Jean Howard in her introduction to As You Like It in
The Norton Shakespeare observes the following:
Ganymede is a beautiful boy Zeus fell in love with and carried to Olympus to be his cupbearer. During the Renaissance, a “Ganymede” was a young boy who was the lover of an older man. During the Renaissance, people did not assume that people had fixed sexual identities. Men especially could be bisexual. Marriage was a social institution to solve social problems.