Cute Shakespeare?

Was there ever a medieval or early modern history or historiography of cuteness? Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages, or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? Has the humanities, or the university, ever been cute?

— Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao¹

Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012) is a canny accounting of the minor affects that run through contemporary art, media, and retail forms. Ngai associates the “zany” with production and performance; the “interesting” with networks of information and exchange; and the “cute” with the allure of the object in relation to its consumption, curation, exhibition, and display. Ngai is attuned to the origins of these affective lures in mixed sources and impulses that include early modern theater, science, and domestic arts, inviting further exploration of the prehistory of her concepts. Indeed, variations of cuteness were part of the early modern conversation before Ngai’s book hit the scene. Hugh Grady’s Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (2012), for example, probes some of the same borderline cases in Kant, such as the attractive and the charming, that Ngai takes up in her analysis, and Richard Burt was an early adapter of infantile affects to Shakespeare studies in his sex and media exposé, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (1998), which included a transnational as well as intermedial dimension.² In forthcoming work, Julian Yates uses Ngai to test (taste) the cuteness of oranges: “it’s certainly handy, lends itself to the hand, befriends handedness, naturalizes itself to the fact of hands. And yes, this cuteness functions a little like that of the commodity form in that when and as we consume it, we are, in fact, put to use, made use of.”

Intrigued by both the pre-history and the future of cute in our field, a group of us convened at the Babel Working Group conference hosted by UC Santa Barbara in October, 2014, for a panel on “Cute Shakespeare.”³ Our papers ran in tandem with another panel, “The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness,” organized by Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao, who gamely allowed us to play in their sandbox. Our panel wanted to test the relevance of Ngai’s highly contemporary categories to Shakespearean sensibilities and object regimes. Ngai associates the cute primarily with the modern commodity; although the commodity is certainly emergent in Shakespeare’s age, its mass-market smirk is still very far on the horizon. Sea-changes in religious affect, however, are perhaps more immediately relevant to the charm of small things in the period. To what extent is the modern cute the late progeny of the “coy,” “tender,” “pretty,” and “delicate” remnants of political theology as they toddle and purr towards their disen-chanted future? Can Shakespearean drama be conceived as an incubator and curator for the haptic and hand-held aspects of cuteness in relation to secularization and its remainders? What role do gender, age, and housekeeping play in Shakespeare’s distillations and domestications of cute? How does religion, especially Catholicism, come to appear cute (sticky and stinky, infantile and overwrought) in the rational nostalgia of secularism, and what does that post-production affect both capture and belittle in Shakespeare’s fairy toys and baseless fabrics?⁴

These questions were the starting point of our panel. The room was packed, and the papers were met with an invigorating mix of interest and incredulity, as befitting the topic. This special issue includes the initial panel; I am offering this introduction, and the other panelists elaborate on their original presentations, which sought cute phenomena in unlikely places: “Cute Shylock” by Luke Wilson, “Cute Cleopatra” by Colby Gordon, and “Cute Coriolanus” by Thomas P. Anderson, my co-editor. In “A Modern Classic,” Viola Timm brings theology and psychoanalysis to the Cute Shakespeare showroom. While these four papers focus on cute affects in the plays, the other three papers in this issue explore how cuteness smooths the pop conduits of flash citation, primitive punning, and teen idolatry in the contemporary Shake-scene. We are pleased to include Richard Burt’s piece on Shakespeare’s...