Queer Shakespeare – desire and sexuality
The production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Emma Rice at the Globe Theatre in the summer season in 2016 staged this play as a comedy of homoerotic desire.1 The success this production had with much of the audience who saw it at the Globe and globally in a BBC live-broadcast in September 2016 lay in ‘queer goings-on’2 as the central feature of the stage interpretation of this comedy. At the level of gender casting and directorial interventions in the play’s text, this production was a Bollywood-style queer entertainment, though shorn of much of the aggression and violence that also accompanies the gender and sexuality politics of this play. The production closes the temporal gap between the articulation of desire and sexuality in Shakespeare’s and our time; through Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry contemporary expressions (more so than debates) spoke with seductive energy and audience approval, even occasional applause. With this production, queer Shakespeare entered the theatre centre stage. Yet it is the complexity and diversity of desire and sexuality produced by Rice’s intervention in the sex-gender distinction and the gender politics of Shakespeare’s text, made possible by queer resourcefulness of Shakespeare’s text, that makes this production a convenient introduction to this book. In Rice’s bold production, full of desiring vitality, Helena became Helenus in love with Demetrius, Hippolyta and Titania kissed and passionate speeches about love and wooing came across as admittance of a character’s acceptance of homosexuality, and as ways of coming out to themselves and the audience, when spoken by one actor to another of the same gender. And when Helenus offers himself to Demetrius,
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
(2.1.203–7)
the female submissiveness to male power within heterosexual chase, as presented in the text begins to sound like a proposal for S/M submission within the male same-sex economy of power and desire. This may appear, as it is, an instance of Rice’s radical intervention in the gendered and sexual politics at the level of text and what the text signifies. Yet in her illuminating reading of this play, which starts at the cross-over of queer and feminist theory, Melissa Sanchez has already suggested that at the conceptual, or theoretical, level these lines could be read as a kind of gender-bending appropriation at this point, with the reference to spaniel suggesting ‘the masochistic element of male desire’ in this play as much as, Sanchez reminds her readers, spaniel does in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. As in this early comedy, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream these lines also reveal, Sanchez suggests, that ‘abject devotion may be the flip side of aggression’.3 If we approach Rice’s staging of Helena as the abject Helenus, eagerly almost inviting to be treated roughly by Demetrius, her production should not appear as either shocking or too radical because we seem to be watching something that has already been addressed by queer theory. I am not suggesting this in order to minimize the radicalism of Rice’s production, as to suggest that we can also think about this production, at this moment, not as one warping Shakespeare’s text too liberally but that it visualizes the complex psychosexual dynamics at play at this moment in the text, a moment the implications of which complicate Rice’s production both visually and aurally in powerful terms. This passage and the Globe performance illustrate that in Shakespeare’s world of desire the choice of an object of desire and of language through which desire is verbalized are separate. This speech is not about shameful desires, not about hidden thoughts and suppressed eroticism. It is instead a moment of truth and autonomy of the sexual subject liberated in its demand for and expression of sexual gratification through submission. When the language in this passage is disembodied from the female object of desire (played by a boy actor) presented as a speaking part, which is how the scene is shown in the text and staged in the theatre; and when it is spoken by a male part, who now plays the submissive boy to Demetrius’s dominant male, it is the semantics of this passage, and the structure of language, that make it still possible for sexual meanings to move freely between different objects of desire without disturbing the meaning of the power and sexual relationship. The queerness of this passage lies precisely in the capacity of the text to allow the separation of personhood from erotic desire and sexual behaviour, relationship and practice. At the end of the play, Demetrius, from whom the spell cast over him by Oberon is never lifted, says to Helenus:
The object and the pleasure of my eye,
Is only Helenus. To [him], my lord,
Was I betroth’d ere I saw Hermia;
But like a sickness did I loathe this food:
But as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will for evermore be true to it.
(4.2.169–75)
The audience thus witnesses a moving moment of a public acceptance of one’s own queer desire, and a kind of theatrical coming out.4
Rice’s turning of the comedy’s heteronormative plot into a production full of new stage identities reveals modalities of desire and erotic meanings that are already in the text and the plot of Shakespeare’s comedy, but that have been contained by history and hidden in time. Just as Rice’s production entices the audience in the Globe to view her production as homoerotic, upends our expectations of a familiar narrative and opens the text up for alternative meanings and motivations, so do the chapters in Queer Shakespeare encourage readers to consider Shakespeare’s works as queer texts of considerable diversity and expressive power. They also demonstrate the extent to which queer theory has diversified and how that diversification has revealed meanings that were unacknowledged by previous critical practices and ways of reading desire and sexuality in Shakespeare. Although individual explorations of the representations of queer desires and sexualities in Shakespeare’s works cumulatively represented one of the most radical, theoretical engagements with Shakespeare since the formulation of queer theory in the late twentieth century, critical surveys of the theoretical approaches to Shakespeare fail to acknowledge the burst of scholarship which queer theory generated in Shakespeare studies, especially in the 1990s.5 Queer Shakespeare does not only address a diversity of ways in which to understand the queerness of language, time, object, style, narrative form and nature in Shakespeare, but also demonstrates that ‘queer’ means diversity of approaches to desire, sexuality and embodiment in Shakespeare. Rice’s production knowingly plays on the queerness, not only of the play’s text, but also on other texts by Shakespeare, such as Sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’, which she interweaves with her version of the play with the purpose to signal the sealing of the bond between Demetrius and Helenus.
