Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (review)

In his smart and innovative new book, Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley, Mario DiGangi expands the boundaries of the history of sexuality even as he shows how that history is intricately connected to social and political history. DiGangi defines the "sexual type" as a figure who reveals the ideological tensions inherent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understandings of character in its social, psychological, and literary registers. On the one hand, the sexual type is an easily recognizable figure (one might even say caricature) of deviant or deformed expressions of gendered or erotic identity. On the other hand, the sexual type participates substantially in familiar and normative social relations and thereby exposes the tenuous and fictional nature of the boundaries between perversity and normality, outsiders and insiders. Moreover, the sexual type is not just "sexual" in a narrow sense. ather, representations of the sexual type reveal the intricate connections between gender and sexual identity and social, economic, and political ideals and loyalties. Focusing on six sexual types—the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the bawd, the citizen wife, and the monstrous favorite—DiGangi shows how "signifiers of gender and (more subtly) of sexuality serve to convey arguments about political loyalty, military ethics, and aristocratic comportment" (3). The sexual is not merely a metaphor for sociopolitical anxieties but a symptom of the contradictions that informed early modern attempts to align various forms of agency and embodiment into stable and recognizable categories. Accordingly, the types that DiGangi analyzes "unsettle the taxonomical thinking that produces them" (9).

DiGangi's study of sexual types also promises to unsettle several modern scholarly taxonomies. For while his project is clearly informed by work in queer studies, DiGangi challenges many of the implicit boundaries that tend to shape scholarship in that field. Most prominently, rather than focus exclusively on early modern representations of same-sex eroticism, Sexual Types includes figures of indeterminate (or "bi-") sexuality (the narcissistic courtier, the monstrous favorite) and figures that fit modern definitions of "heterosexuality" (the citizen wife, the bawd) as well as those that appear to conform to the modern definition of "homosexuality" (the sodomite, the tribade). By examining a range of gendered and sexual behaviors, DiGangi reminds us of the power of early modern studies to destabilize both past and present identitarian categories of male and female, homo- and heterosexual. In addition, Sexual Types gracefully combines formalist, historicist, feminist, and queer methods of reading. By showing how sexual taxonomies are inseparable from social, economic, and political ideologies, DiGangi reveals the importance of private, affective, embodied experience to these public structures of identification. Finally, DiGangi examines a wide range of early modern writing. In addition to a number of plays by Shakespeare, Sexual Types includes careful analysis of less commonly read work by Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, Massinger, Killigrew, and Shirley. These plays are, moreover, set in conversation with legal tracts, political pamphlets, crime narratives, character studies, travel writing, and medical texts. The effect is quietly to remind us of the artificiality of both modern hierarchies of literary value and modern distinctions between aesthetic and sociopolitical realms of thought.

Sexual Types is divided into three parts, each of which examines a pair of types, one male and one female, that foregrounds a particular set of ideological issues. Part 1 includes chapters on representations of the sodomite and the tribade in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Winter's Tale, each of which unsettles categories of masculinity and femininity, perversity and familiarity. In chapter one, DiGangi argues that the sodomite should be conceived as neither an alien figure (as Alan Bray and Paul Hammond have argued) nor as a purely fictional subject constructed through discourse (as Gregory Bredbeck and Jonathan Goldberg would have it), nor yet as a familiar figure with whom playgoers might pleasurably identify (as in Bruce Smith's and Mary Bly's accounts...