Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature before Heterosexuality (review)

Most scholars writing in the queer theory boom of the past twenty years have followed Michel Foucault in supposing that "sexuality" as a basic category of identity is a relatively recent phenomenon. The once radical idea that sexuality has a history and a genealogy is now a truism of cultural criticism, and few would argue with the idea that Renaissance manifestations of gender, eroticism, and affect are discontinuous with our own. The process of denaturalizing, or "queering," sexual categories has yielded a wide body of scholarship that addresses same-sex affiliations and desires, many previously unexamined or viewed only through the scrim of homophobia. To be historically specific, we must thus grant that if present-day sexual categories do not apply, there were no gay people in the Renaissance—and no straight people, either.

Bach's book contributes to the much smaller body of work that denaturalizes the category of "heterosexuality" and traces its formation across the early modern period. Without the assumptions many of us share (voluntarily or not) about male-female love, plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries occupy a very different terrain, and their meanings shift seismically. According to Bach, early modern England was the site of competing ideologies: a dominant "homosocial imaginary," and an emergent heterosexual one that began to take hold with the Restoration. Readers will likely recognize Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's formulation of homosociality, but the author takes pains to define heterosexuality as well. The ideology encompasses far more than marriage or male-female sex: it takes for granted that such acts are healthy and good; it predicates male masculinity upon the desire for women; and it expects biological sex, gender, object choice, domestic arrangements, and family structure all to correspond unproblematically under a single standard. The essence of the book's argument is that "Shakespeare's plays and other dramas from the English Renaissance were rewritten and shaped editorially" during the long eighteenth century, actively constructing heterosexual representation out of mostly homosocial materials (3).

The first chapter reads King Lear through the homosocial imaginary, observing that Kent and Edward, who valorize friendship and service, and share no sexual attachments with women, are the most honorable characters in the play. Sexual desire for women is suspect, shared mostly by the degenerate and lowborn; it weakens masculinity, rather than reinforces it. The violent, corrupt desire displayed by Regan and Goneril (not to mention Lear's fearful misogyny) emphasizes the degrading power of female sexuality. But Lear's morality condemns the damaging consequences of lust and greed, rather than simply women, and celebrates the chaste men who can resist all three.

Having outlined Shakespeare's homosocial logic, Bach turns in following chapters to the dramatic adaptations that dismantled it. John Dryden's All For Love transforms Antony and Cleopatra from a cautionary tale into a great love story in which Cleopatra complements and sustains Antony—"a Restoration development, virtually impossible in the earlier world in which sexual involvement with a woman can destroy male reason" (57). Bach excels at especially close readings that reveal ideological change: tracing the semantic diminution of the word mistress, for example, she reveals how its definition narrowed from one of general female power and authority to one more strictly sexual (and adulterous). Similar readings of knave, slave, and virtue, among others, reinforce the thesis.

But Restoration authors were not content merely to endorse love for women as a criterion of masculinity; they also actively rewrote Shakespeare's homosocial friends in the image of the libertine bent on sexual conquest. Libertines replace friends in plays such as Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear, Thomas Shadwell's The History of Timon of Athens, and Edward Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus. If such plays' audiences found homosocial love increasingly unintelligible, perhaps the libertine was an extreme corrective, overbalancing male identity into something more recognizably heterosexual. Locating identity in sexual desire also had the effect of uniting maleness as a category, crossing such previously unbridgeable divides as politics, occupation, and rank.

From...