Note 22 — NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

Except in in [sic] such a passage as when he calls this favourite by "The master-mistress of my passion," Sonn. 20. And in a few others, where the expressions literally shew the writer to be a man. [Warton of course wanted to preserve Shakespeare's sonnets from the charge of homosexuality. In the eighteenth century the distaste for conceits and an acute sensitivity to the suspicion of homosexuality made the Sonnets so unpopular that they were omitted from the editions of Shakespeare by, among others, Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Warburton, Capell, and Johnson.]