Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (review)

There is a kind of literary criticism that transparently evokes the critic's own dreams and interests, as when Coleridge finds in Shakespeare "the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy" (Notes on Some Other Plays of Shakespeare). Guy-Bray's Homoerotic Space exhibits a kindred longing to Coleridge's. He looks for a homoerotic literary tradition in classical and Renaissance literature and finds it, although his discoveries are not entirely cheerful. "This book," he writes, "does not tell a particularly happy story, and loss—in particular, the deaths of young men—is one of its major topics. I want to conclude these acknowledgments by honoring the memory of some I knew who died too young." We are well aware of the death toll among twentieth-century young men, and after reading Guy-Bray's book, we must note that the Renaissance was also littered with dying young men.

The argument of Homoerotic Space is that certain classical genres such as the pastoral and the elegy "were frequently encoded as homoerotic" (4). Thus an educated early modern Englishman would have read many texts in which homoerotic discourses were central. Guy-Bray argues that these writers used classical models to construct their own homoerotic discourses. He complicates the process of literary emulation by using Certeau's idea of "place" versus "space." Certeau argues that "an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text." Guy-Bray looks in early modern texts for this practice of "place," uncovering the interactive early modern reader engaged in "the literal motion of cruising, in which people sexualize the urban spaces they inhabit" (9). He creates a rather poignant shelter that grows from words into space: "The ability of pastoral poetry to recreate both a bygone place and a bygone time allows for the creation of what I call homoerotic space: a safe, because carefully demarcated, zone in which homoeroticism can appear" (15).

It is in this safe, cozy readers' space that one detects a dose of wish fulfillment. Guy-Bray does limit the homoerotic passion he looks for, noting that there have always been men attracted to men, that some of them were readers of poetry and poets, and that classical texts may have "been of particular use to such men" (6). But his desire to uncover traces of a thriving parallel to a modern gay writers' community infects some of his conclusions. For example, he argues that "two men who speak very affectionately of each other and who kiss each other are surely more likely to be having sex than two men who are not" (11). I think many anthropologists would disagree. Affectionate kisses certainly do not preclude sexual activity, but the extent to which those actions reflect that activity is culturally determined. In his discussion of Milton's relationship with Diodati, Guy-Bray argues that "common sense suggests that the friendship was physical, since the most obvious reason for using sexual metaphors to describe a relationship is that the relationship is or was sexual" (119). This is certainly true at present; it is not necessarily true of the past, particularly in the case of Milton. Besides, if we apply a commonsense rule, when Milton writes of Diodati (in Guy-Bray's translation), "because you did not taste the pleasures of the bed, lo! The rewards of virginity have been kept for you," a logical reader might as well assume that Diodati died a virgin (129).

But, as Guy-Bray quickly points out, the extent of the sexual relationship between two given men is not essential to his argument, since he is discussing loverather than sexual activity. Unfortunately, he finds evocations of this love only in the context of death: "[W]e could also give the name homoerotic space to the gap between the living and the dead, a gap filled with laments" (19). In the end, the cozy homoerotic space...