Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare

by Madhavi Menon (Editor), Michèle Aina Barale (Editor), Jonathan Goldberg (Editor), Michael Moon (Editor), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Editor)

Overview

Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies.

Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822393337
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2011
Series:	Series Q
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	506
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Madhavi Menon is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film and Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama.

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Shakesqueer

A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare

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DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4845-0

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Chapter One

All Is True (Henry VIII)

The Unbearable Sex of Henry VIII

STEVEN BRUHM

If I see a man that is Hot, Hairy, high-coloured, with a black thick curled head of haire, great veines, & a big voice, I dare be bold to say, that that man hath a hot and dry Liver, and his Generative parts are also of the same Temper; & that consequently he is inclined to lustfull desires. —James Ferrand, Erotomania, 170

Hot, hairy, and big. Were it not for the archaic language and suspicion of "lustfull desires," this passage from James Ferrand's treatise Erotomania (1645) could come from hairyboyz.com or any website devoted to "bears"—those chubby, bearded, and hirsute gay men who constitute a significant modern subculture. Nor was Ferrand the only premodern writer to figure an erotic—or is it a pornographic?—of pogonotrophy. Clement of Alexandria had argued that God adorned man "with a beard like a lion, making him tough, with a hairy chest, for such is the emblem of strength and empire." Marcus Ulmus contended in 1603 that "Nature gave to mankind a Beard, that it might remaine as an Index in the Face, of the Masculine generative faculty." In a similar vein, John Bulwer argued in Anthropometamorphosis (1654) that "shaving the chin is justly to be accounted a note of Effeminacy." Indeed, according to Will Fisher, the clean-shaven man in early modern England "quite literally becomes 'lesse man' or even a 'woman,'" a prejudice Fisher finds in Phillip Massinger's play The Guardian (1658). Massinger suggests that a husband without a beard is worse than an adulterer because the former risks being considered sodomitical; lacking facial hair, he was supposed incapable of sexual regeneration. And in the opinion of Johan Valerian (1533), the shaven face ranks its holder among "chyldren" and "gelded men"?—that is, the smooth, shaved, barely adolescent twink that is the current front-runner of gay desire.

For the contemporary bear lover, though, the happy hunting grounds that extend to the Lone Star Bar find a particularly rich den in early modernism. After a centuries-long chaetophobia inspired by the early Christian conviction that body hair was the mark of the Beast on fallen man, the fur flew back onto the faces of the sixteenth-century man. In English culture, the papa of these bears is Henry VIII, as shown most readily in Hans Holbein's famous portrait of him of 1540 (figure 1). Here Henry's face offers immediate satisfaction to the beard lover, both for what is there and for what is to come. Thanks to Henry's introduction of the beard to the English court, English Renaissance portraiture from Holbein on would be dominated by bearded figures. Bearded and bearish: The corpulent body in Holbein's canvas at least whets the appetite for the hairy chest that is metonymically suggested by the ermine draping over the king's shoulders and down across his nipples. The sashes under the belly, the sweep of the costume toward the remarkably genital knot of the belt, the right arm directing our gaze down across the stomach to the left hand placed tantalizingly on the hilt of a dagger—all of this leads viewers so inclined to fantasize about how long that dagger really is and what it might prick. With a remarkable and pointed clarity, the filigree of Henry's costume images his actual bodily flesh, a Henry stripped bare to become Henry the bear (figure 2).

Such a perverse reading of His Majesty's magisterial body is not beside the point in early modern figurations of Henry. Shakespeare opens Henry VIII with the spectacle of not one but two big, burly, kingly bodies on display. Moreover, Shakespeare gives them an erotic dynamism that the Holbein portrait can only hint at. The Duke of Norfolk begins the play by describing to Buckingham the famous summit at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in which Henry meets the equally large (and equally hirsute) King Francis I:

    I was then present, saw them salute on horseback,
    Beheld them when they lighted, how they clung
    In their embracement as they grew together,
    Which had they, what four throned ones could have weighed
    Such a compounded one?
        ... Men might say
    Till this time pomp was single, but now married
    To one above itself.

