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Shakespeare and sexuality

Ann Thompson

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which

power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowl-

edge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a

historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difﬁcult to grasp, but

a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the in-

tensiﬁcation of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation

of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances,

are linked to one another, in

accordance with a few major strategies

of knowledge and power.

The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures if one tries to center

it on mechanisms of repression. The ﬁrst, occurring in the course of

the seventeenth century, was characterized by the advent of the great

prohibitions, the exclusive promotion of adult marital sexuality, the

imperatives of decency, the obligatory concealment of the body,

the reduction to silence and mandatory reticences of language. The

second, a twentieth-century phenomenon, was really less a rupture

than an inﬂexion of the curve: this was the moment when the mech-

anisms of repression were seen as beginning to loosen their grip; one

passed from insistent sexual taboos to a relative tolerance with re-

gard to prenuptial or extra-marital relations; the disqualiﬁcation of

‘perverts’ diminished, their condemnation by law was in part elim-

inated; a good many of the taboos that weighed on the sexuality of

children were lifted.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume I (1976),

translated by Robert Hurley (Penguin, 1990),

pp. 105–6 and p. 115.

‘Sexuality’ is a fashionable and controversial topic today, not just in lit-

erary studies but throughout the whole range of the humanities and

social and behavioural sciences. It is both a new topic and an interdi-

sciplinary one. This is explicitly recognized by the University of Chicago

Press which publishes a periodical called the Journal of the History of Sex-

uality, which claims to cover relevant areas ‘from incest to infanticide,

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2 ANN THOMPSON

from breast-feeding and women’s sexuality to female prostitution, from

pornography to reproductive politics, and from the ﬁrst homosexual

rights movement to AIDS’. Advertising for the journal stresses the

marked increase in scholarship in the history of sexuality in the past

decade, and points out that publications have been widely scattered

across traditional subject boundaries in social, political and cultural stud-

ies. It is evident from the list of topics cited that this explosion of inter-

est relates to the coming together of three current modes of academic

discourse: feminism, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and homosexual or

gay studies. A modest amount of time spent browsing in any bookstore,

library or even publisher’s catalogue will demonstrate how much work

is being done in all of these ﬁelds.

In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur

claims that ‘Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was

invented’,

but he argues that this ‘invention’ depended on the cultural

reorientation that went on during the Renaissance period when there

occurred a shift in perception from a one-sex model of humanity to

a two-sex model: that is, instead of seeing the female body as a lesser

(inverted) version of the male body, people began to see it as its incom-

mensurable opposite. The early modern period does seem to feature

heavily in histories of sexuality. As my second quotation from Foucault

suggests, our twentieth-century focus on sexuality can perhaps be seen

as a result of the loosening of the mechanisms of repression, while our

interest in the seventeenth century can be seen as an attempt to inves-

tigate the supposed point of the imposition of those mechanisms. The

strong inﬂuence of Foucault on literary critics (especially new historicists)

has made it seem inevitable that the debate about sexuality is conducted

primarily in terms of knowledge and power; despite Laqueur’s investi-

gation of the history of the disappearing female orgasm, it seems almost

quaint these days to associate sexuality with pleasure.

Shakespeare studies have of course been affected by these debates.

‘Shakespeare and Sexuality’ was the topic of the twenty-ﬁfth Interna-

tional Shakespeare conference at Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1992 ,

and this volume includes several of the papers delivered at the confer-

ence. It also includes relevant essays from other volumes of Shakespeare

Survey and other periodicals and two specially commissioned essays. A

great deal of further work in this area has been published since 1 992

and it is not practicable to attempt a complete retrospect of such schol-

arship; rather, I propose to draw out what seem to me to be a number

of key concerns of the past two decades under some fairly broad general

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Shakespeare and sexuality 3

headings: ‘Feminism’, ‘Men in Feminism and Gay Studies’, ‘The Boy

Actor and Performance Studies’ and ‘Language’.

FEMINISM

In the preface to Making Sex Thomas Laqueur says that he could not have

written the book ‘without the intellectual revolution wrought by feminism

since World War II and especially during the last twenty years’. Certainly

in Shakespeare studies there can be no doubt that feminist criticism has

been enormously inﬂuential in putting issues of sexuality and sexual dif-

ference on to the critical agenda. In his 1991 annotated bibliography of

Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism, Philip C. Kolin covers four hundred and

thirty-nine items from the publication of Juliet Dusinber

’s Shakespeare

and the Nature of Women in 1975 to his cut-off point in 1988.

