Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time by Jeffrey Masten (review)

To introduce readers to what a practice of “queer philology” might look like, Jeffrey Masten opens this wonderful new book with a discussion of “Q.” A single letter, of course, constitutes an element that we might describe as one of the most basic components of language. In quick brushstrokes, Masten shows how queer a character Q really is. Take, for example, that Q’s name would have an erotic resonance in the time of Shakespeare as the sound of its name suggests a “cul” or “arse,” as the definition reads in an early modern French-English dictionary. Consider that, in order to teach the shapes of letters, primers sometimes portrayed letter forms on a grid in relation to forms and poses of the human body. Q, with its front-facing tail, stands out among its counterparts as a shape that breaks outside the normative grid. Note also that letter pairings in the early modern period were described with the language of desire and manhood. One grammar book, for instance, describes Q as desiring to have V after it, though the second letter loses its virtue in the coupling. With thoroughly researched and surprising details such as these, Queer Philologies suggests exciting new possibilities in one of the foundational fields of literary study. But this book isn’t just about minor details. Such details map to larger issues of social identity and relations. The alphabet, this discussion of Q reminds us, is produced by a culture and evolves with that culture, and thus can be used to reveal ideological beliefs. Further, just as grammar handbooks tell us how to write letters and how to pair them with each other, guidelines for the use of language point to the ways that disciplines not only work to define norms but also are involved in project of disciplining practitioners.

After the very focused discussion of Q at the outset, the study widens its gaze to address a range of literary genres and authors, all the while maintaining the insight and attention to detail that characterizes the book’s careful opening analysis. In major part, the book’s aim is “to draw critical attention…to the ways in which philology’s manifold methods and rhetorics of investigation are often themselves thoroughly implicated in the languages of sex, gender, and the body” (18). Through its array of applications, Queer Philologies reveals how this field that so inherently involves “analysis of language and textual transmission, contamination, and correction” shares a tropic language with the lexicon of reproduction, sexuality, and the family (20). In doing so, it showcases rich scholarly territory where sexuality intersects with textuality.

One of the most interesting parts of the book involves discussion of the role of editors in fashioning texts and consequently readers’ reception of those texts. For example, spelling practices and other patterns of writing have helped scholars identify different compositors of Shakespeare’s work. Masten deftly shows how these practices of profiling individuals based on exhibited behaviors mirror efforts in the middle of the twentieth century to identify homosexual employees in the US government. Turning next to the history of editors’ efforts to correct “errors” in early modern texts, Masten shows us another clear link between philology and sexuality by tracing how attempts to fix or regularize spelling has worked to elide possibilities for a variety of forms of romantic and sexual relations. For example, the marriage scene in the folio version of As You Like It reads “joyne his hand with his” to describe the marriage between Rosalind/Ganymede and Orlando. However, editors almost universally emend the line to “correct” one instance of “his” to read “her,” thus foreclosing the gendered possibilities for how we interpret the scene. Attention to philological practices that adjust gender identities in texts is thus vital, especially in regard to this play where a boy actor would have originally played the female character and the female character takes...