Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) to an individual's sexual identity but only to specific sexual acts any individual might engage in. As Bray writes: "To talk of an individual of this period as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism and ruinously misleading. The temptation to debauchery, from which homosexuality was not clearly distinguished, was accepted as part of the common lot ... homosexuality [as understood in 15th-century England] was a sin 'to which men's natural corruption and viciousness [were] prone' " (16–17, Rainolds qtd. in Bray, 17). Antonio (The Merchant of Venice) Antonio is the title character in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of
Spelling of Shakespeare's name (1602) and the second of "King Lear" (1619). The name printed at the end of the poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle", which was published in a collection of verse in 1601, is hyphenated, as is the name on the title page of "Shake-speares Sonnets" (1609). It is used in the cast list of Ben Jonson's "Sejanus His Fall", and in six literary allusions published between 1594 and 1623. The un-hyphenated spelling "Shakespeare" (or Shakeſpeare, with a long s) appears on 22 of the 58 quartos. It is spelled this way in the first quartos of "The Merchant of Venice"