While all

these books and essays could be seen to relate to the question of sexuality

in the broadest sense, Kolin lists just thirty-eight items under ‘sexuality

(female)’ in his subject index and eighteen under ‘sexuality (male)’, of

which only thirteen are different from those listed under ‘sexuality (fe-

male)’. A quite surprisingly high proportion of these, in fact about half,

authored by both men and women, deal with the topic of male anxiety

about female sexuality. Other topics which recur, but less frequently, are

sexual stereotyping, sexuality (and sexism) in the reproduction and read-

ing of Shakespeare, and ambivalence about male sexuality and the issue

of homoeroticism.

The focus on male anxiety testiﬁes to the prevalence of psychoana-

lytical approaches, especially in feminist criticism from North America.

A strong tradition can be traced from Representing Shakespeare: New Psy-

choanalytic Essays edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Copp´elia Kahn in

1980

through Kahn’s own Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare,

Majorie Garber’s Coming of Age in Shakespeare,

David Sundelson’s Shake-

speare’s Restoration of the Father

and Kay Stockholder’s Dream Works: Lovers

and Families in Shakespeare’s Plays

to Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers

and Valerie Traub’s Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean

Drama

(both published in 1 992 ). At times earlier contributions to this ap-

proach have been attacked for exhibiting an ahistorical essentialism (see,

for example, Kathleen McLuskie’s essay ‘The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist

Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure’),

but it has

provided us with many valuable insights into Shakespeare’s treatment of

infantile sexuality, female relationships, the formation of sexual identity,

male bonding, misogyny, the fear of cuckoldry and other related issues.

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4 ANN THOMPSON

The subtitle of Valerie Traub’s book, Circulations of Sexuality in Shake-

spearean Drama, is, as she explains, a deliberate allusion to Stephen Green-

blatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations which was subtitled The Circulation of Social

Energy in Renaissance England.

Greenblatt’s work in that book as well as

in his earlier Renaissance Self-Fashioning

has been an important inﬂuence

on all critics who have examined the issue of individual identity in the

early modern period, but there has been some tension between femi-

nist critics and new historicist critics with the former accusing the latter

of treating issues of sexuality almost entirely in terms of power to the

exclusion of gender: see Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Family in Shakespeare

Studies; or – Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or – The Politics

of Politics’,

Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Constructing the Subject: Feminist

Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses’

and my own ‘Are There

Any Women in King Lear?’

In this respect, the work of Michel Foucault,

in The History of Sexuality and especially in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

the Prison,

has perhaps had an overly negative effect on our deﬁnitions

of early modern sexuality. At the same time one should in fairness record

that feminists have been accused of introducing a new kind of Puritanism

into the discourse of sexuality.

Feminist critics have often objected to negative views of Shake-

speare’s female characters. They have argued that the plays are less

sexist than the theatrical and critical traditions which continually re-

produce them. Barbara Mowat pointed out in 1977 the discrepancy

between Shakespeare’s women and the way they are perceived by male

characters,

and other feminist critics have shown that male directors

and critics are all too likely to agree with male characters – to take

as it were Hamlet’s view of Gertrude rather than Shakespeare’s. Irene

Dash has used stage history to demonstrate, in Wooing, Wedding and Power:

Women in Shakespeare’s Plays,

how regularly women’s roles have been

distorted and limited in productions, often with the effect of reducing a

robust interest in sexuality to the more coy attitudes thought of as fem-

inine by later ages. As long ago as 1957 Carolyn Heilbrun argued that

Gertrude had been misunderstood and wrongly condemned by male

critics;

Linda T. Fitz explored a similar phenomenon in ‘Egyptian

Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra’,

and Jacqueline Rose has argued in ‘Sexuality in the Reading of Shake-

speare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure’ that the ‘problems’ in those plays

relate to the sexual anxieties of male critics and their determination to

hold female desire responsible for any breakdown in moral or aesthetic

order.