Just as the line that separates the world of magic in the woods and the world of courtly reality is thin, so are the lines that apparently distinguish desires and sexualities within what is set out to be a heteronormative plot. The class ideology in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has led Alan Sinfield to point out that the play’s sexual politics create an ‘interruption of the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta’ and thus to an ‘endemic crisis in patriarchy’.6 Social contradictions in Shakespeare, as Daniel Juan Gil shows, often define versions of sexual subjectivities as asocial, hence queer. Such sexualities expose contradictions within the social life of early modern England, as in Troilus and Cressida, Juan Gil argues; one could say that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that kind of a play as well.7 The manifold desires in this play have prompted Madhavi Menon to claim that passages like the one displaying Demetrius’ expression of love to Helena in a scene in the woods do not ‘explain desire; on the contrary, they insist on its lack of identifiable causality’.8 Instances like these do not necessarily reaffirm heteronormative love and wooing; they cloud rather than illuminate desire that runs through such scenes. They also show that the signification and direction of Shakespearean desire cannot be pinned down easily, but that queer theory teases out different, and differing, structures and versions of that desire. Shakespeare’s texts brim with similar discursive and narrative scenarios. The plurality of meaning produced by the comedy’s language within a plot of coupling arises from the confusion created by the magic potion. It brings into play dramatic, syntactic, semantic and stylistic possibilities for a new erotic meaning, which can be called ‘queer’. These new dramatic possibilities are queer because they originate from within the text and yield new states of being on the stage, ones that unsettle heteronormative discourse in the play. Shakespeare is queer because his language is queer.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of many plays in which Shakespeare’s text reveals itself not only as a ‘queer’ but whose ‘queer ability to bond affectively with the past’9 represents a meeting point between his time and our modernity. In combination with his iconic status as a literary figure, the queer potential of Shakespeare’s texts has assured that he is an unavoidable subject of queer early modern studies and a frequent object of queer experimentation and testing in theatre and popular culture. Coupled with the queer potential within his texts, this cultural visibility assures that Shakespeare has a queer future as well. Yet, despite the combined effect of these attributes, queer early modern criticism and queer theory in particular have not made as extensive a use of Shakespeare as an object of inquiry as one might expect. Queer Shakespeare addresses some of the lacunae in the scholarship of queer desires and sexualities within Shakespeare studies. It encourages approaches that have been left out by other explorations of queer Shakespeare that have disparately appeared in individual essays throughout journals, collections and individual chapters in monographs. Taking a broad view of what queer theory can do for Shakespeare and what Shakespeare has done for queer theory, contributors to Queer Shakespeare have written their chapters cognizant of the disagreement with some of the current writing on queer Shakespeare. The contributors explore multiple ways in which ‘queer’ manifests itself in Shakespeare’s texts. Queer Shakespeare raises questions about what makes Shakespeare’s texts queer and demonstrates utility of the term ‘queer’ in Shakespeare studies.
What is queer Shakespeare?
‘Queer Shakespeare’ is a matter of theoretical perspective as well as a subject of critical inquiry. What is queer about Shakespeare’s texts as objects of critical analysis? How does queer Shakespeare affect critical practice at our current moment in Shakespeare scholarship? These questions frame this collection and underpin the individual essays. As a term of deconstruction most closely associated with post-structuralist theory of sexuality, desire and embodiment, ‘queer’, when it is used in early modern criticism, has denoted the four categories around which that foundational criticism has built its arguments: the sodomite and homoeroticism in representations of male same-sex eroticism; and the tribade and lesbianism in depictions of female same-sex eroticism.10 In this historical sense in which it defined the opposition between identity and difference, ‘queer’ has captured the representation and the discourse of desire and sex that are historically determined in opposition to social regulation, for example, the religious doctrine of marriage and procreation. As such a term, ‘queer’ has also been used to contrast the cultural and political power that demands knowledge of any identity defined in transparent and fixed terms. In this sense, ‘queer’ represents ‘a challenge to the ontological grounding of desire and politics’.11
Yet Queer Shakespeare reaches beyond the theoretical dichotomies of deconstruction and the treatment of queer as one of the theoretical versions of post-structuralism, by pushing the thinking about desire and sexuality in a direction that does not only include debates about the norm and the overturning or deviating from it, but that also takes it apart. ‘Queer’ in Queer Shakespeare captures some of the existing understanding of desire and sexuality prevalent in queer early modern criticism, but it also focuses on style, formalism, community and objects as subjects of analysis which produce new and varied kinds of desire. One of the peculiarities of queer Shakespeare as a critical and theoretical direction is that, almost paradoxically, from the start it ran against the idea that ‘queer’ also signals marginality. Existent scholarship on queerness in Shakespeare has located queer meanings within some of the most mainstream characters, actions and plot strands in Shakespeare. One does not have to be relegated to the social or sexual margin in Shakespeare to embody queer meaning. And Queer Shakespeare demonstrates that margin is not always the place that produces queer currents in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, nor is it one that ‘queer’ presences seek to occupy. Queer Shakespeare picks up on some of the new thinking about the relationship of literature, time and desire that has grown out of post-structuralist theories of desire and sexuality.
Coupled with the idea of temporality, ‘queer’ has recently posed challenge to the teleology of historical time; to the idea that across time and history, queer has always been a forward-oriented imagination and that ‘tended to privilege the avant-garde’.12 Hamlet does not come to mind immediately as a queer text on the surface of it, but there is a good reason for Elizabeth Freeman to use this play (indeed, to use Shakespeare) as a framing device for her experimental study about new social relations produced by interruptions in time and in the social order. Hamlet is an avant-garde play at all levels of composition. In the context of Freeman’s idea of ‘queer’ as a marker of avant-garde art, either mainstream or popular, Hamlet is a queer play. It is a play that shatters orthodoxies of any kind, from theatre to semantics. Obsession with the body – body politic, Ophelia’s body, Claudius’s body, Polonius’s body, Old Hamlet’s body, Yorrick’s body, Gertude’s body, Rosencranz’s and Guilderstern’s bodies, Laertes’s body – lies at heart of Hamlet. For Freeman, therefore, ‘it’s not unreasonable to read the entire play as … a melancholic wish for the homoerotic Eden that is the play’s primal scene’.13 This claim will no doubt prompt thinking about Hamlet, though outside Queer Shakespeare, because there is no essay devoted to this tragedy in this volume. But what Freeman’s thinking about Hamlet as a starting moment that prompts slow steps and nuanced ways of defining and illustrating queer temporality perceptively shows is that queer theory is in some of its most recent formulations indebted to Shakespeare. That Shakespeare’s engenders the queer theory of temporality is a proposition that both queer theorists and Shakespeare critics might accept, at least as a starting point for further debates.
