Monologue of the character Helena to Hermia, from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fantasy romantic comedy written in the 1590s, one of the earlier plays of his career and one of only a few with no prior literary or historical source for the plot

Expressions of same-sex affection can be found throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, including The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Coriolanus, and Two Noble Kinsmen. However, the Renaissance did not have the modern concepts of sexual identity and sexual orientation that we have inherited from 19th- and early 20th-century theories of human sexuality and psychology. Hence nobody in this period would have conceived of themselves in terms of modern sexual categories such as heterosexual and homosexual, or gay and straight. The challenge in reading passages such as this is to understand the personal, social, and political significance of same-sex relationships in Renaissance culture without applying anachronistic labels or standards of judgment. In Renaissance England, intimate relationships between women were generally accepted as long as they did not interfere with the women’s conventional sexual and social duties: getting married, having children, maintaining chastity, and behaving in an appropriately feminine manner. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, adolescent female friendships finally give way to the new bonds between husbands and wives that signal entry into adulthood. However, being married did not prevent adult women from maintaining or establishing affectionate intimacies with other women through relationships of friendship, patronage, or service.

—Annotation in Barnes and Noble Shakespeare’s edition of the play (the first edition I read when I was seventeen), edited by Mario DiGangi