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Paradoxically, as Celia R. Daileader notes in her essay in this volume,

‘Shakespeare needs feminism’

: despite attacks on ‘the patriarchal bard’

and revelations of the comparative misogyny of early modern culture,

female readers and audience members as well as feminist students and

critics have shown no desire to write him off; rather they have con-

tributed to and enjoyed a lively and very much ongoing debate. Many

of the most signiﬁcant essays of the last twenty years have been col-

lected in anthologies such as Shakespeare and Gender edited by Deborah H.

Barker and Ivo Kamps

and Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender edited by

Kate Chedgzoy.

Recent books have included the genre-based studies

in Routledge’s ‘Feminist Readings of Shakespeare’ series (I should de-

clare an interest as General Editor of this series). Volumes published so

far are Philippa Berry’s Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disﬁguring Death in

the Tragedies,

Copp´elia Kahn’s Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and

Women

and Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation:

A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories.

All these books make

use of current debates about gender and sexuality while displaying a

scholarly awareness of the social and historical contexts of Shakespeare’s

work. Such a dual focus is also evident in Catherine Belsey’s Shakespeare

and the Loss of Eden,

whose subtitle, ‘The Construction of Family Values

in Early Modern Culture’, hints at the book’s slightly ironic take on how

we re-read the past.

Men in feminism and gay studies

There has clearly been a male response to feminist criticism in the pub-

lication of a number of books dealing directly with men’s relationship

to it: see for example Men in Feminism edited by Alice Jardine and Paul

Smith

and Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism edited

by Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden.

The work of many male crit-

ics is listed in Kolin’s annotated bibliography of Shakespeare and Feminist

Criticism though not all of them would necessarily describe themselves

as feminists. One critic who has explicitly engaged with what it means

to write as a male feminist is Peter Erickson whose Patriarchal Structures

in Shakespeare’s Drama provides a clear and at times grim analysis of the

sexual politics of the plays.

In his recent Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewrit-

ing Ourselves Erickson discusses in an afterword his own project which

‘involves undoing the automatic, apparently given, equation between

Shakespeare as white male author and myself as white male critic’.

his essay in this volume, Michael Hattaway addresses his own discomfort

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in being a man ‘reading as a woman’ and attempting to analyse misogyny

in Shakespearian texts.

At the same time, there has been a growing interest in the history and

construction of homosexuality and lesbianism. Did they even exist in the

modern sense in the Renaissance period? The issue has been explored

by James M. Saslow in ‘Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior,

Identity, and Artistic Expression’

and by Alan Bray in Homosexuality

in Renaissance England.

Literary scholars have also been contributing to

this debate: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and

Male Homosocial Desire

invigorated discussion by distinguishing between

homosociality and homosexuality and locating male homoerotic desire

in the speciﬁc social context of patriarchal heterosexuality. She discussed

Shakespeare’s Sonnets which are an inevitable focus of attention in this

context, despite Margreta de Grazia’s brave attempt in her paper in this

volume to locate the ‘scandal’ elsewhere.

While the eighteenth century

did its best to eliminate the tricky question of Shakespeare’s own sexuality

altogether, a twentieth-century scholar like Joseph Pequigney in Such is

My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets tries to put it back, claiming a

speciﬁcally homosexual identity for the author and deploring the way

that most commentators neglect or dispose of the issue.

Such an identity

today (or, more precisely, such an implied commitment to speciﬁc erotic

practices) is of course overshadowed by the history of AIDS which makes

the association between desire and death grimly literal.

Other related areas of debate have been the differences between

Marlowe and Shakespeare in this respect (see Marilyn J. Thorssen,

‘Varieties of Amorous Experience: Homosexual and Heterosexual

Relationships in Marlowe and Shakespeare’,

and Joseph A. Porter,

‘Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Canonization of Heterosexuality’

and the question of homoeroticism in The Merchant of Venice where the

Antonio/Bassanio/Portia triangle has been read as a struggle between

homosexual and heterosexual love (see Seymour Kleinberg ‘The Mer-

chant of Venice: The Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism’,

Keith Geary, ‘The Nature of Portia’s Victory: Turning to Men in The Mer-

chant of Venice’

and Karen Newman, ‘Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and

Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’.

