the narrator describes as "to my purpose nothing". The line can be read literally as a denial of sexual interest. However, given the homoerotic tone of the rest of the sonnet, it could also be meant to appear disingenuous, mimicking the common sentiment of would-be seducers: 'it's you I want, not your body’. In Sonnet 20, the narrator tells the youth to sleep with women, but to love only him: "mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure". In some sonnets addressed to the youth, such as Sonnet 52, the erotic punning is particularly intense: "So is the time that keeps you as my chest, / Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide, / To make some special instant special blest, / By new unfolding his imprisoned pride." In Elizabethan bawdy, 'pride' is a euphemism for penis, especially an erect one. Others have countered that these passages could be referring to intense platonic friendship, rather than sexual love. In the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition, Douglas Bush writes: Since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality (a notion sufficiently refuted by the sonnets themselves), we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women, could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne, and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature. Richard Dutton writes that the Shakespearean scholar A. L. Rowse never accepted that the Bard was homosexual to any extent at all, writing that "Shakespeare’s interest in the youth is not at all sexual". Dutton comments:Rowse’s conviction on this point remained unshaken to his death, which is odd, not least because he himself was widely understood to be homosexual and wrote openly about writers like Marlowe and Wilde. . Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical but fiction, another of Shakespeare's "dramatic characterization[s]", so that the narrator of the sonnets should not be presumed to be Shakespeare himself. 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 Edmond Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms. The question of the