Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (review)

In an unabashedly deconstructive mode, Wanton Words attempts to expand our understanding of Renaissance sexuality by triangulating it with the discourses of rhetorical theory and Renaissance theater. Modeling her understanding of sexuality on Jonathan Goldberg's Sodometries, Menon aims to explore the "mutual imbrication of language and sexuality" (3), developing close analyses that are heavily indebted to Joel Fineman. Complex, intriguing, frustrating, and difficult to summarize, Wanton Words is written with great energy and memorable turns of phrase even as it often pushes its conclusions beyond the evidence.

Commenting on studies of sexuality that focus on the vexed issue of taxonomy (5), Menon argues that the very terms sex and sexuality oblige criticism to pay strict attention to the rhetorical underpinnings that ground their usage. Once we reject the positivistic categories of historical and medio-juridical specificity (which possess no absolute authority to define erotic experience in life or art), we are open to approach the dynamic, nonsystematic representations of sexuality in rhetorical and theatrical performance. Menon's opening chapter examines such performances by looking at how metaphor is described by rhetorical handbooks. Menon connects sexuality to rhetoric and theater in that all three exert a "performative mobility" (12) that renders such discourses resistant to strict regulation or definitional "purity": "Rhetoric is the study of linguistic dalliance—of wanton words—and dabbles in definitional exactitude without ever achieving it" (6). Unlike essentialist models of sexuality, "the material of rhetoric undermines its own investment in coherence by being linguistically and sexually wanton" (7). In this study such a remark amounts to tautology, for the linguistic and the sexual are so interconnected that they can scarcely be distinguished.

In the following chapters, Menon examines the complexities of a single trope in examples from classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory and canonical Renaissance theater, including metonymy, metalepsis, catachresis, and allegory, and she concludes with a brief chapter on the intersections of irony and incest in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Menon's chapters begin with a brief analysis of an exemplary text (not necessarily dramatic), which sets up the interpretive difficulties of the figure. She then follows with a discussion of the trope in two or more rhetorical handbooks, primarily ranging among Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, the anonymous "Ciceronian" Rhetorica ad Herennium, Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, and Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie. Each chapter then moves on to analyze the operation of its figure in two canonical plays, mostly Shakespearean.

In her chapter on metonymy, Menon demonstrates how rhetorical theorists frame the trope as indistinguishable from the functions of synecdoche, metalepsis, and catachresis, depending on an unspecified affinity that renders its status ambiguous even as it expands the range of its rhetorical force. She then argues that metonymy may be used to read Richard II against the grain of mainstream criticism, which generally understands the play through its metaphors (garden, mirror, and clock) or through the metaphors of its title character. In a complex reading of the garden scene, Menon makes a persuasive case for uncovering the ways in which metaphoric readings of the body of state serve as covers for a metonymic undercurrent in the play focusing on King Richard's physical body and his homosexuality.

In the following chapter, Menon less successfully attempts to connect the self-effacing function of metalepsis to conceptions of death, claiming that such death "is figured in both Romeo and Juliet and All's Well that Ends Well as an absent sex scene. In both plays, sexual consummation is discussed before and after the fact but sex is never presented as a visual spectacle. . . . In both cases . . . the unrepresented and/or unacted sex scene creates a textual scar by its metaleptic absence" (77–78). Long recognized as the trope of ideology through its reversal of cause and effect, metalepsis can indeed deploy remarkable acts of self-effacement and misdirection. However, Menon never persuasively connects such sleight of hand to forms...