‘Queer’ stands for both a critical method and a theoretical system grounded in what Mario DiGangi has described as ‘the strategy of examining the representation of mobile erotic relations instead of fixed erotic identities’.14 Fixed identities, which queer overturns, are socially produced identities, which allows Carla Freccero to define ‘queer’ as ‘naming a non-identity-based critical cultural and political practice that seeks to resist the humanist rights-bearing claims of collective identities’.15 Freccero employs ‘queer’ as a theoretical term that signals an ideological departure from the idea of the erotic body defined uniformly, which DiGangi also questions. Critics of queer early modernity in England have offered arguments about different ways in which same-sex sexual acts, practices and desires manifested themselves in early modern literature and society. In these undertakings, critics have invested a significant amount of controlled speculation in drawing conclusions about what we can actually know today about the social signification of these sexual and erotic manifestations in the past that came down to us in coded allegories and literary stylizations, and a limited body of archival evidence, in the English context.
With his large canon of plays and a significant body of lyric poetry for an active playwright and actor that he was, Shakespeare has become an important case study in explaining the meeting point of queer theory and early modern literature. One of the questions that this volume also addresses is what queer theory has done for Shakespeare scholarship and how queer theory can move Shakespeare criticism in a new direction. Madhavi Menon’s critical experiment, Shakesqueer,16 represents a bold intervention in this regard, in that her project covers the entire Shakespeare canon of plays and poems. The contributors to this book, of whom some are not scholars of early modern studies but theory scholars writing predominantly on modern and contemporary literature and culture, found something queer in each of Shakespeare’s texts. Not only does Menon’s queer companion make Shakespeare a queer writer tout court, but more importantly, her statement that ‘Shakespeare is a queer theorist … because his work already inhabits the queer theory we occupy today’17 raises the key question that also frames Queer Shakespeare: what is the relationship between queer theory and Shakespeare? The goal is to show how queer theory unfolds from within Shakespeare’s texts, how to think of queer theory as formulating itself by looking backward in the past, not only forward, towards modern times and literatures, as queer theory tends to do. The overall conception and the course of the book themselves make Menon’s volume a queer book. It is a very different kind of companion among many that have been steadily coming out of late. If, as Menon suggests, Shakespeare’s texts and modern queer theory share common ground, then queer Shakespeare scholarship, as envisaged in Queer Shakespeare, shows how else one might conceive of queer Shakespeare as a queer theorist and writer, by linking queer theory with other theories and philosophical paradigms that both complement Menon’s ‘Shakesqueer’ project and suggest new directions for the next phase of queer scholarship on Shakespeare.
Shakesqueer makes a strong claim for Shakespeare’s work to contain conceptual and ideological structures of queer theory, something which queer theorists who are not early modern specialists pick up and develop in their analyses. Queer Shakespeare demonstrates that teasing out queer theory in analyses of Shakespeare’s texts is inextricable from analyzing those texts as part of the historical, cultural and aesthetic backgrounds in which they were originally written, though not only as contexts that helped form Shakespeare’s texts but also milieus against which those texts react. This critical approach is enriched by bringing together different directions and ways of using queer theory in interpreting Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, John Garrison’s chapter engages new thinking in the study of object-oriented ontology and Simone Chess’s chapter brings in recent thinking about trans issues in the present. In this way, these chapters remind us why scholars continue to turn to queer approaches as they seek new insights into Shakespeare: queer theory nimbly deploys multiple modes of interpretation to render visible the complexity of sexuality. Queer Shakespeare demonstrates that queer theory brings the present in dialogue with the past while also unsettling the teleologies that position those temporal categories as proceeding one from the other.18
Queer theory has allowed Shakespeare critics to unpack desires, sexualities and kinds of embodiment in ways in which previous criticism did not. It has revealed Shakespeare as a sexual radical at times, as a writer for whom the body and desire, and sex and sexuality, are as important as crowns and wars, who is in and who is out of the throne. The Shakespeare that emerges from the pages of Queer Shakespeare is the Shakespeare acutely curious, observant and attentive to the nuances of how sexuality and desire shape and affect his world. Queer theory has shown that Shakespeare is transgressive in order to raise questions about what might be the opposite of transgression, that we may think is the norm, but it might not be. It has suggested that the law of desire that regulates which body should desire which other body is the most malleable and unstable of the laws within his creative imagination. Queer theory has also displayed that in Shakespeare the fictional men and women, fairies and airy spirits, are driven by competing desires that cut across the lines of gender and sexual identities against contemporary expectations. In methodological terms, queer theory has deepened the link between the study of the psychic structures within interiority and the social and cultural history that shape identity. In that respect, queer theory has shown that in Shakespeare the process of a character’s unchaining itself from those external constructions takes the form of a struggle that is at once political and public as well as intimate and emotional. Queer theory brought together historiography and the study of psychic processes, and inwardness and the subconscious, imagined in different terms but presented in recognizable structures in Shakespeare’s text.
