To his Coy Master Mistress. The Pleasures of Homoeroticism and (Pro)creation in Shakespeare's Sonnets

The treatment of pleasure in Shakespeare's Sonnets revolves around both Platonic and Aristotelian patterns. On the one hand, the speaker's love for the fair youth echoes the typically Platonic liaison between an erastes and an eromenos. On the other hand, the appeal to "increase" may not only be related to Plato's theory of "reproduction in beauty" in the Symposium, but also to Aristotle's notion of increase (auxesis) in his biological works - as well as to similar notions formulated in contemporary anatomical treatises. Pleasure and eros thus take on both homosexual and heterosexual meanings. Indeed, in spite of his "love" for the boy, the speaker repeatedly invites him to yield to heterosexual "love's use". A solution to this apparent paradox may be found in the youth's growth and consequent masculinization. As hinted in Sonnet XX - and in conformity with Elizabethan homoerotic patterns - a boy could only be loved by an older man as long as he was young enough to evoke femininity. However, the Sonnets also suggest that the homoerotic roles played by the fair youth and his older lover are not so strict and may easily be exchanged. In fact, the older lover is not only a kind of "father", but also a "mother" who bears the mirror image of the youth in his poetic womb.