Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by Madhavi Menon (review)

Was William Shakespeare a queer theorist? Madhavi Menon argues as much in her introduction to this compilation of essays by forty-eight prominent queer scholars working in and beyond the early modern period. While the status quo in academia “ensures that a queered Shakespeare is never a queer Shakespeare” (1), Menon considers how the Bard’s own queerness might predate the word, the identity, and the academy around it. The essays in this book consider how the already-present queerness in Shakespeare’s texts may inform, or “Shake,” queer theory and thus establish a dialogue between it and early modern scholarship.

Enabled by Carla Freccero’s Queer/Early/Modern (2005) and Jonathan Goldberg and Menon’s own “Queering History” (2005), as well as by the Bard’s own use of anachronism, Menon creates a framework that allows for a pliable relationship with periodicity. She argues that queerness “does not abide by the laws of a chronology [and insists] on redrawing, if not collapsing, the temporal divide between sixteenth century . . . and the twentieth” (2–3). Thus, we can accept that Shakespeare considered concepts and identities that would not emerge until centuries after his death. Additionally, many essays appear to deliberately flaunt their ahistoricism: for example, Bethany Schneider’s contribution reads Julius Caesar through the lens of the Lincoln assassination; meanwhile, Katherine Bond Stockton claims that “The Winter’s Tale was written with TV in mind” (421), as she compares it to the ABC culthit Lost. In an attempt to free themselves from older historicist assumptions, many of Shakesqueer’s contributors explicitly engage with little extant scholarship—the average number of citations per essay is fewer than ten works.

The second major methodological assumption of this book is the unmooring of queerness from identity politics. Building on the work of scholars like Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam, Menon argues that “queerness is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization” (7). Furthermore, considering that intense emotional experiences are not limited to the erotic, she states that “queerness is everywhere” (ibid.), from wordplay to power struggles. Thus, a play can be queer even without any self-identifying queer character, or even without any queer erotics. Through this expanded (or emptied) definition, writers are able to identify queerness in a variety of figures. Ellis Hanson reads the eunuch of Antony and Cleopatra as “unsexed and thereby oversexed” (49). Heather Love sees Macbeth’s ambition as a particularly queer character trait; she describes it as “a form of desire that does not respect temporal sequence and that produces situations of over-proximity” (201). Laurie Shannon challenges “human-exceptionalist applications” in her analysis of the universe as the locus of queerness in King Lear (171). Stephen Guy-Bray even uses gay in its locker-room definition of “weak” to evaluate less-celebrated works like Henry VI Part 2 and interrogate what we mean by praising a work as “Shakespearean.”

With nearly fifty essays and no obvious thematic grouping (the essays are organized by their textual objects), Shakesqueer proves difficult to summarize. The rule of Shakesqueer is that there are no rules to queer Shakespearean scholarship. Essays can be only tangentially about Shakespeare, as is Ann Pellegrini’s Much Ado About Nothing piece that is far more about Stephen Sondheim’s Company, or Hector Kollias’s essay that is ostensibly about the lost Love’s Labour’s Won although it takes as its object the 2007 Doctor Who episode, “The Shakespeare Code.” The primary focus of an essay may be a production history, as Michael Moon’s contribution does for Titus Andronicus. Likewise, it could be a particular filmed version, like Robert McRuer’s reading of the erotics of disability in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 Richard III. Artist Andrew Nicholls even adopts a queer drawing practice to produce a mostly wordless response to “Venus and Adonis.” Lost plays, poems, and even works with dubious authorship have a place in...