This is the play's first spectacle of huge bodies growing together, melding or "marrying" into an undifferentiated one—the first, but certainly not the only. During Anne Boleyn's coronation in Act 4, we read that

        Great-bellied women,
    That had not half a week to go, like rams
    In the old time of war, would shake the press,
    And make 'em reel before 'em. No man living
    Could say "This is my wife" there, all were woven
    So strangely in one piece. (4.1.78–83)

And at the baptism of the baby Elizabeth, we have the crowds turning the court into a version of Paris Garden ("a park for bear- and bull-baiting") to catch sight of the child, as if "some strange Indian with a great tool [has] come to court" (5.3.32–33). "Bless me," cries the Porter, "what a fry of fornication is at the door! On my Christian conscience, this one christening will beget a thousand. Here will be father, godfather, and all together" (5.3.33–36). If the great bellies of Act 4 vie for space with the great tool of Act 5, the effect is merely to embroider on the play's indulgence in swollen bodies entering strangely into one piece—women like phallic rams, great tools and great bellies producing many papas. Papas, and Papa Bears, for while the marriage of pomp and circumference at the Valley of the Cloth of Gold does not mention hair, we know it is covered in the stuff: Francis was one of the first European heads of state to sport a beard (figure 3), in defiance of medieval Christian practice, and Henry, in imitation (in identification? in desire?) of Francis, quickly followed suit, bringing the hirsute home to England. In this sense Shakespeare's play opens with something of a girth-and-mirth orgy, where "two kings" become "but one" (1.1.28–32) to beget a thousand beards across the English landscape.

If the invocation of two beefy, hairy men embracing each other into oneness makes my bear-loving imagination run wild, it also brings it up short. I remember, of course, that Henry VIII is the story of a man who marries six different women to produce a kingly heir, and that two of these women end up on the chopping block. When Henry VIII wants someone to give head, he does not have my sort in mind. Moreover, I remember that the gropefest at the Valley of the Cloth of Gold failed to produce any stable and meaningful allegiance between its two monarchs; this particular love story was doomed to failure. But it is precisely these two "failures" to produce a future that cement for me the necessity of reading Henry within the discourses of queer temporality and corporality. Henry's large, fecund body, his beard figuring the seminal overflow of his generative parts, his lustful desires, the sexual and political prowess that adheres to his regal body all figure impotence and castration, an inability to live up to the normative promises that Henry's body makes. How then might Henry VIII bear up under a sustained queer reading of its bearishness? How might those simultaneous signifiers of phallic excess and phallic failure help us to read an unregenerate queerness in Shakespeare's play? Let us begin again, with another bearish characteristic: fatness.

In an essay on fat children, ghosts, and animals, Kathryn Bond Stockton teaches us how to read for "sideways growth"—that is, how queer bodily contours and queer bodily acts often register a refusal to grow "up" (into normalcy, singularity, legibility) while nevertheless insisting on growing "out," "around," or "across" sites of meaning. Contemporary society, she contends, does not yet know what to do with the fat body other than to incorporate it into a pathologizing discourse of unsuccessful human development. Queers would do well, she suggests, to consider how sideways growth can figure a refusal of the strictures of normative development. Cast in other terms (those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), sideways growth may signal the significatory excesses of the rhizomic body, one that does not or will not align itself with the dictates of Oedipal health—that is, the imperative to grow up, straight and tall, with all the rights and normalcy pertaining thereto. While Stockton's preferred site for analysis of this anti-Oedipal, sideways growth is the fat child and the dog-loving lesbian, I suggest we consider the ursine as well. Given that the first English law prohibiting sodomy took effect under the reign of Henry VIII, and that it named as a crime the "abhomynable vice of buggery commyttid with mankynde or beaste," let us consider how mankind as beast—as bear—refuses to keep Henry VIII straight.

