Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (review)

In the Acknowledgments to Shakesqueer, the editor, Madhavi Menon calls this book a labour of love. I believed her. The love shows not only in the quality of the idea itself, but also in the way the book has been put together, which is a recipe for success. Take forty-eight smart and interesting thinkers working in the field of queer theory – some of them Shakespeareans and early modernists, some not – that is one for each of the forty-five works by Shakespeare, plus three for the Sonnets. Get them to write – more or less reluctantly – their observations on the individual work of William Shakespeare allocated to them. Precede their musings with an Introduction which defines things that the reader is likely to have been thinking about, but did not dare to ask: what is ‘queer criticism’, how it is distinct not only from gay and lesbian criticism, gender studies, theory of the other, and deconstruction theory, but also from twentieth-century queer theory, even the way our expertise and academic jobs are defined? Then, in a deliciously hip anachronistic move, apply the notion of queerness to Shakespeare’s opus in order to uphold the idea of its continuing relevance. By rearranging the pixels on the icon of Shakespeare, turn him into an altogether different, modern, fresh, re-thought kind of icon; yet an icon nevertheless. Or, as the Bard himself puts it: one must be cruel only to be kind.

‘Privilege’, argues Menon in the Introduction, ‘is not all that it appears to be, and being canonized … deprives the text of agency … If canonizing Shakespeare protects our idea of ourselves, then not engaging the canonical Shakespeare allows that protection to continue unimpeded’, and this is not a good thing. But any shaking of Shakespeare must also shake queer theory and rethink two main assumptions: ‘that queerness has a historical start date [which Menon argues is the nineteenth century]; and that queerness is a synonym for embodied homosexuality [which Menon argues is a post nineteenth-century phenomenon]’ (pp. 2–4). Rather, the question proposed as being at the heart of this project is: ‘Can Shakespeare be regarded as a queer theorist, or is he always the object on which queer theory acts in a one-sided relationship?’ It is proof of its impeccable academic credentials that the book also acknowledges the fundamental problem with this question: that ‘Shakespeare … lies beyond the pale of acceptable chronology, so to extend queerness to him is to play fast and loose with academic credibility’ (p. 5). In response to this, Menon proposes queer theory that is ‘a hybrid, an amalgamation of several different theories and texts that thwarts our desire to pin down its essence’. In essence, then, this is a theory which explores itself and its relationship with the unusual, weird, unorthodox, unexpected, surprising, and, above all, self-interrogating types of self-expression, then applies the result to the works of William Shakespeare.

It was good to see in the volume the likes of Bruce Smith, Lee Edelman, Stephen Bruhm, Ellis Hanson, Stephen Guy-Bray, Kathryn Schwarz, Alan Sinfield, and others associated with a study of sexuality and otherness, both in and out of the field of the Renaissance Studies (though Stephen Orgel is conspicuous by his absence), as well as some unfamiliar names. As it is impossible to discuss all forty-eight contributions in a review, I offer here a small and personal selection. Bruce Smith’s ‘The Latin Lovers in the Taming of the Shrew’ is a light-hearted and highly incisive piece on the relationship between the vagaries of (Latin) grammar and generation of sexual meaning (no pun intended here): it is characteristically informative and pleasurable. Lee Edelman’s ‘Hamlet’s wounded name’ is also an exploration of language, but written in a denser, Derrida-esque style. Edelman casts Hamlet as a ‘personification of too-muchness beyond the grasp of...