Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (review)

James Bromley and Will Stockton’s new collection celebrates reading like a pervert, defying Stanley Wells’s insistence that we should reject readings that stem from “the ‘dirty minds’ of the interpreters rather than from the imagination of the dramatist and of his early audiences” (6). The essays thrust right into the great problems we face as present-day readers seeking to interpret older texts: How do we know what those early readers were capable of imagining? What kinds of “sex” did they participate in and dream of, and thus what “sex” could they see when they watched and listened to players on the stage? In place of Wells’s foreclosure of meaning, the editors choose Mario DiGangi’s concept of “the indeterminacy of ‘the sexual,’” where we readers “cannot always be entirely confident that we know which bodily acts count as ‘sexual’” (4).

I have been putting “sex” in scare quotes since it is an anachronism to use it to refer to the act when Shakespeare could have used it only to speak of “sexual difference” (11). In reminding us of that fact, the writers introduce Foucault’s distinction between the act of sex and the discourses of sexuality; for Foucault, of course, the disciplining of the body into categories and identities gives shape to the acts that we today recognize as “sex.” Not all of the contributors in this anthology accept Foucault’s schema without reservation, and Bromley and Stockton raise important questions about how the search for the roots of modern sexual discourses has led gender studies to neglect those aspects of premodern sex and sexuality that do not fit today’s pressing political concerns. In their introduction, they contend that “the sex act itself actually remains an undertheorized and underhistoricized concept” (10). The concern with identity and performativity has sometimes blinded critics to what cannot be performed on stage, acts that can be spoken of only indirectly, acts that only become visible as words play upon the imaginations of authors, players, and audiences.

The essays are idiosyncratic, often highly personal in their responses to texts. Some are archival and historicist; others are largely theoretical. Not every essay will appear equally persuasive, although that is part of the point. Queering our sense of the early modern audience reminds us that there is no one “early modern audience” but an unknowable variety of possible responses available to spectators then and now. We should never assume the existence of a single ideal audience, and no single ideal sex act.

A paradox underlies this volume: sex exists in words, as conversation, yet it resists direct representation in language. Decorum keeps it hidden in the margins of the text—unspeakable, unrepresentable. In the final essay in the collection, Thomas H. Luxon shows how in Paradise Lost “conversation itself is a kind of sex before sex” (268), where the spoken word generates the erotic and creates life itself. In his startling but convincing argument, Eve is born of conversation—and hence sex—between God and Adam. This perception underlies the entire collection. Words and bodies create sex in the imagination, playing on fantasy and generating new ideas, new sensations, new life. Christine Varnado opens the collection with a very different exploration of a similar idea—the generative power of the erotic imagination. She uses the Internet meme of “Invisible sex!”—cats photographed in positions and activities that look like sex—to demonstrate how “what ‘looks like’ erotic activity … is historically conditioned, arbitrary, and deeply specific to each culture, place, and time” (29). Varnado insists that a queer reading will look beyond the responses that an imagination conditioned on heteronormative culture will find obvious, like the assumption that Romeo and Juliet spend their one night together dutifully consummating their marriage in penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse.

Bookended by...