Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship

Beginning to address my topic, allow me, patient readers, scholars, and friends, to begin with some possible addresses, and some scenes in the history and theory of the address. First, a familiar modern scene:

Ideology . . . "recruits" subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or "transforms" the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: "Hey, you there!"

Second, Erasmus, in "On the Writing of Letters," considering salutations and the writing of "the usual epithets of kindred and relatives":

"Best of fathers," "most gracious mother," "dearest brother," "esteemed uncle," "dearest sister," "sweet wife," "darling grandson," "dear son-in-law, relative, comrade, fellow-soldier." Of the rest, who are distinguished by no clear indication, we shall call wealthy and influential men "estimable," "eminent," "in the first rank," "illustrious," "respected," "most respected"; those endowed with virtue or outstanding in learning "esteemed," "honourable," "commendable," "accomplished," "excellent," "surpassing," "wise," "estimable," "respectable," "clear-sighted," "prudent"; married women "noble," "distinguished," "best," "blameless," "virtuous," "modest"; girls "pretty," "beautiful," "lovable," "well-mannered," "chaste," "charming," "sweet"; young men "talented," "virtuous," "restrained," "promising," "of outstanding character," "of noble character"; soldiers "valiant," "well-tried"; workmen "hard-working," "clever," "skilled," "expert," "painstaking." From the examples I have given each will discover the rest for himself. But here is caution needed . . . against transferring what suits one group to another, such as calling a girl "venerable," an old man "charming," a king "modest," and a matron "invincible."²

Third, an editorial gloss from Clifford Leech's Arden edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, discussing line 2.4.149: "The use of 'sweet,' absolutely, as a form of address between man and man on equal terms, is rare in Shakespeare."³

Fourth, selected salutations from the letters of James I, writing to the Duke of Buckingham, and to Buckingham and Charles together:

My only sweet and dear child, | Sweet boys, | My sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance, | My sweet boys, | My sweet Steenie gossip, | My sweet Steenie, | My sweet Steenie and gossip, | Sweet heart, | My sweet dear child, scholar, and friend.⁴

Fifth, Jacques Derrida, beginning Politics of Friendship, quoting Montaigne referencing Aristotle:

"O my friends, there is no friend." I am addressing you, am I not? How many of us are there?⁵

"Good night, sweet prince," a man addresses his dying friend at the end of a familiar play, "And flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest."⁶ If this line has much of the timeless, monumental, and therefore unheard quality that much of the surrounding play has attained in the time since its initial performances in urban England in the first years of the seventeenth century, there is nevertheless a slight catch in its smooth delivery into timelessness—an unusual aftertaste. Perhaps a modern audience finds this justified by the trauma that has preceded it; perhaps we hear it, if we hear it, as "merely" metaphorical, nothing at stake—surely no director would cut the line—and yet it is the syrupy adjective that I linger over as Horatio addresses Hamlet, one last time. After all the butch heroics of the preceding scenes, the stoicism, the shouting and jumping in of graves, the tabulation of competitive Ophelia-loving, the fencing—after he has, after all, killed several people with his own hand and earlier dispatched a couple of longtime friends to their early deaths, all of this known to Horatio—it is nevertheless: "Good night, sweet prince."

This is not a line that has attracted much attention. Of the flights of angels, whole chapters if not books have been written, but, within the ample glossing of the Hamlet text, "Good night, sweet prince" rarely scores a mention.⁷ There is no comment on the line in the Variorum edition; the phrase passes unnoted in The Norton Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, and other prominent modern teaching and scholarly editions. The Variorum edition's...