Goldberg 1994

Goldberg, ed. Queering the Renaissance.

Alan Bray, Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England

two images: masculine friend (universally admired) and sodomite (execrated and feared) -- but "in their uncompromising symmetry they paralleled each other in an uncanny way" (40)

"bedfellow"

Archibishop Laud, dream of August 1625, relates that his patron Duke of Buckingham came to his bed, many others saw it

John Lyly, Euphues, friendship with Philautus

strong distinction between two kinds of intimacy -- one civil, one subversive

"Perhaps there is always a potential ambiguity about intimacy between men. It may be so. But in early modern England such intimacy was peculiarly ambivalent, for the protecting conventions that ensured that it was seen in an acceptable frame of reference were often absent by the end of the sixteenth century. It was a disturbing fact that the Elizabethans preferred not to acknowledge, but when it suited them it provided a weapon that lay close to hand; and it left this intimacy more open and less secure in its meaning than the formal Elizabethan essays on friendship would have us believe." (56)