As far as we can tell, in Shakespeare’s
time, there was a, not a fixed category of
erotic object choice that someone was either
homosexual or heterosexual, let alone bi-sexual,
which was a term they didn’t have either.
 In the absence of such a term of a distinct
sociological category, it’s been argued
at least has a distinct cultural effect.
 
 
Among other things, it produces a weird phenomenon
legally.
 Shakespeare’s time had exceedingly unpleasant
laws against sodomy.
And those laws, which were on the books, are
taken to be signs of a kind of toxic, viral
homophobia.
Scholars have done a lot of work on the actual
legal record, and it turns out that almost
no one was prosecuted under those laws.
 The cases that come up are ones in which
a handful, a tiny handful of cases in which
people were crying out in pain, for example,
being evidently assaulted in bed and they
said, “Please don’t assault…” or whatever.
 But they didn’t actually pursue the laws.
 
 
Now the question is, why didn’t they pursue
the law?
 Sometimes having ferocious laws, insanely
punitive laws, makes it difficult for communities
to actually prosecute under those laws because
human lives are what they are.
 And because actually if you start down that
road, you would wind up killing a lot of people
in your society.
 Shakespeare’s world and this is an aspect
of Shakespeare’s world I don’t completely
understand, had what seems like a perpetual
bed shortage or rather like something like
the other way around.
 People liked sleeping with each other in
the same bed.
 
Back in 1980, which was a very long time ago,
I went for the one and only time in my life
to China.
 And I remember staying in a place called
the Friendship Hotel, there only being one,
which was a kind of hostel, a student hostel.
At that time when people were having showers,
the students were having showers, they went
around and said, “Does anyone else want
a shower?”
 And I was struck by it at the time because,
the point is it’s not that there was a water
shortage in Beijing as far as I know, but
that people felt there was something slightly
odd about having a shower by yourself.
Really, something anti-social or weird.
 People wanted to have showers together.
 
And something like that seems to have been
the case in the 16th century.
 People slept in the same bed, the same-sex
couples slept in the same bed for much of
their adolescent lives.
 We don’t know what happened in those beds.
 But we think that, as far as I can tell,
at least, that the police weren’t called.
 The question is, when are the police called?
 Under what circumstances is the culture
worrying about whether someone is “X”
or “Y”?
 And Shakespeare’s culture, as I say, had
laws on the books that indicated that it was
worried in the technical sense, but the laws
were not, as far as we can tell, enforced
and certainly not enforced in that place. 
Is it a better world from the point of view
of homophobia?
 Well, in some sense, not at all, it’s
much worse.
 But in some sense quite distinctly better.
In any case, Shakespeare seems to have inhabited
a world in which it’s much more possible
to express homosexual passions--we would now
call it--and probably to enact that passion
without triggering a kind of social crisis.