The list of male bodies that grow sideways in Henry VIII is as imposing as the bodies themselves. There is Henry of course, and his symbiotic Francis; but there is also Cardinal Wolsey, that "keech" (suet, "hunk of fat"; 1.1.55) with "unbounded stomach" (4.2.34) who "can, with his very bulk, / Take up the rays o' th' beneficial sun, / And keep it from the earth" (1.1.55–57); and from whose "ambitious finger" "No man's pie is freed" (1.1.52–53). Sexually speaking, the pie that receives Wolsey's ambitious finger is doubtless female, but his clean-shaven face, in obedience to a century of papal dictates, telegraphs a celibacy bordering on the catamitic or the gelded. And if a fat hairless body is not condemning enough, let us fantasize hair onto it, as Buckingham and Norfolk do, to complete his moral degradation. Wolsey is a "fox, / Or wolf, or both," says Buckingham (1.1.158–59), animal hair acting as metaphor for bestial, degraded behavior. What is most interesting for my purposes, though, is how Wolsey's courtly ambitions also get figured in terms of sideways growth: not just a horizontal bear body for our Wolsey, but also a sideways political growth that bespeaks lack of proper allegiance to the Oedipal, filial, class-based inheritance that constituted Tudor aristocratic propriety. Norfolk's chief complaint about Wolsey is that his power, in addition to being pernicious, is undeserved by someone of his class. This "keech" is, after all, the son of a butcher, and

    There's in him stuff that puts him to these ends [political ambitions].
    For being not propped by ancestry, whose grace
    Chalks successors their way ...
        [he] gives us note
    The force of his own merit makes his way—
    A gift that heaven gives for him which buys
    A place next to the King. (1.1.58–66)

Not a proper Oedipal lineage propped by ancestry, then, but a sideways acquisition. The gifts of his own merit place Wolsey next to (not beneath) the king. Little wonder, then, that Wolsey should figure his undoing in terms of physical shrinkage and deflation. He has "ventured, / Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, / ... far beyond my depth" (3.2.359–62) and just as his "greatness is a-ripening, [Fortune] nips his root, / And then he falls" (3.2.358–59). But it is not Fortune that nips this boy's root, it is Papa Bear. Henry breaks the wanton Wolsey's bladder, removing a "load," a "burden / Too heavy" from the cardinal's shoulders (3.2.384-86). A grandeur gained sideways has been too much for Wolsey's king to bear.

This anti-Oedipal charge bears weight elsewhere in Henry VIII. As Wolsey levels against his successor, Thomas Cranmer, the accusation that Cranmer has not risen to his position of power so much as he "hath crawled into the favor of the King" (3.2.104), we get a sense of the potbelly calling the kettle black. And according to the (possibly fallacious) testimony brought against the Duke of Buckingham, such sideways acquisition may also characterize Buckingham's pretensions to the throne should Henry "without issue die" (1.2.135). But perhaps the most notable sideways growth, the most anti-Oedipal position in the play, belongs to Henry himself. In a passage that would make psychoanalytic readers of Hamlet green with envy, Henry decries his almost-but-not-quite Oedipal union with Katherine, the princess "dowager, / Sometimes our brother's wife" (2.4.177–78). "My conscience first received a tenderness, / Scruple, and prick," the king tells Wolsey, when the Bishop of Bayonne wonders whether Henry's daughter, Mary, is the legitimate offspring of a man married to his brother's wife (2.4.167–68). Is Henry properly a father (and Mary his direct, vertical descendent), or is he more like an uncle, constituted by a sideways relationship to his own brother's wife?

        This respite shook
    The bosom of my conscience, entered me,
    Yea, with a spitting power, and made to tremble
    The region of my breast. (2.4.178–81)

Let us leave aside the entering, pricking, and spitting, the shaking bosoms and trembling breasts, to focus instead on what gets accomplished by this entrance into Henry's already capacious and sensitive body (at least according to the logics of Shakespeare's history play). From this anti-Oedipal union comes not only a crisis of sexual subjectivity but also a new marriage, the birth of Elizabeth I, the reformation of Catholicism's hold over the English monarchy, and the eventual establishment of the Church of England. That is quite a growth to come from the failure of reproduction—or, rather, from a reproduction that fails to authorize itself as legitimate.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Queer Shakes / Madhavi Menon 1

All is True (Henry VIII)
The Unbearable Sex of Henry VIII / Steven Bruhm 28

All's Well That Ends Well
Is Marriage Always Already Heterosexual? / Julie Crawford 39

