Shakespeare on love...

Well, actually Joseph Pearce included it in something he wrote...

Someone asked him if Shakespeare was a homosexual, based upon Sonnet 20.  Dr. Pearce responded:

The problem with "gay history" is that it is an invention of the last fifty years. It never existed prior to its invention. This is not to say that homosexual practice did not exist, of course, though it would not and could not even be called "homosexual" in Shakespeare's time because that word is itself an invention of the late nineteenth century, when it was employed to signify something pathological. The word "gay", of course, is even newer, deriving from mid-twentieth century homosexual underworld slang. The point is that Shakespeare would have been baffled at first and then horrified to discover that gutter-minded "academics", employing the doubles-entendres of twentieth-century adolescent toilet humour, had inverted his meaning to signify sodomy, which would probably be the only word he would have used to describe the practice of homosexuality.

This being said, let's humour the inventors of "gay history" by looking at the evidence they present. Sonnet 20, to which you refer, seems to be the strongest evidence that they have to offer. It does talk of "love", though love meant love to the Elizabethans, not fornication or copulation, and still less sodomy. The word "love" was not used as a mere innuendo, nor would Lennon's understanding of love as something self-centred and lacking in self-sacrifice have been comprehensible to an Elizabethan. Of course, a cad might feign "love" for vicious purposes but that would make him a liar, not a lover. Since "love" meant "love", it was often employed to describe a man's feelings towards another man. Love meant love, as in caritas, something which every Christian is commanded to feel towards every other person, male or female.

To the extent that Shakespeare uses healthy bawdiness in the sonnet, it is absolutely clear that the poet is not interested in the one thing in which homosexuals are obsessed. The "addition" of male genitalia to the person to whom the sonnet is addressed is the "adding [of] one thing to my purpose nothing", i.e. the poet has no purpose for the additional appendage, which signifies that "Nature [had] prick'd thee out for women's pleasure". Shakespeare's meaning is clear enough. Men are not interested in something that Nature has designed for women's pleasure. If Sonnet 20 is the best that "gay historians" can do to make a case for the "pinking" of the Bard, they are not likely to convince anyone other than their own in-crowd, or should that be out-crowd! - St. Austin Revue

Obviously Joseph Pearce is not happy that gay historians are trying to claim Shakespeare as their own - I don't like that sort of thing either, and I've often noted, as Pearce does, that homosexuality as we know it and refer to it today, didn't exist before the 20th century.

That said - I'm not a student of Shakespeare, but what most interested me in Joseph Pearce's rebuttal is how he presents love from Elizabethan times:

"...love meant love to the Elizabethans, not fornication or copulation, and still less sodomy."

It means the type of love between friends no one can condemn - and friends themselves would dare not corrupt.