Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare ed. by Madhavi Menon (review)

Madhavi Menon has edited a new collection of essays, Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which will prove a valuable resource for theatre historians, scholars, artists, and pedagogues. This assortment of forty-eight short essays puts queer theorists in conversation with all the extant (and a few lost) Shakespearean works. Exhaustive in scope, theoretically expansive, and critically provocative, this ambitious project explores "what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the canonical Shakespeare" (24). Given Menon's previous books—Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (2004) and Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (2008)—the union of Shakespeare and queer theory in this volume does not surprise, and, as she explains in the general introduction, this collection challenges two notions: "the idea that queerness has a historical start date" and "that queerness is a synonym for embodied homosexuality" (2). Menon argues that queer theory has centered on texts composed after 1800—about the same time that sexual identity began to be named, codified, pathologized, and criminalized. In releasing her subject from the boundaries of time and sexual identity that she associates with customary queer scholarship, Menon hopes simultaneously to shake up queer theory and to queer Shakespeare. To this end, this collection focuses on three areas of common interest for Shakespeare scholars and queer theorists—language, identity, and temporality—which are destabilized, unsettled, and challenged by the essays in Shakesqueer. While calling for the expansion of queerness beyond erotic desire and difference does not preclude homoerotic possibility from queer pleasure (especially as evinced in many of essays in this collection, which link queerness and erotic identity), this collection follows in the critical footsteps of Lauren Berlant, Jill Dolan, David Savran, Michael Warner, and others by theorizing a more capacious idea of queerness: as oddity, non-normative, stranger, other.

The forty-eight pieces in the collection consider the entire corpus of Shakespeare's works (including the apocryphal Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won). Menon's impressive list of contributors includes luminaries of queer cultural, literary, and performance studies, foundational figures in queer Shakespeare studies, and scholars from the important second wave of queer early modern studies; in addition to the heavy hitters, Menon generously includes a significant number of papers by up-and-coming scholars. This balance of well-known and newer voices, taken alongside the predominance of non-Shakespearean queer scholars writing about Shakespeare's works, results in a collection that will appeal to readers interested in Shakespeare and sexuality studies, including theatre educators, artists, and scholars.

Shakesqueer is organized alphabetically by text title, allowing for easy access to whichever play or poem a reader desires to queer. Although the hefty number of essays makes it imprudent to recount each individual contribution, as a whole they are insightful, range from six to ten pages, and reflect wide-ranging critical approaches. Julie Crawford, for example, carefully contests marriage's implicit heterosexuality in All's Well That Ends Well, whereas Jeffrey Masten offers a playful reading of Sir Thomas More that features multiple, oftentimes incongruous, appraisals of historical bodies in performance. Steven Bruhm identifies the king's body in All Is True (King Henry VIII) as a "bear" ("those chubby, bearded, and hirsute gay men who constitute a significant modern subculture"), while Lynne Huffer rejects queer subjectivity via Foucault's concept of madness in The Comedy or Errors (28). Andrew Nicholls presents a series of drawings for Venus and Adonis which "take queer pleasure in the failure of heterosexual desire," while Heather Love interprets maternal ambivalence in Macbeth as both asynchronous and queer (415). Julian Yates reorients/disorients readers of the sonnets à la Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Laurie Shannon combines the orthodoxy of Richard Hooker and close reading to queer "the cosmos" in King Lear, and Sharon Holland seeks lesbian desire in (and around) the Globe Theatre's...