Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (review)

Early in this fascinating but ultimately frustrating study, Paul Hammond writes: "[i]n place of the cultural materialist and new historicist treatments which the subject has tended to receive in recent years, this book turns to the rhetoric of sex between men, exploring how literature creates an imagined world in which homosexual relations can be figured, and how readers responded to those creations by adapting, rewriting, and censoring those texts" (4). The approach may seem a relief to some, for in the early modern world first described by Alan Bray in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) and later elaborated by Jonathan Goldberg in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992), sex between men never seems capable of clear or easy articulation. Indeed it seems always to be elsewhere, marked not as sex at all but as another discourse such as friendship, service, or pedagogy. Hammond makes the perhaps salutary suggestion that homoerotic sex itself can be "figured" or read in the rhetorical ambiguity of texts from this period, and he is careful not to suggest that it is always represented as the same kind of activity, desire, or subjective experience in each. He argues that there are no unitary discourses of homoeroticism or sodomy, but a series of "discontinuous micro-discourses" (255). Homoerotic desire or sex can be read in specific texts only as particular voices speaking from particular locations.

Figuring Sex between Men understands the tension between Alan Bray's thesis that there was a range of "strong sexual and emotional feelings which lacked any vocabulary except the condemnatory language of officialdom" (10) and Bruce Smith's demonstration in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (1991) that a repertoire of literary modes explored same-sex desire. Rather than pursue this tension in historical terms, however, Hammond defines it through rhetoric, emphasizing the ways in which rhetorical figures obscure homoerotic desire even as they express it. Primary in this regard is paradiastole, "in which the character of a person or act is represented in a different light" from what is actually the case (18). In Hammond's view, homoerotic texts of the period carefully negotiate relations of definition and indefinition, precision and ambiguity, both to suggest a sexual reading and to ward off disapproval (16).

To take an example, Hammond examines Shakespeare's Sonnets to show how words such as friend and lover overlap and diverge through paradiastole and other rhetorical figures. He argues that when these words apply to emotive relationships between men, they "operate in a field where ambiguity may be necessary" (20). So the Sonnets reveal a "half-open, half-secret domain" in which a male "friend" may also be a "lover" (20). What distinguishes Hammond's reading is the insistence that Shakespeare's play with the ambiguities of such words ultimately connotes an "expression of sexual desire for the youth" (67). But even though Hammond finds "sexual desire" in the rhetoric of the Sonnets, he is careful to distinguish the particularity of Shakespeare's expressions of it from others', in this particular instance, Richard Barnfield's whose The A ff ectionate Shepheard (1594) and Cynthia (1595) he reads as significant sources: "Where Barnfield's poetry speaks of the desire of an older man to possess a younger man, eroticizing his body and multiplying images of physical consummation, Shakespeare's poetry moves inward, analysing various kinds of possession and dispossession, and the emotions which attend them" (84). While resisting the implication that Barnfield's poems and Shakespeare's Sonnets reflect a single experience of same-sex desire, Hammond is equally insistent that the Sonnets "could not possibly be read as expressions of homosocial friendship" (85).

Hammond's is certainly a more nuanced and historically sensitive reading than that found in Joseph Pequigney's Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1985), in which homosexual sex in the Sonnets is seen as having a specific physical shape. But, like Pequigney, Hammond...