Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (review)

Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage is an enticing, learned study of homoerotic puns in the plays of the King's Revels, a boys' company that operated at the Whitefriars theater for a nine-month period during 1607-8. The book's focus is purposefully narrow: it examines a particular kind of wordplay found in a small number of obscure plays written by a few amateur playwrights for a short-lived London theater company. For devotees of Shakespeare, the names of Robert Armin, Lording Barry, Michael Drayton, Lewis Machin, John Mason, Gervase Markham, or Edward Sharpham are unlikely to command respect. And the plays they wrote—bawdy romantic comedies with names such as Cupid's Whirligig and The Dumb Knight—hardly promise philosophical insight or emotional profundity: these are plays of which one is not ashamed to confess complete ignorance.

Nonetheless, the eight plays staged by the King's Revels were apparently very popular in their own day, in part because for Renaissance audiences "wordplay had an intrinsic value now lost" to modern readers (30). Presenting sexual puns as a legitimate subject of literary analysis, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans enhances our understanding of the operation of erotic discourse in early modern drama and poetry. Yet Bly reaches beyond the pleasures of anatomizing lexical minutiae, arguing that the consistently bawdy texture of Whitefriars drama served to create a homoerotic community of playgoers in early modern London. This provocative and original thesis engages with perennial questions in lesbian and gay Shakespeare scholarship: how was homoerotic desire experienced and expressed in early modern England? Did those who experienced it recognize an affinity with others like themselves? In what ways and to what degree did homoerotic desires signify beyond the legalistic and theological confines of "sodomy?"

Bly recognizes the difficulty of demonstrating the existence of a male homoerotic community in the Whitefriars theater. To make her case, she aims to prove not only that Whitefriars plays offered London playgoers a unique kind of theatrical experience but also that they were in fact written to attract playgoers with an appreciation for homoerotic humor and wit. More precisely, the "transgressive conjunction" (552) of virgin characters and bawdy puns distinguishes Whitefriars comedies from those produced by other Jacobean companies. Whitefriars comedies feature obscenely spoken young women who escape censure for their verbal transgressions, a structure expressive of a liberal attitude Bly considers "the primary cultural deviation" of the plays (61). The heroines of Whitefriars plays thus resemble the obscene clowns or waggish pages of Renaissance romantic comedy rather than typically chaste heroines such as Twelfth Night's Viola. Witty and lustful, these paradoxically sexual/virginal women speak "queer" puns—using words, such as bit, that convey the speaker's erotic desires yet also confound gender difference by simultaneously referring to male and female genitalia. Deftly dissecting such erotic puns, Bly unpacks obscure levels of meaning while still conveying a sense of the burst and sparkle of verbal wit that must have appealed to the plays' original audiences.

The consistency of character type, language, and politics among the Whitefriars comedies suggests to Bly that the members of the King's Revels strategically collaborated on building an erotically transgressive repertory, in contrast to the social satire and scandal emphasized at the other boys' companies, Paul's and the Blackfriars. Recognizing the profit to be made from offering a unique product, the King's Revels not only presented transgressively bawdy virgins but also regendered puns that normally referred to female sexuality in early modern idiom. For instance, case normally refers to the vagina; yet in the Whitefriars play The Turk the sodomitical "he-letcher" Bordello applies the term to his codpiece, an "adulterated usage [that] would immediately have been grasped by the audience" (63). Likewise, Bly identifies several examples of the word sweetmeats referring to male genitalia...