Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (review)

Sodomy, as savvy readers of this journal know very well, is not something you do with your body; it's something you think with. More than a dozen years ago Gregory Bredbeck made that distinction the focal point of his book Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (1991). Nearly a decade earlier Alan Bray had demonstrated in Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) just how slippery a term sodomy was in early modern English. It could cover heresy and sedition as well as the acts of predatory sexual violence specified in the law books. In Sexual Dissidencein Society and History, published the same year as Bredbeck's study, Jonathan Dollimore used an encounter between Gide and Wilde to contrast two ways of making sense of the world: one grounded in a search for connections and wholeness, the other open to contradictions and discontinuities. It's the Wildean sensibility, the understanding of sodomy as cognitive dissidence, that has given direction to most subsequent books that take early modern sodomy as a point of departure. Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries (1992) and Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse (1997) are brilliant cases in point. In audacity, in exactitude, in sheer force of wit Richard Halpern's new book takes its place in this well-established critical tradition.

Sodomy and political power? Yes. Sodomy and joint authorship? Of course. Sodomy and sublimity? As Halpern wryly notes, the two words at least have the alliterating s to recommend a connection. What Halpern has done is to take a page out of queer philology (Patricia Parker's seizing on the word preposterous comes to mind as well as Masten's work on fundament¹ ) and to investigate certain key words in early modern English. Preposterous and fundament may point in our direction—we think we know what they mean—but in 1600 they carried literal meanings that made connections we have forgotten. To retrieve those connections is to administer a jolt of new-historicist culture shock. In Halpern's case, the words in question are sublime, sublimity, sublimation, and sublimate. Our sense of sublime as "belonging to the highest regions of thought, reality, or human activity" is dated by the Oxford English Dictionary no earlier than Milton (1634; OED, "sublime," adj.,A.4.). Thesublime is later still (1679; OED, "sublime," n.,B.1.). What was sublime in 1600 was style, persons, and objects "[s]et or raised aloft" (from sub [up to] + l?men [lintel]; OED, "sublime," adj.,A.1.). That sense of physical remove, of elevation, connects sublime with the alchemical terms sublimation and sublimate, both of which refer to the "chemical action or process of subliming or converting a solid substance by means of heat into vapour, which resolidifies on cooling" into a purer substance (OED, "sublimation," 1.a.). To sublime was recognized as a verb in early modern English. Hence the "perfume" of Shakespeare's Sonnet 5, the distillation of the young man's essence in the vial formed by the poem itself. Lurking in the connections that Halpern makes, though never quite made explicit, is subliminal. Hence the book's chapters on Freud and on Lacan. In strictly chronological terms, there is a certain sleight of hand in the book's first chapter, on Shakespeare's sonnets. The "sublimity" of the book's title is stretched to cover one concept that was not quite present in the English of 1600, "the sublime," and another, "subliminal," that wasn't coined until the time of Oscar Wilde, the subject of chapter 2. But that chronological slippage is just the point. Halpern traces a cultural history of sublimity in which the key concepts undergo changes in definition. What does not change, in Halpern's account, is the groundedness of those concepts of sublimity in sodomy.

With Bray, Bredbeck, Dollimore, Goldberg, and Masten, Halpern shares a basic sense of sodomy as that-which-cannot-be-represented...