Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (review)

The title of Alan Sinfield's important but troubling new book for Terry Hawkes's Accents on Shakespeare series suggests that the author will focus on issues left unfinished by his earlier work and, presumably, other materialist critics. To the extent that the book provides a coherent argument, it is that cultural materialism, a politically committed criticism, has not finished responding to either idealist reading strategies or the by-now-orthodox (primarily Foucauldian) theoretical accounts of early modern gender and sexuality. But the author's confession that what he "did not foresee, when [he] began work on this book on authority and sexuality, is the extent to which it would be about both those concepts, together" (137) points to what is missing in the argument: the book does not, in the final analysis, make the relations between authority and sexuality a consistent, defining theme. As a result, Sinfield does not always help his readers think through the intellectual connections among the book's many compelling insights and readings.

For example, although Sinfield uses As You Like It to argue (smartly, without question) that traditional modes of idealist literary analysis yearn for a text outside history and politics and thus constitute, themselves, a version of pastoral, this insight seems directed more toward questions of authority in the critical history of the play than to issues of sexuality. Much the same might be said of Sinfield's intriguing essay on the ways Poetaster can "be read as a complex intervention" (47) in a post-Foucauldian discussion of the emergence of the author, albeit Sinfield concludes this essay with a coda that brings his commentary into some conformity with the essays on sexuality that follow. The banishing of Ovid in Poetaster, he writes, is evidence that "unlicensed cross-gender relations were regarded as more dangerous than private, same-gender liaisons" (51–52). Ultimately, however, the title of Sinfield's book seems to stand as an outline for a rather disparate collection of essays on sometimes discrete topics. In this respect, the "unfinished" business seems to be the book itself.

This is not to say that Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a failure. Indeed, it is an extremely valuable book because it demonstrates (despite recent assertions to the contrary) that cultural materialist reading practice can still be applied profitably to questions of early modern sexuality. Against the (arguably Foucauldian) idea that forms of subjectivity are inscribed seamlessly or monolithically into the discourses of any particular historical episteme, Sinfield counters with Raymond Williams's Gramscian understanding that "subordinate, residual, emergent, alternative, and oppositional cultural forces" always exist "alongside the dominant" (7).¹ Sinfield argues repeatedly against poststructuralist approaches that, in his mind, tend to diffuse political readings of texts and "identify the one, true form for productive writing-and-reading experience" (122). Over the course of Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality, he shows that the discursive fields of sex and especially what he calls "same-gender" relations in the early modern period were more varied—with regard to both agency and the availability of dissident power—than much recent criticism allows (29). His remarkably fluid reading strategies yield stunning insights into the multiplicity of early modern sexualities.

To briefly outline these, in a chapter that explores A Midsummer Night's Dream in relation to The Two Noble Kinsmen, Sinfield argues that the two plays actualize "different ranges of ideological potential" (82) with regard to sex and gender roles and that the earlier play is less progressive in resisting heteronormative patriarchy than has been seen by some critics. Another chapter on the overworked topic of Renaissance friendship nevertheless makes a convincing case for a somewhat novel point: because friendship was a relationship among equals and masculine sexuality was typically constructed as a hierarchical relation to either women or boys, "it was not...