While in modern Western culture the heterosexual couple is the paradigm of romantic love, the erotic triangle involving at least one homosexual trajectory of desire seems to be far more interesting and far more disturbing.
    Based on Eve K. Sedgwick’s analysis of male homosocial desire in Between Men (1985), this paper inquires into the de(con)structive dynamics of the erotic triangle in Early Modern drama. Far from merely serving as a preservative to patriarchal culture based on male homosocial bonding, however, the triangle tends to exhibit a disruptive potential when either of its sides transgresses the boundaries from "orderly" to "disorderly" hetero- or homosexual love. Drawing both on contemporary sources such as Francis Bacon’s essays or the pamphlets of Puritan preacher William Gouge and on the work of critics such as Michel Foucault and Alan Bray, this paper tries to establish the socially accepted parameters within which the erotic triangle will work as cover for homosocial/erotic/sexual desire – and beyond which it will enter the realm of the "disorderly".
    Examining the erotic triangles in Shakespeare’s Othello, these assumptions may help to clarify the dynamics informing the play and the manipulative potential of triangular constellations – that is, the introduction of a third element in order to split up an already existing compound with the aim of forming a new combination under the exclusion of one of the former components.