Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (review)

Michael Keevak's concise, witty book examines a variety of ways in which concerns about Shakespeare's life and work almost always end up raising questions about his sexuality and how it is understood and represented to the public, be they late-eighteenth-century readers of William Henry Ireland's forged Shakespearean documents, nineteenth-century advocates of the earl of Oxford, or viewers of contemporary films such as Shakespeare in Love. Keevak's starting point is the paradoxical link between the paucity of concrete details about Shakespeare's life and endless speculation over it. The former seems to generate the latter—theories and debates readily multiply in the absence of constraining "facts." This biographical ellipsis produces two main propositions which are explored in the book's four chapters: that any account of Shakespeare's life is in some way a "forgery," and that all such forgeries entail a desire to define Shakespeare's sexuality. Critics, biographers, and commentators' claims to be "authenticating Shakespeare" (16) seem unable to evade or ignore this desire, perhaps no more so than in cases where notions of Shakespeare are carefully "desexualized. . . in favor of other details" (17).

Keevak's approach is historically eclectic. He selects four cases in which accounts of Shakespeare contain notable sexual subtexts. In each there is an attempt to efface aspects of the sexual identities and desires attributed to the playwright. Keevak unravels these attempts at concealment from a broadly conceived queer-studies perspective; that is, his focus is on showing recurrent efforts to "straighten out" the Bard (cf. 118), efforts that can entail ignoring or suppressing the social range of and sexual identities, relations, and activities in both Shakespeare's time and later periods. Keevak takes his stand against this tendency, asserting that "sexual Shakespeare should remain a resolutely multivalent idea, in order to combat the tendency for squeezing him into any one-dimensional erotic narrative" (66).

Shakespeare's sonnets provide the key text for the examples and arguments that Keevak considers. Edmund Malone's 1780 edition of the sonnets and his account of Shakespeare's life and times, published first as a supplement to Johnson and Steevens's 1778 edition of the plays and then in Malone's own 1790 edition, are also regarded as having opened "the floodgates" for speculation over Shakespeare's "'true' life story" (17). The study begins by exploring the personal and cultural effects of the bizarre case of William Henry Ireland's forgeries in 1795 of a vast array of Shakespeare-related documents, from legal deeds to personal sketches to a lost tragedy. (He even fabricated a reference to an Ireland forebear who rescued the playwright from drowning in the Thames.) The Ireland case, while similar to other literary forgeries in the late 1700s, exemplifies the way in which the absence of biographical facts prompted an increasing reliance on the plays and poems to flesh out Shakespeare's personality and life experience.

Ireland fashioned an acceptably genteel Shakespeare, one who even corresponded with the queen. While his forgeries were soon exposed (by Edmund Malone among others), some writers, such as George Chalmers, seized on this image to develop biographical and literary accounts of Shakespeare's connection to Elizabeth I, her faithful subject's "master-mistress." The corollary of this bond was to desexualize the author of the sonnets, especially in terms of same-sex desire that the 1780 edition of the poems had made far more manifest than had previous editions. The Ireland forgeries are symptomatic of the developing nexus between biographical criticism and the "definition of a Shakespeare who was, in one way or another, sexual" (37). Keevak contends that this connection continues to inform Shakespeare studies.

In chapter 2Keevak contrasts notions of homoeroticism linked to the author and his work with an earlier reputation, which Shakespeare gained in his own time for composing poems and plays that displayed an Ovidian...