Disputable Friends

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What does it mean to be a friend in Shakespeare'sEngland? In their writings on the subject, Renaissance users of rhetoric would recognize, deployand appreciate tropes and textual ambiguities in amanner alien to twenty-first century readers. Thelarge body of classical writings on friendship whichcropped up on early modern school curricula, especially Cicero's productively paradoxical DeAmicitia, provided imagery and scenarios which couldbe recast by fertile imaginations. This inventive use of tropes and contradictions whenwriting about friendship has important parallels forqueer scholars. The problems and benefits ofasserting a 'queer history' are considered here, asis such a history's ambiguous relationship tohistoricist reading practices. Texts examined include three 1580s conduct books onfriendship, John Florio's translation of Montaigne'sessay on friendship, later English essays onfriendship by Francis Bacon and his contemporaries, the correspondence between Edmund Spenser and GabrielHarvey, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Henry IV andSonnets.