In Shakespeare, as in much early modern literature, queer is a coded discourse, one dependent on the rhetorical ornament or a classical allusion to convey queer meaning. A reference to Ganymede19 or to Calisto20 would have conjured associations with what we now call queer sexuality and desire to the early moderns just as we decode these mythical figures as queer, because we have transported the classical associations of these figures with queer sexuality to modern times. But rhetorically coded lines in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, certain lexical choices and puns, for instance in Coriolanus21 and Romeo and Juliet, and some passages in The Merchant of Venice22 or Twelfth Night, all demonstrate that at different levels of expression and ornamentation, and to differing degrees, Shakespeare’s texts produce queer moments and scenic events. As a marker of such textual moments, queer is attached to a person or behaviour that is not named by culture that regulates representation. Because that discourse is linguistically coded in ways that intersect with but are not always identical to the actual acts and forms of embodiment that early modern men and women practised and inhabited, a queer Shakespeare project depends on the critical practice of the uncovering of the linguistic, rhetorical and stylistic work of imagination that reshapes various social practices into the language of dramatic and lyric poetry. If Shakespeare the queer theorist came before queer theory, which is how the teleological argument goes, the emergence of queer theory, before it was so named, owes, as it does, much to Shakespeare as well.
Queer Shakespeare before queer theory
Queer Shakespeare collects chapters which either examine queerness as an instance of history as a cultural practice, or which treat ‘queer’ as an elastic and expansive notion that bears within itself the meaning of aberration from genealogical thinking of some kind. While informed by queer theory, the essays are also intent on extending the terms of queer theory in a direction in which queer theory has not gone yet. This dual purpose of the chapters in Queer Shakespeare is represented to different degrees in individual essays, but all of the chapters intervene in both historiography and theory. They all make it evident that the Shakespearean past is treated ‘as a site that produces queer theory’,23 as Stephen Guy Bray postulates in his book Against Reproduction.
For Shakespeare critics who are queer theorists, Queer Shakespeare gives an opportunity to understand how Shakespeare anticipates queer theory, and how queer theory builds on the queer foundations of some of Shakespeare’s texts. The way, for instance, in which Shakespeare represents romantic love as always contested, unsettled and frequently unromantic; in which courtship is often bound by ‘homoerotic dimension’;24 and that sex and sexuality are not identical, already deconstructs heterosexual ideology, ‘proleptically’, by presenting ‘queerness at the heart of heteronormative culture’.25 Queer early modern criticism started by making this argument and to a large extent still continues to work within it.
If Shakespeare came before queer theory in the sense that his texts anticipate some of the ideas upon which queer theory would later be built, his texts also contributed to the queer structure of thinking about polymorphous sexuality, in a way that closes the gap between the pastness of Shakespeare and the contemporariness of queer theory. The chapter ‘Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire explores Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, the so called master-mistress sonnet. Sedwgick’s essay gave rise to many ‘startingly crisp’26 arguments about homosociality and gendered identities put forward in Shakespeare studies, at the same time when queer theory started to influence literary criticism. Sedgwick’s chapter is at once a contribution to queer theory in the making and to Shakespeare studies in need of a nuanced awareness of the erotic energies that produce texts which give intellectual enjoyment. Her chapter also played an important role in shaping queer theory as a critical tool for unpacking dichotomies within, and the binaries of, gender and sexuality. Sedgwick, via Shakespeare, was therefore constitutive of the formative phase of queer theory and queer early modern literary criticism.
Some recent work on sex, sexuality and desire in Shakespeare, however, illustrates ‘queer’ work on Shakespeare outside the theoretical understanding of ‘queerness’, as offered in this volume. When Paul Hammond points to the fact that Shakespeare’s sonnets are ‘less direct’27 than Philip Sidney’s sonnets, that their distinct feature is their ‘tortuous indirections’ compared to the ‘daring’28 of Richard Barnfield’s sonnets, without calling such aesthetic convolutions ‘queer’, he demonstrates that the lexicon of queer theory is a matter of selection for a literary critic. For Sedgwick and Hammond, who both wrote about Sonnet 20, ‘queer’ is a new method of analysis and critical reading, not an adherence to a specific theory and its technical vocabulary. For them, ‘queer’ lies in the tangle of linguistic subtleties with which polymorphous sexuality and androgyny become the subjects of lyric poetry and a way of reimagining the tradition of sonnet writing; of altering that tradition from within – and at the moment passed its peak as a lyrical fashion in the English Renaissance.29 Queer, in Queer Shakespeare, is a repository of critical possibilities – difficult, political, probing, but also lively – which one can employ, at this moment in theory more widely, and in queer theory specifically, to interpret the incommensurate and controversial language of desire and sexuality in Shakespeare.
Queer Shakespeare in critical context
In queer early modern literary criticism and in queer criticism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and culture, scholars have used the term ‘queer’ to analyze the changing conceptualization of sexual behaviour, the binaries of sexual identity and scenes which in some way look awry at normative representations of desire, sexuality and embodiment. The focus on desire and the querying of the sexual binaries of homo- and heterosexuality as they have been culturally and historically formulated to presume control of the definitions of sexuality in the Renaissance has also been the main objects of queer literary criticism. For instance, Queering the Renaissance, a volume that collects some of the grounding essays from the formative phase of queer early modern historiography, redefines the ways in which identity, gender and sexuality were conceptualized in the Renaissance and presented in literature of the period.30 Shakespeare is explored within a critical context that covers different figures and genres of writing. Goldberg’s own essay, ‘Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs’, deconstructs the energies of desire in this play that ‘cross gender difference’, mainly in linguistic terms.31 In their critical overview of queer historicism, Goldberg and Menon theorized the relationship between historical and sexual difference, as an aspect of what they call the ‘universalizing scope’ of historicism that has a tendency to homogenize markers of sexuality as universally different in relation to normativity.32 In his work that followed these discussions, Goldberg extended queer historiography with the aid of ‘philosophical materialism’,33 while continuing to grapple with the concepts of sameness and difference that are represented as elusive and ambiguous in Renaissance art and literature – but in this project, Shakespeare is not his subject.
