Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) person … lie[s] all unlocked to your occasions" ("MoV" 1.1.146), seem to allude to a sexual dimension in Antonio's love for Bassanio. However, there is also evidence that the two shared a strictly fraternal, familial bond, as indicated by the line "Bassanio, your most noble kinsman …" ("MoV" 1.1.60) Other scholars maintain that all attempts to read Shakespeare's characters as gay or straight in terms of the modern understanding of the word are culturally and historically flawed. Alan Bray's book "Homosexuality in Renaissance England" argues that in the time period of "The Merchant of Venice's" composition, "homosexuality" did not refer
The Plays of William Shakespeare another in the dark." Raleigh then admitted that he "soon falls into the habit, when he meets with an obscure passage, of consulting Johnson's note before the others." T. S. Eliot wrote that "no poet can ask more of posterity than to be greatly honoured by the great; and Johnson's words about Shakespeare are great honour". Walter Jackson Bate, in his 1977 biography on Johnson, wrote: the edition of Shakespeare – viewed with historical understanding of what it involved in 1765 – could seem a remarkable feat; and we are not speaking of just the great "Preface" To see it