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Critics are divided over whether Shakespeare’s sonnets really do contain expressions of homoerotic desire. What do you think?

A: There is of course no right answer here, but any argument must again pay close heed to the particulars of the text. Is the narrator’s love for the fair lord purely one of friendship, or is it in fact something else? A consideration of what exactly homoeroticism meant and constituted in Shakespeare’s day – how it might be expressed in so repressive a society, how it might be tacitly acknowledged – is likewise necessary.