Yet in Queer Shakespeare, sameness and difference do not drive analyses in the individual essays. In differing ways, the essays in Queer Shakespeare show that the multifarious ways in which desire and sexuality feature in different texts demonstrate how queer theory becomes a ‘perceptional opener’34 by which object-oriented philosophy, trans theory or comparativism can yield new insights. This volume also opens up the term ‘queer’ to redefinition, to re-envisaging, and to a new critical awareness of its potential. It allows each contributor to understand and use the term ‘queer’ in an individual way; to adapt it to the texts and contexts which are the subject of queering; and even to take as much from an understanding of ‘queer’ as a signifier of erotic unruliness within a text and culture. Each chapter in Queer Shakespeare therefore brings its own perspective on ‘queer’, a term ‘whose political efficacy is diluted through its universalization’, as James Bromley and William Stockton argue in their collection, Sex Before Sex, but a term which continues, even at this most recent, late, stage in queer theory, to stir up controversy, even if only at the level of debate among critics of literature and stage performance.35 Queer Shakespeare shows that deconstructive Shakespeare is not always the same as queer Shakespeare. It proposes that dichotomies of desire and sexuality, which are the subject of analysis in this volume, are queer, but only insofar as those dichotomies also extend to other manifestations of desire and forms of embodiment that on the surface may not strike us as queer, like glass, smell or size.
In Queer Shakespeare, ‘queer’ means not just intimacy and affection, not only sexuality and eroticism, not only acts and practices. Rather, ‘queer’ captures the split between representation and embodiment; the changing of texts between linguistically different cultures of the early modern period; it bridges gaps between different kinds of community, and material objects and texts. Sexual practices and types are queer; but so are rhetorical figures and styles. And ‘queer’ in this collection does not mark a departure from genital sex: sodomy is analysed in the context of antitheatrical homophobia and within the register of the early modern money-lending economy. When procreation, taken to be the generation or animation of material life, is shown to be a queer act, as it is in Christine Varnado’s reading of Macbeth, then ‘queer’ in Queer Shakespeare has made an unpredictable leap by showing how the normative has become the transgressive, and a queer event of a particular, and peculiar, kind. Or, when the gigantic and the miniature are treated as queer attributes of the erotic, as in Valerie Billing’s interpretation of Love’s Labour’s Lost; when clothing, jewellery, strange texts and the dilatory, baroque manner of narration turn into the signs of queerness in Stephen Guy-Bray’s analysis of Cymbeline; and when law and the Christian articulation of virtuous and shameful sex are put in conversation with queer theory in Melissa Sanchez’s exploration of Measure for Measure – then Queer Shakespeare demonstrates expansiveness of the term queer to capture the strangeness of the past to imagine desire, sexuality and the body. ‘Queer’ captures how the kind of writing Shakespeare employs and the ways of telling a story represent a response in his poetics to the moment of profound social, political, cultural shifts and changes in language that early modern England underwent at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In this sense, Queer Shakespeare shows that queer early modern studies, and queer theory more broadly, is far from over.
On the contrary, the more queer theory evolves, the more it expands the opportunity for critical innovation; the more experimental vitality it can add to Shakespeare criticism and different cultural appropriations of Shakespeare. Queer Shakespeare shows that the vibrancy of Shakespearean sexualities, the vagaries and extremities of desire germane to his writing, and the resistance to epistemologically transparent articulations of sex and the body afford new critical possibilities. The Shakespearean queer is both a conceptual abstraction and an abstraction that masks the representation of desire, sexuality and embodiment of multiple significations. The most desiring of Shakespeare’s fictional men and women, the ones fully consumed by eros, are also the ones who test rhetoric most daringly.
Queer language and queer Shakespeare
The chapters in Queer Shakespeare demonstrate that at any level of composition and style, stage scene and plot device, Shakespeare can be queer, even queerer than we at first think he is; and in refreshing and liberating ways, too. Queer Shakespeare displays rhetorical power that can shatter and alter meaning at any point in the text, as the following lines by Arcite, one of the two cousins from The Two Noble Kinsmen, illustrates:
Let’s think this prison holy sanctuary,
To keep us from corruption of worse men.
…
What worthy blessing
Can be but our imaginations
May make it ours? And here being thus together,
We are an endless mine to one another;
We are one another’s wife, ever begetting
New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance,
We are in one another, families;
I am your heir, and you are mine. This place is our inheritance.
(2.2.71–2; 76–84)
Confinement becomes a place that liberates imagination to beget new ways of belonging for two men. It is a place of fantasy. It erases the boundary between kinship and friendship, and turns both kinship and friendship into a new kind of affective bond, ‘an endless mine to one another’. It is not clear what kind of exchange is imagined in this passage; whatever it is, it offers fulfillment. Imprisonment also redefines the meaning of gender and marriage, in an invitation to become (symbolically?) each other’s wife. This fantasy of new affective and social coupling has rewritten what family, heritage and inheritance mean in the prison. Yet this confinement seems more like a desired bower of emotional bliss than a crushing dungeon. Prison has become a shared space of intimacy, however elusive the somatic and erotic signification of that intimacy may be. It has become a homosocial and queer space. As Arcite’s language cuts through matrimonial and kinship lines, it releases desire that is at once erotic and political: his words have made Palamon ‘almost wanton’ (2.2.96). Wantonness, understood in the sense in which the OED defines it as ‘undisciplined, ungoverned, unmanageable, [and] rebellious’, implies force and desire to shatter the political authority that imprisoned the cousin-friends. Arcite’s use of the word reveals both political and erotic Shakespeare and Fletcher, his collaborator on this play. Palamon’s ungoverned thoughts rebel even against time, which may put an end to his ‘friendship’ with Arcite: ‘I do not think it possible for our friendship / Should ever leave us’ (2.2.124–5). The meaning of the word ‘friend’ is not too far removed from that of ‘cousin,’ which invokes love and intimacy. ‘Friend’ is also closely related to amicitia, which captures the affective basis of friendship, love as a way of bonding between friends. This dramatic moment brings out the tension between ‘the tropes of male friendship and the cultural imperative of monogamous marriage’36 in the plot. To seal the bond between friends in this passionate reverie, Arcite imagines death as the state in which shared love within this affective friendship will never end: ‘And after death our spirits shall be led / To those that love eternally’ (2.2.115). The fantasy of eternity takes the language of emotional exchange back to that of matrimony, and the ritualistic promise that husband and wife are inseparate in life and death.
