if to imply that all the epigrams were included.46 Even W. C. A. Kerr’s original Loeb edition from 1925 translated some of the more salacious texts into Italian instead of English. (These were eventually replaced by English translations in reprint editions).
Not surprisingly, Martial himself predicted that some readers would want to censor his text: In epigram 1.35 he warns the reader not to castrate his poems. ‘Like husbands,’ he says, ‘they can’t please without a cock’ (lines 4–5). By the laws of poetry, epigrams must be provocative.47 In Hermaphroditus, Beccadelli used Martial’s epigram as a model for one of his own:
To Mino, That He Should Not Castrate This Book48
Mino, you advise me to take the cock out of my book.
That way you think my songs will please everyone.
Mino, please don’t castrate my book.
Phoebus has a cock. Calliope has a pussy.
(1.23)
For Beccadelli, both the god and the muse of poetry are sexual beings. Whatever the gender of eloquence – male, female, hermaphrodite – it must be sexualized to be potent, and, like Shakespeare’s master-mistress, to appeal to all.
Shakespeare’s sonnets have been read in a wide variety of registers and their radical relation to Petrarchan traditions is abundantly clear. Reading Shakespeare’s sonnets through the lens of Beccadelli’s epigrams allows one to see their eroticism in a different light. Shakespeare’s treatment of queer desire rejects many of the traditional attitudes of the classical epigram. He avoids the epigram’s explicit language, as well as classical norms of male desire which see penetration as the essence of masculine sexuality. Shakespeare’s sonnets incorporate romantic and affectionate feeling in ways that are absolutely alien to the discourse of Martial and Beccadelli. The result is a body of poetic work that is arguably more destabilizing than Beccadelli’s scandalous collection. In their articulation of the male speaker’s passionate and frustrated attraction to an elegant male social superior, Shakespeare’s sonnets reimagine the possibilities of masculine desire. Beccadelli’s epigrams, on the other hand simply reassert a classical model that is deeply traditional in its definition of masculinity as the physical penetration of social inferiors: women, boys and slaves. Though Hermaphroditus was clearly transgressive in the context of early modern Christian sexual morality, Beccadelli’s collection looks defiantly to the past and to strong hierarchies of sexual power and desire rather than imagining a queer present or future.