sexual orientation of the sonnets' author was 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". Other scholars concurred with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment, made 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". Robert Browning, writing of Wordsworth's assertion that "with this key [the Sonnets] Shakespeare unlocked his heart", famously replied in his poem House, "If so, the less Shakespeare he!" Oscar Wilde addressed the issue of the dedicatee of the sonnets in his 1889 short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." in which he identified Will Hughes, a boy actor in Shakespeare's company, as both "Mr W. H." and the "Fair Youth". The controversy continued in the 20th century. By 1944, the Variorum edition of the sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. In the year after "the law in Britain decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting males over twenty-one", the historian G. P. V. Akrigg published the first extended study of the Earl of Southampton, "who he had no doubt was the 'fair youth' of the sonnets." Akrigg wrote, "One is forced to suspect that some element of homosexuality lay at the root of the trouble . . . The love which he felt for Southampton may well have been the most intense emotion of his life." Literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt, in writing about sexuality within Southampton’s world, "assumes that something went on—'whether they only stared longingly at one another or embraced, kissed passionately, went to bed together'". Stanley Wells also addressed the topic in Looking for Sex in Shakespeare (2004), arguing that a balance had yet to be drawn between the deniers of any possible homoerotic expression in the sonnets and more recent, liberal commentators who have "swung too far in the opposite direction" and allowed their own sensibilities to influence their understanding. One element that complicates the question of Shakespeare's sexuality is that same-sex friendships in the Renaissance were often characterized by shows of affection (e.g., bed sharing, confessions of love) that contemporary readers associate with modern-day sexual relationships. A recent notable scholarly dispute on the matter occurred in the letters pages of