Antony and Cleopatra
Aught an Eunuch Has / Ellis Hanson 48

As You Like It
Fortune's Turn / Valerie Rohy 55

Cardenio
"Absonant Desire": The Question of Cardenio / Philip Lorenz 62

The Comedy of Errors
In Praise of Error / Lynne Huffer 72

Coriolanus
"Tell Me Not Wherein I Seem Unnatural": Queer Meditations on Coriolanus in the Time of War / Jason Edwards 80

Cymbeline
desire vomit emptiness: Cymbeline's Marriage Time / Amanda Berry 89

Hamlet
Hamlet's Wounded Name / Lee Edelman 97

Henry IV, Part 1
When Harry Met Harry / Matt Bell 106

Henry IV, Part 2
The Deep Structure of Sexuality: War and Masochism in Henry IV, Part 2 / Daniel Juan Gil 114

King Henry V
Scrambling Harry and Sampling Hal / Drew Daniel 121

Henry VI, Part 1
"Wounded Alpha Bad Boy Soldier" / Mario Digangi 130

Henry VI, Part 2
The Gayest Play Ever / Stephen Guy-Bray 139

Henry VI, Part 3
Stay / Cary Howie 146

Julius Caeser
Thus, Always: Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln / Bethany Schneider 152

King John
Queer Futility: Or, The Life and Death of King John / Kathryn Schwarz 163

King Lear
Lear's Queer Cosmos / Laurie Shannon 171

A Lover's Complaint
Learning How to Love (Again) / Ashley T. Shelden 179

Love's Labour's Lost
The L Words / Madhavi Menon 187

Love's Labour's Won
Doctorin' the Bard: A Contemporary Appropriation of Love's Labour's Won / Hector Kollias 194

Macbeth
Milk / Heather Love 201

Measure for Measure
Same-Saint Desire / Paul Morrison 209

The Merchant of Venice
The Rites of Queer Marriage in The Merchant of Venice / Arthur L. Little Jr. 216

The Merry Wives of Windsor
What Do Women Want? / Jonathan Goldberg 225

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare's Ass Play / Richard Rambuss 234

Much Ado About Nothing
Closing Ranks, Keeping Company: Marriage Plots and the Will to be Single in Much Ado About Nothing / Ann Pellegrini 245

Othello
Othello's Penis: Or, Islam in the Closet / Daniel Boyarin 254

Pericles
"Curious Pleasures": Pericles beyond the Civility of Union / Patrick O'Malley 263

The Phoenix and the Turtle
Number There in Love Was Slain / Karl Steel 271

The Rape of Lucree
Desire My Pilot Is / Peter Coviello 278

Richard II
Pretty Richard / Judith Brown 286

Richard III
Fuck the Disabled: The Prequel / Robert McRuer 294

Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet Love Death / Carla Freccero 302

Sir Thomas More
More or Less Queer / Jeffrey Masten 309

The Sonnets
Momma's Boy / Aranye Fradenburg 319

Speech Therapy / Barbara Johnson 328

More Life: Shakespeare's Sonnet Machines / Julian Yates 333

The Taming of the Shrew
Latin Lovers in The Taming of the Shrew / Bruce Smith 343

The Tempest
Forgetting The Tempest / Kevin Ohi 351

Timon of Athens
Skepticism, Sovereignty, Sodomy / James Kuzner 361

Titus Andronicus
A Child's Garden of Atrocities / Michael Moon 369

Troilus and Cressida
The Leather Men and the Lovely Boy: Reading Positions in Troilus and Cressida / Alan Sinfeild 376

Twelfth Night
Is There an Audience for My Play? / Sharon Holland 385

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Pageboy, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Movie / Amy Villajero 394

The Two Noble Kinsmen
Philadelphia, or War / Jody Greene 404

Venus and Adonis421
Venus and Adonis Freeze / Andrew Nicholls 414

The Winter's Tale
Lost, or "Exit, Pursued by a Bear": Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare's TV / Kathryn Bond Stockton 421

References 429

Further Reading 449

Contributors 467

Index 477

Editorial Reviews

"For 'insider experts'—those who are Shakespeareans, queer theorists, or both (always, already, at once)—Shakesqueer provides a garden of delights between its covers. . . . Shakesqueer extends, enriches, and strengthens the vocabulary of Shakespeare criticism in concert with queer theory."

