Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (review)

Erotic Subjects is a welcome addition to the continuing scholarly discussion of the relationship between sexuality and politics in early modern English literature. Melissa Sanchez's unique and imaginative contribution to this discussion lies in her reversal of the traditional order. Rather than focus on the politics of sexuality, she addresses the sexualization of politics, focusing especially on how the political discourses that extend from the Renaissance through the Reformation and into the Restoration are infused with the language of eroticism. From this novel perspective, Sanchez illustrates the anagogical relationship between the production of imaginative literature and the practice of material culture, and most particularly she looks at how the politics and law of the latter inflect the former.

Sanchez begins her exploration of the personal and public relationships between the individual subject and sovereign authority, as well as the tensions between concepts of monarchy and republicanism, by closely examining works of two of the Tudors' most prominent male authors: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. She initiates her discussion of Sidney by focusing on a historical event: Sidney's gift to Queen Elizabeth of a "' jewel of gold, being a whip garnished with small diamonds in four rows, and cords of small seed pearle'" (31). This gift, Sanchez argues, "neatly encompasses the complex relation of power and pleasure that Sidney explores in detail throughout The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," a text, she claims, that "examines the possibility that martyrdom may be a powerful source of political, as well as religious, empowerment" (33). By illustrating how the relationship between Argalus and Parthenia functions as "a pattern for the romance's main plot of Pyrocles and Musidorus' courtship of Philoclea and Pamela," Sanchez demonstrates how Sidney's description of "political hagiography"—"tales of feminine suffering"—functions as a form of protest against conventionally masculinized tyranny (54).

Turning from Sidney to Spenser, Sanchez argues that The Faerie Queene also "ponders the intricate relationship of authority and submission through images of assaulted female virtue," but she contends that "Spenser is less optimistic about the possibility of such principled resistance" (57). Sanchez asserts that "the martyrdom that Sidney saw as the source of both moral and political authority may give way to perverse pleasure" (57) Thus, as she writes, "Spenser tests the limits of the hagiographic politics that Sidney endorses" (57). By comparing the relationship between Sir Scudamore and the female characters in Books III and IV to Artegal's relationship with the female characters in Book V, Sanchez illustrates how "the elusiveness of chastity and friendship are closely tied to the ultimate failure of justice" (57).

Following her discussion of Sidney and Spenser, Sanchez takes up two works by Shakespeare: The Rape of Lucrece and Pericles. Working from contemporary legal cases that illustrate the fine line between rape and ravishment, Sanchez addresses Shakespeare's concept of personal and political agency to illustrate how "the gendered language of sexual assault provides Shakespeare a powerful idiom for analyzing political consent precisely because it depicts agency in . . . confused and paradoxical terms" (89). Rather than depict the limitations of individual choice that Sidney and Spenser portrayed, Shakespeare's texts, Sanchez claims, show how

good subjects, like good women, cannot actively resist their superiors—even abusive ones—without raising the specter of anarchy. And if resistance is unthinkable, then consent is the only option, and so no longer a sign of the difference between prince and tyrant.

(89)

As Sanchez concludes, the struggle between will and law that these works address would have been all too familiar to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences.

Sanchez shifts to the Stuart court and its sexualized politics by analyzing the works of two of the period's most prominent female authors: Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish. In contrast to recent criticism that has understood Wroth's Urania as a "mediation of the nature of governance," Sanchez writes, she depicts how "the extremity of submission in the romance...