The homoerotic subtext in Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel : the question of evidence"

J. Burke

Homosexuality presents special problems for historians. Historians feel they must rely on evidence to prove or disprove claims about the past, the harder the better. Notions of evidence, especially for more recent times, typically require something written to prove that something was or was not so. What, however, does the historian do when faced with silence, when a subject is "off the record" as homosexuality has been? This issue came into focus when I set out to substantiate my claim that Sir Walter Scott was in fact representing King James's homosexuality in The Fortunes of Nigel, a novel that Scott published in 1822, nearly two hundred years after James's death on 25 March 1625.