'Shakespeare' Screenplay Cut Corners for Convenience

The editors:

Jordana R. Lewis makes a couple of mistakes in her article "Shakespeare in Love with a Man" (Opinion, March 16).

First, she assumes that when Levin Professor Literature Stephen J. Greenblatt wrote in The New York Times that the movie could have "depicted Shakespeare writing his sonnet to a fair young man," Greenblatt meant that the movie could have, and should have, presented Shakespeare as homosexual. In fact, Lewis presents no evidence at all that Greenblatt thinks Shakespeare was homosexual.

Furthermore, Lewis does not even acknowledge the traditional view of Shakespeare's sonnets: namely, that the first half of them were written to a "fair young man" for whom Shakespeare had very strong, but non-sexual, feelings. If she thinks Shakespeare's descriptions of his male friend sound a little too intimate to be non-sexual, she should remember that these were not Shakespeare's personal letters, but were openly read and accepted by many of his contemporaries in straight-laced, sexually repressed Elizabethan England.

Bottom line: maybe Shakespeare was homosexual, maybe he wasn't--but there is no conclusive proof for his sexual orientation in his sonnets. Certainly, the writers of the movie are cutting corners artistically when they have Will write Sonnet 18 to his girlfriend, but they are doing it for the sake of convenience, not homophobia. JOSH N. LAMBERT '01   March 16, 1999