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching - Stephen F. Evans

If you're looking for clues to Romeo and Mercutio's secret romance in the new academic volume Shakesqueer : A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Madhavi Menon (Duke), you're barking up the wrong yew tree. American University professor Menon and her queer-theorist contributors find queerness in Shakespeare in that term's most all-encompassing meaning of oddball, unusual, or non-normative. But when you come to think of it, fairy queen Titania falling in love with an ass named Bottom is pretty queer, in all senses of the word.

Bay Area Reporter - Roberto Friedman

The adventurous essays in Shakesqueer demonstrate that queer theory does indeed need Shakespeare, if only to defy rumors of its own demise: the essays show what is vital about a queer studies that might have been thought by this point too domesticated or reified or ‘fixed’ to be intellectually vibrant.”—Carolyn Dinshaw, author of Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern


“What happens when queer theory gets into bed with Shakespeare? A play in forty-eight acts, this spirited group production never ceases to entertain and surprise with its queer cast of characters: virgins, eunuchs, and lechers; queens, kings, and pageboys; tyrants, assassins, and killjoys; lions, tigers, and bears—oh my! Full of toil and trouble, wit and wisdom, Shakesqueer succeeds where few other edited collections do: it puts the play back in playwright, and the fun back in theory.”—Diana Fuss, Princeton University

From the Publisher

This fascinating collection of essays explores the queer elements within all of Shakespeare’s works. With contributions from scholars of both queer studies and Shakespeare, the volume represents a joining of the two fields rarely attempted before.”

Gay & Lesbian Review - Charles Green

It is rare to see a volume that does so much, and does it with such consistent wit, thoughtfulness, and creativity. . . . In putting together this volume, Menon has done scholars from all fields and periods an immense service. Shakesqueer gives us a very queer new reading ‘’companion’’ — friend, helpmeet, comrade-in-arms — that makes us exquisitely aware of the need for the perverse and disruptive critical practice its essays so pleasurably model.

Renaissance Quarterly - Melissa E. Sanchez

Few works of literary criticism deserve the descriptor ‘monumental,’ but this one does. . . . The book is both readable and witty. It is also important, for it drives the final nail into the coffin of 20th-century Shakespearean studies. . . . No hierarchies survive this book. Every play and poem receives a fresh new reading. . . . Essential. All readers.

Choice - M. J. Emery

[Shakesqueer] manages to put the fun back into academic research. Shakesqueer is a highly entertaining collection of essays, which all focus on the strange, the unusual, that is, the queer element in the Shakespearean oeuvre.

European Journal of English Studies - Veronika Schandl

There’s something for every queer scholar and Bard-lover in the anthology; from bears in Henry VIII to eunuchs in Antony and Cleopatra, from the death drive in Hamlet to precariously heterosexual marriages in All’s Well that Ends Well, the contributing authors chart Shakespeare’s varied engagements with queerness, putting pressure on assumptions that Shakespeare has nothing to offer to contemporary queer theory. . . . The assorted essays assert that Shakespeare has as much to offer queer theory as queer theory can contribute to understanding and deconstructing the Bard’s texts. This book belongs on every bookish queer’s shelf, right where the leather-bound Complete Works of William Shakespeare butts up against Butler and Foucault.

Lambda Literary Review - Kestryl Cael Lowrey

In the end, this book is a big, glorious mess, full of playful juxtapositions and frightening possibilities. It is thrilling. Theatre scholars, queer theorists, actors, directors, and dramaturges will all find something useful and interesting.

Sixteenth Century Journal - Michael Cramer

When studying endless Shakespeare plays on English Literature courses, we always had a hunch there were some exceptionally queer goings on beyond some same sex sonnets and this collection of essays proves us right. Earl on earl analysis sits beside complex queer theories on the bard.

Gay Times

"This book examines Shakespeare's work in an engaging and ambitious fashion and focuses on all facets of the author's work including poetry."

Year's Work in English Studies - Arun Chun