Or four hundred years after Shakespeare’s time.
Only three hundred.
Did anyone write this in 1620?
Is 1640 close enough?
"Despite these alternative interpretations, numerous readers throughout the past four centuries have been disturbed by the poems' apparent homoeroticism. In 1640, John Benson published a second edition of the Sonnets in which he changed most of the pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly all of the sonnets were addressed to the Dark Lady. Benson’s modified version soon became the best-known text, and it was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms. [13]
The question of the sexual orientation of the Sonnets was first openly articulated in 1780, when George Steevens, upon reading Shakespeare's description of a young man as his "master-mistress" remarked, "it is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation". [14] Other English scholars, dismayed at the possibility that their national hero might have been a "sodomite", concurred with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment, around 1800, that Shakespeare’s love was "pure" and in his sonnets there is "not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices." [15] Robert Browning, writing of Wordsworth's assertion that "with this key [the Sonnets] Shakespeare unlocked his heart," famously replied, "If so, the less Shakespeare he!"
Critics in Continental Europe were also surprised. In 1834, a French reviewer asked, "He instead of she?… Can I be mistaken? Can these sonnets be addressed to a man? Shakespeare! Great Shakespeare? Did you feel yourself authorized by Virgil’s example?" alluding to the Roman poet known for his pederastic verse."
True. My math sucks. But then again, 1640 is not the first year the theory was floated, as your link shows.
Is it possible that the sonnets weren’t even written by Shakespeare? The authorship of his plays has been the subject of much debate; perhaps his sonnets should be, also. The implied homoeroticism of the sonnets doesn’t follow in the same footsteps as his non-homoerotic plays. Wouldn’t we have heard of a scandal if these sonnets came out at the same time as his plays?