This passage illustrates that in its most recognizable form the queerness of Shakespeare’s text characterizes what Jeffrey Masten has called ‘the mobile quality of desire, erotics, and affections, as distinct from identities’.37 Arcite’s language shows the virtue of desire to be fluid; its meaning opaque. But the text does not demonstrate that either the class or gender, or even sexual identity of the imprisoned noblemen is affected by these changes in the rhetoric of desire. It is desire, not identity that is, in fact, of more interest to the two collaborators at this point. For, affections that bind the friends in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play are not imaginative constructions of a playtext only. Their cultural correlative and social meaning lie in what Will Tosh has documented and described as complicated ‘affectional transactions’38 between men as friends in early modern England. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s text is queer in both the historical and theoretical sense in which friendship is imagined.
Yet how transgressive is this desire? The desire imagined in this passage privileges a male-male relationship differently in relation to kinship and the Theban court, as normative units and, especially of the court, of political power as well. But that same male-male desire does not put gender and affection in tension, but in consonance. As such, desire confirms masculine agency.39 One could say, even, that this passage confirms that Shakespeare and Fletcher think and write within the frame of his own period’s idealization of friendship as one of the main social pillars, while also treating friendship as a more expansive and affective bond that registers particular, if often fluid, forms of closeness and privacy between men.40 The state situation shows that this other, affective, side of friendship is of more interest to Shakespeare at this point in the play. The exchange between Arcite and Palamon takes place in a prison cell, in a space that emasculates men; in a place that strips men of power afforded to them by culture and society. The desire that brings Arcite and Palamon together does not come in addition to the power they had outside the prison walls, but despite having that power taken away from them. Queer Shakespeare shows that signs of queerness in Shakespeare are more authentic in scenes away from the tension of gender and sexuality, where the play between orthodoxy and subversion is apparent but not simplified.
The multifaceted meaning of the words in this passage conceals both the operation of the mind that thinks away from the normative gender arrangement and shows the syntactic strategy that carries this meaning. It is evidence of a historical change occurring in the English language at the turn of the centuries. It shows that the increasingly rhetorical mind of a writer writing in a deeply rhetorical culture was influenced by the changes in the English language at the point when the semantic potential of the English language significantly developed at the end of the sixteenth century.41 The artificiality of language, which Renaissance rhetoricians advocated as an ideal to be followed over realism, even colloquialism, depended on rhetorical ornament for its effect; rhetoric also encouraged the experimentation with the invention of topics to be developed and embellished with rhetorical figures.42 In playwrights like Shakespeare we should therefore expect rhetoric to be a malleable form in which experimenting with content means testing the meanings they can produce; and using those meanings, and the very process of their testing, to dramatic or poetic ends. In the passage from The Two Noble Kinsmen, these rhetorical tendencies are evident in attaching different meanings to desire as well as to the affective and corporeal bonds within such social categories as wife, cousin and friend. Shakespeare rhetorical imagination is also queer imagination.
At this moment in the history of the English language, the expansion of the meaning of words, mostly through polysemy, became an important tool for the creation of the semantic diversity of the English literary language.43 Reflecting on the lines cited above from the angle of theory, one could say that those lines illustrate what Jeffrey Masten has recently called ‘queer philology’.44 Queer Shakespeare demonstrates that the origin of queer early modern theory lies precisely in the arrangement and meaning of the words as carriers of meaning, not only in meaning itself. The lines from The Two Noble Kinsmen on which I comment here demonstrate that the Shakespeareanism of desire,45 that is, the specific nature and force of expression that Shakespeare attaches to the vibrancy of the language of desire, builds a bridge between the past and the present of queer theory.
The exchange between Arcite and Palamon does not make them homosexuals in modern terms; it does not reveal the homoerotic nature of their affective relationship with each other. Even friendship which they profess in idealized terms does not follow the same trajectory of same-sex relations which we find within the spaces of friendship that John Garrison, in his book on early modern friendship and queer theory, traces down to a philological and historical detail.46 Rather, the rhetoric of new bonding between the two young noblemen captures queerness in the sense in which David Orvis treats queer as ‘alternative arrangements and practices’47 that can be established between men against dominant cultural arrangements. What exactly this arrangement, fantasized about within the prison walls and, importantly, hidden away from the family household and the scrutinizing gaze of the King of Thebes, means, is not clear. But this arrangement shows Shakespeare’s queer art of the incommensurable. Queer meaning in Shakespeare is never graspable in full; it is never circled; so many meanings compete at once, and sometimes contradict one another. In that sense his linguistic art reveals itself as the queer art of words. The semantic opacity of the affective, emotional, erotic or amorous language becomes in Shakespeare’s queer art of words a ‘productive analytical resource’.48 And that productive analytical resource, as a queer resource, extends Shakespeare criticism in directions in which other forms of critical inquiry do not venture. Unpacking Shakespeare’s queer language enables us to not only see how Shakespeare, the writer of restless desires, pushes the limits of sexuality and desire, but also how the utility and meaning of ‘queer’ dilates in close analysis. In many instances in Queer Shakespeare, in fact, nuanced close analysis proves to be the best analytical method in finding out how Shakespeare buries queer meaning in the complexity and bravura of his language.
