Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (review)

For the past decade or so, New Historicism was often the preferred criti-cal mode for the study of English Renaissance drama, particularly the plays of Shakespeare. It is refreshing to see a new diversity of approach in the scholarship pertaining to this period and genre, as indicated by recent books and conference papers flavored with performance studies, postcolonial theory, and gender and/or queer theory. A quick perusal of Medhavi Menon's Wanton Words might create the false impression that her book provides a near-anomalous example of deconstruction applied to English Renaissance drama, but here less is more. Menon's recent book is, in fact, deconstruction wrought in the seldom seen, but truest de Manian sense (very close reading with special attention to rhetoric) generally minus Derridean legerdemain, plus way more. Menon, apparently, is a member of my own school, the school of "tool box theory." And when reading her texts, Menon invariably reaches for the appropriate tool, be it a new historical nugget, a guiding principle of gender and/or queer theory, an insight into the shortcomings of so-called postcolonial theory. Her range is astonishing, her insights often original.

Menon's objective, to reevaluate the separation of "acts" from "sexuality" in describing the historical/sexual difference of the early modern subject, forms its basis in popular rhetorical handbooks circulating in English Renaissance culture. Accordingly, she argues that "a discussion of 'sexuality' in the Renaissance, far from being anachronistic, is strongly marked by theoretical ideas about language that were in circulation at the time" (4). That is, these rhetorical handbooks, intending to define "linguistic effects," often (inadvertently) expose "sexual effects," offering a "surprising insight into the nature and concept of early modern desire" (4). To wit: "acts" and "sexuality" in early modern culture may correlate somewhat with our own ideas about the same. Plus ça change. . . .

To demonstrate the larger argument, Menon, after a thoughtful explication of metaphor as a "governing" rhetorical device, divides her chapters into studies of other tropes (metonymy, metalepsis, catechresis, and allegory) coupled with plays that seem to enact the polymorphous perversity of the trope (Richard II and The Roaring Girl, Romeo and Juliet and All's Well that Ends Well, Othello and King John, and Volpone and The Tempest, respectively). Menon's own grasp of rhetoric is strong; her readings of the selected tropes are clear, careful, and very astute. Given the immensity of the task, however, it is hardly surprising that the individual applications of rhetorical theory to text are often more abbreviated than one would hope. I doubt, however, that exhaustive readings are the true goal here. Rather, I believe that Menon, in true postmodern spirit, mainly hopes to suggest a new, counterintuitive dialectic.

Though going the distance may have asked Menon to acknowledge, in her otherwise very shrewd reading of The Tempest, that Sycorax, the "Algerian" woman dumped on what would become "Prospero's" island for the "crime" Menon aptly describes as "the one thing," "the act of sex of which Caliban is the offshoot" (152), is described as a "blue-eyed hag" in the play. Yes, the thing that dare not speak its name here is sex, and "illegitimate" sex at that, but it is also probably interracial sex, as paralleled by Caliban and Miranda, Claribel and the King of Tunis, even the "sun-burnt" harvesters dancing with Iris, Ceres, and Juno in the masque. In every case, the pairings include "white" women with men of color, though as Menon and this play attest, "race" is a fluid category in the Renaissance. Despite that fluidity, it seems to me that "not white" was all the early modern English denizen needed to construct one as an Other, whether or not the current chain of signification attached to the word "race" obtains. As such, color does matter in this play, as it does in Othello, in which, as Menon points out in an apt...