Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism,Canon Formation,and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Famous as the author of an early full-length scientific study of sexual inversion or homosexuality, English sexologist Havelock Ellis was also a literary critic responsible for initiating publication of the famous Mermaid Series of “The Best of Plays of the Old Dramatists” in the late-nineteenth century. Personally editing the first volume of plays by Christopher Marlowe and a later collection by tragedian John Ford, Ellis associated these playwrights here and in his scientific work, Sexual Inversion, with ideas about normative and so-called abnormal sexualities at the start of the twentieth century. Ellis, thus, helped give expression to a literary canon of early English dramatists in which modern, anachronistic ideas about sexual subjectivity play a part. While this article does not claim that Ellis was the necessary source for later criticism, it shows how, over the whole of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's priority in the literary canon came to be posited at least in part on his apparent sexual normality in contrast with a supposedly homosexual Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights such as Ford or Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher associated with varying degrees of sexual difference.