What is common to all the chapters that follow is that their authors search for hitherto unexplored strategies of deciphering the ‘intelligibility’49 of desires and sexualities imagined in Shakespeare’s text. The authors explore Shakespeare’s drama and lyric poetry in relation to other dramatic characters, against the background of the stylistic and literary contexts that helped shape Shakespeare’s texts, with a view of social and cultural communities imagined in the texts as versions of collectivity separate from traditional collective units and social categories, like family, religious group and social class. Among the topics examined in this book are explorations of the forms of sexual connections formed after disease (plague), transgendered bodies at the heart of comedy, homophobia and metatheatre, glass and desire, generation as an unnatural phenomenon, the queerness of scent and writing style as queer formalism.
Queer Shakespeare between history and theory
Queer readings of Shakespeare represented in this volume are both historically and theoretically oriented. The aim of this book is to uncover as many possibilities for expanding the historiography of queer approaches to Shakespeare in the space allowed and to illustrate how different ways of theoretical thinking about what ‘queer’ is, or can be, influences how we read Shakesepare. A project of this scope, centred on a mainstream writer of a large and generically diverse canon such is Shakespeare, inevitably has to leave something out. This book does not feature readings of Shakespeare that are dependent on the decision-making processes and revisions undertaken by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors in editions, and changes in prompt books in which words were crossed out.50 Although the way we read sexuality in Shakespeare is dependent also on those revisions, I consider this particular aspect of queer Shakespeare historiography, important though it is, a distinct area of research. This area covers related objects and fields of study and analytical practices – new bibliography, history and practices of editing, theatre history, performance and textual studies – which would make a stronger and more visible contribution to queer Shakespeare historiography in a project more focused on different instances within this field of Shakespeare scholarship. The book also does not include chapters on queer readings of stage performance and of popular film and music, despite the imprint that queer interpretations of Shakespeare have produced within popular culture and media.51 Although I acknowledge that popular culture represents a growing area for the study of modern queer appropriations of Shakespeare, I am also mindful of the fact that different media in popular culture shift focus from text to popular culture and therefore call for a critical apparatus that is different from that of literary criticism.52
Queer in Queer Shakespeare draws on new developments in queer theory particularly attentive to transsexual theory. Comparative literary and cultural assessments reveal yet another new perspective on queer work on Shakespeare practised in this volume. In contact with texts from the European Renaissance, Shakespeare’s writing reveals queerness as a difference based on suppression, occlusion and semantic difference of allied vocabulary. One of the difficulties and pleasures of unpacking queer meanings in Shakespeare, and in early modern literature more broadly, is the illegibility of the scenes which harbour such meanings. Motifs, figures, rhetorical formulations and scenarios associated with them in archival and more readily available texts can also be repetitive. A comparative perspective with queer culture in early modern Italy, where social history shows that different queer acts and practices were culturally more visible and more amply registered in the archives in explicit terms, might help us speculate differently about the nature of sins that are textualized in Shakespeare and other examples of early modern English literature.53 It seems that there are fewer of what Traub calls ‘archival impasses’54 in Italian than in English archives of queer early modernity. What would it mean, for instance, for an analysis of queer Renaissance, the history of homosexuality in England or specifically for the queerness of The Two Noble Kinsmen, if an English archive yielded evidence, similar to a detailed document in an Italian archive, of a group marriage involving eight men in Rome in 1578, ‘who legitimized their relationship in a rite that imitated the Counter-Reformation sacrament of marriage’, as Giuseppe Marcocci describes that occasion?55 The marriage took place in the ‘ancient basilica of San Giovanni a Porta Latina’, now a frequented tourist site and advertised as a popular place for weddings in Rome. The men, all from southern Europe, were found out, tried, imprisoned then hanged on the bridge over the river Tiber leading to Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Their bodies were burned on a stake in a southern part of Rome, an unlikely location for this act. Echoing the language from the Shakespeare–Fletcher play, these eight men became wives to one another in a group marriage ceremony, doubly troubling the idea and act of marriage because of its same-gendered nature and the multiple parties tied into a wedlock. The brief lives of these men in imprisonment became the queer space of their brief new reality of marriage. What that group marriage signified in social terms, we do not fully know. Different political cultures and social conditions in early modern Europe determined what was recorded, how much, by whom and with what purpose, especially if the record registered a draconic punishment, which in itself is an event, as this one was. Comparative queer historiography, of which we need more in queer early modern (English) studies, may shift perspectives of our knowledge and critical practice in exciting directions. Ian Moulton’s comparative analysis of an unlikely pair of texts, Shakespeare’s sonnets and an explicitly pornographic poem about hermaphroditic sex, embodiment and eroticism from Italian literature, uncovers a more explicit and raw form of hermaphroditism than that which is only occasionally attended to by Shakespeare.
The chapters on language, style and comparativism act as reminders that in the post-New Historicist critical environment a return to language and the study of resources as objects of inquiry represents a return to two topics which New Historicism did not address: language as material practice and source studies. When Stephen Greenblatt stated that ‘the Renaissance tended to sharpen its sense of the normative by meditating upon the prodigious’,56 he gestured towards thinking about the Renaissance as a queer phenomenon. His claim sounded like a sign of theoretical possibility. And his interpretation of Twelfth Night in the essay from which I have quoted him here examines the play’s resistance to a determined identity. Queer Shakespeare treats historicist research, which is in one form or another unavoidable in Renaissance studies, not as a precondition for queer criticism but as a theoretically reconfigured alternative to, and sometimes a version of, the empiricism of archival research. This volume demonstrates that Shakespeare is an unavoidable presence in the literary history of sexuality in early modern England;57 that he is constituent of queer theory just as queer theory without Shakespeare shuts itself away from one of its most resourceful presences.
