Queer Shakespeare: Desire & Sexuality ed. by Goran Stanivukovic, and: Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten, and: Queering the Shakespeare Film: Gender Trouble, Gay Spectatorship and Male Homoeroticism by Anthony Guy Patricia (review)

These three recent examples of new queer scholarship are exciting contributions to a thriving subfield of Shakespeare Studies, reflecting insights into understanding queer worlds of the past and queerness as it exists now and approaches that can equip all scholars to find clear queer entry points into new trajectories for their own research. This rich and important work on queerness and Shakespeare emerging within our scholarly community will no doubt serve to strengthen this research area.

Queer Shakespeare: Desire & Sexuality engages with crucial yet subversive queerness throughout Shakespearean poetry and performance. Unifying past scholarship with vital queer theory, this collection reveals necessary insights into our evolving relationship with Shakespeare. As Goran Stanivukovic states in the introduction, "Queer Shakespeare recaptures some of the existing understanding of desire and sexuality prevalent in queer early modern criticism, but it also focuses on style, formalism, community, and objects as subjects of analysis which produce new and varied kinds of desire" (7). This editorial approach, woven through his introduction and evident, also, in the work of his contributors, not only uncovers and corrects years of heteronormative research, but further teases out queer elements that typically remain unexplored. From queer interplay with social hierarchies and persistent heteronormativity in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, explored by Stephen Guy-Bray, to non-normative natural phenomena and queer environmental messaging in Macbeth, researched by Christine Varnado, this well-curated collection merits a place on every Shakespeare scholar's shelf. Stanivukovic reminds us in his afterword focused on questions of the Anthropocene that readers should persist in imagining queer possibilities within, as well as beyond, Shakespeare. While Puck may not have been a climate champion, this collection fervently reminds us that our largely underused queer imaginations may find productive new avenues to explore.

Jeffrey Masten's Queer Philologies contains rich analysis and intrepid readings of diverse queer letters, words, phrases, and textual resonances from the early modern period and therefore his book is essential queer studies reading, as well as a necessary compendium of queer language history. He starts with the letter Q to offer diverse philological accounts in order "to draw attention to some of the assumptions and problems of traditional philology as it emerges out of classical textual recovery, editing, correction, errata sheets, and 'castigation' in the Renaissance" (16–17). Discussions of words like "sweet," used as a form of often-misconstrued affection, are here linked across the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and others throughout decades of early modern history. Masten observes linguistic recurrences of words and language with queer undertones in Shakespeare but also in ephemeral texts, ornamental letters, and woodcuts. His table of contents includes a glossary of specific words with historical and contemporary queer resonances like "shame," "girl-boy," "kinship," and "bottom." While Stanivukovic's contributors focus on how entire plays are themselves larger enterprises of queerness, Masten applies himself to more isolated instances of unique sounds, letters, and words with elements of queerness.

Anthony Guy Patricia describes his own research on Shakespearean films as covering a wide array of examples of cinematic adaptation spawning from the flood of queerly observed films in the 1990s, such as Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991) and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991). Recognizing the staggering number of new films connected to queerness, Patricia states "it is striking that, comparatively speaking, there seems to be a dearth of scholarship on Shakespearean cinema that address the subject from a queer perspective" (xviii-xix). Queering the Shakespeare Film invests in an overview of extant Hollywood, BBC, and other popular productions...