Queer Shakespeare is divided into three parts. Since all of the chapters engage with queer desire, sexuality, embodiment and practice, close analysis as a way of interpreting specific historical milieu and theoretical perspective from which each author addresses her or his topic, there are necessary conceptual overlaps between chapters as a whole. Therefore, the organization of the book in three parts should be taken as a way of stimulating further critical thinking about queer Shakespeare by identifying notions that the chapters in each part offer as a way of starting critical conversation, not clear-cut thematic categories that neatly correspond to topics explored in each of the chapters within the three parts.
Part I, ‘Queer time’, groups together four chapters in which queer sexuality and desire are analyzed in relation to time, history and historiography, within the English context and comparatively. The chapters in this group explore the fluid relationship between time and desire, history and sexuality and the problems of historiographical descriptions and articulations of these relationships, including a comparative, Anglo–Italian perspective as a way of accessing queer meanings that relate Shakespeare’s texts to other vernacular literature in a transnational context. David L. Orvis examines how the early modern ideology of love shaped amorous and erotic discourses in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Specifically, Orvis’s chapter is concerned with how this early comedy consistently asks questions of the worthiness of different kinds and levels of love and desire. His chapter shows the extent to which Shakespeare’s plays explore questions about the meaning and worth of queer desires and what we might call normative sexuality, and about romantic love and affectionate friendship between men. John Garrison’s chapter, ‘Glass: The Sonnets’ desiring object’, pushes the idea of queer time in Shakespeare in a different direction. He explores glass as a natural object related to the operations of time, desire, ‘desirability’ and aging in the sonnets. In ‘The sport of asses: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Kirk Quinsland asks whether thinking about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antitheatrical writing as homophobic represents a historical anachronism, in an attempt to explore the dynamics between stage representations of sexual conduct and homophobic audiences in Shakespeare’s time. The ‘stylistic badness’ of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ play-within-the play staged by the rude Mechanicals referred to as ‘sport’ is explored as an antihomophobic reaction to the homophobia of antitheatrical treatises. This part ends with Ian Frederick Moulton’s chapter, ‘As You Like It or What You Will: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus’, which sets out to examine the relationship between texts across ‘temporal and linguistic boundaries’, specifically between licit and illicit desire in Becadelli’s early fifteenth-century collection of Latin epigrams and a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Comparative analysis between temporally and generically different poetry reveals a relationship between desire and time that allows queer presences to be recognized as structurally corresponding across a longer historical arc.
Part II, ‘Queer language’, brings together four chapters examining language, narrative and style as carriers of meaning about desire and sexuality. These chapters focus on language as material practice, rhetoric, sound, narrative and style of Shakespeare’s writing which we call ‘queer’. Valerie Billing, in ‘The queer language of size in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, investigates size, a property neither inherently erotic nor intrinsically queer, as a linguistic and stylistic category charged with erotic potential and the source of phallic jokes, through which male-male social and physical contacts are rendered as queer desire. In ‘Locating queerness in Cymbeline’, Stephen Guy-Bray asks what makes Cymbeline a queer play when it ‘reaffirms’ natural social hierarchy and orthodoxy. Focusing his analysis on narrative rather than linguistic excess, Guy-Bray demonstrates that the heteronormative narrative of the play is conveyed in a queer manner, and in that sense his reading runs counter to criticism that has analysed identity, language and sexuality in the play as queer. Moving from macrotextual to microlinguistic forms, Holly Dugan’s chapter, ‘Desiring H: Much Ado About Nothing and the sound of women’s desire’, focuses on the construction of female eroticism through aural punning and sexual allusions created by it, by exploring the queer phonology and meaning of the sound produced by various pronunciations of the letter ‘H’ at the end of the song in which Beatrice and Margaret pun about ‘the orthography of women’s desire’. If Billing starts her analysis by examining the limits of the Petrarchan rhetoric to articulate desire, Goran Stanivukovic, in his chapter ‘“Two lips, indifferent red”: Queer styles in Twelfth Night’, examines the vocabulary and syntax of Petrarchan style as carriers of queer meaning in the passionate encounters between Viola-Cesario and Olivia.
The last part, ‘Queer nature’, consists of five chapters which, in differing ways, explore the relationship between desire, environmentality and nature more broadly. These chapters are concerned with the notion of nature as a broad category, from weather to embodiment but also the binary of nature and nurture; from plague to the unnaturalness of sodomy; and from vitality to antisocial procreation. In ‘Queer nature, or the weather in Macbeth’, Christine Varnado explores how the language which renders the natural world in Macbeth by collapsing the boundaries between natural, human and ‘what is alive’ disrupts ‘the logic of sexual reproduction’. Reproduction of a different kind, of money bred by way of usury, is the subject of Eliza Greenstadt’s chapter ‘Strange insertions in The Merchant of Venice’, in which she explores sodomy as an unnatural sin against the background of early modern writing about usury. The connection between desire, gender and embodiment is the subject of Simone Chess’s chapter, ‘Male femininity and Male-to-female crossdressing in Shakespeare’s plays and poems’, which examines male-to-female (MTF) crossdressing by ‘recognizing and recentering Shakespeare’s representations of male femininity’. Kathryn Schwarz, in her chapter ‘Held in common: Romeo and Juliet and the promiscuous seductions of plague’, explores how contagion, specifically plague, yokes bodies with speech acts, and explores sexuality not in relation to heterosexual marriage but in a supple vocabulary of ways in which all mortal bodies might touch. This part started with a chapter asking questions about the nature of procreation in Macbeth and it ends with Melissa Sanchez’s chapter, ‘Antisocial procreation in Measure for Measure,’ in which she challenges the category of both the sexual and ontological female body as consigned to procreation by virtue of that body’s ‘nature’, and examines consequence of such separateness upon social order. Vin Nardizzi’s afterword extends debates about desire and sexuality as queer ecology and queer environmentalism.