) Catherine Belsey’s

essay in this volume puts this debate into the context of the perceived

distance between early modern culture and our own over the meaning

of sexuality, noting how difﬁcult it is for us to determine the meaning of

terms like ‘love’ and ‘desire’ in relation to either heterosexual or homo-

sexual relationships.

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There has been far less written about lesbianism, though Valerie Traub

has explored the question of homoerotic desire from a lesbian angle, es-

pecially in her chapters on ‘Desire and the Differences it Makes’ and ‘The

Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy’ in Desire and Anxiety.

Making

use of feminist ﬁlm criticism on the ‘male gaze’ and the positioning of

the audience in relation to screen representations, she argues eloquently

for an eroticism which does not ﬂow directly from gender identity and

is not limited to the binary homosexual/heterosexual opposition. (See

also her more recent essay on ‘The (In)Signiﬁcance of “Lesbian” Desire

in Early Modern England’.

)

Recent contributions to the area of gay studies include Kate

Chedgzoy’s Shakespeare’s Queer Children,

which sees Shakespeare as an

enabling and empowering force for a range of ‘other’ voices, includ-

ing those of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman. Jeffrey Masten’s Textual

Intercourse

explores the homoerotics of collaborative authorship in the

drama of Shakespeare’s time, and the anthology Queering the Renaissance

edited by Jonathan Goldberg provides a wider context for homosexual,

homoerotic and homosocial phenomena.

THE BOY ACTOR AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Male homosexual desire in the Renaissance period is often represented

as something which involves an age difference if not a sex difference: it

is seen as the desire of adult men for ‘boys’, and the use of such terms

for the younger partner as ‘ganymede’, ‘catamite’ and ‘ingle’ all testify

to this. The boy actor of women’s parts has been the focus of consider-

able interest to gay critics as well as to feminist critics in recent years. At

the same time a more general interest in transvestism as a widespread

social phenomenon not exclusive to the Renaissance is shown in two re-

cent books by prominent Shakespearian critics: Marjorie Garber’s Vested

Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety,

and Jonathan Dollimore’s

Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault,

which has a chapter

on ‘Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England’. In fact we still know ex-

traordinarily little about the actual performers, their lives and careers,

but we can argue, both from the texts themselves and from secondary

material (notably the attacks on the immorality of the stage), that this

particular dramatic convention gave rise to a number of debates about

sexual identity, sexual difference and sexual transgression.

Several scholars working in this area have discussed cross-dressing

as a real-life social phenomenon in Renaissance England as well as

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8 ANN THOMPSON

a theatrical practice. They have investigated the social and religious

background and the possible relationships between women wearing

men’s clothes on the streets and men wearing women’s clothes on the

stage. Such work includes Juliet Dusinberre’s section on ‘Disguise and

the Boy Actor’ in chapter 4 of Shakespeare and the Nature of Women,

Lisa

Jardine’s chapter on ‘Female Roles and Elizabethan Eroticism’ in Still

Harping on Daughters,

Mary Beth Rose’s essay on ‘Women in Men’s

Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl ’,

Laura

Levine’s ‘Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminiza-

tion from 1579 to 1642’,

Jonathan Dollimore’s ‘Subjectivity, Sexuality

and Transgression’,

Stephen Orgel’s ‘Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did

the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for Women?’

and Jean E.

Howard’s ‘Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early

Modern England’.

Others have concentrated more speciﬁcally on the immediate dra-

matic effects of the convention: such work includes Paula S. Berggren’s

‘The Woman’s Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare’s Plays’,

Kathleen McLuskie’s ‘The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on

the Elizabethan Stage’,

Mary Free’s ‘Shakespeare’s Comedic Heroines:

Protofeminists or Conformers to Patriarchy?’,

Matthew H. Wikan-

der’s ‘ “As secret as maidenhead”: The Profession of the Boy-Actress

in Twelfth Night’,

Phyllis Rackin’s ‘Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Mar-

riage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage’

and

Lorraine Helms’s ‘Playing the Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism and

Shakespearean Performance’.

A central issue of debate about the boy actor has been over whether

the convention empowers women, by allowing female characters to

adopt freedoms denied them in a patriarchal culture, or whether in the

end the disguises serve only to reafﬁrm the sexual hierarchy. On the more

positive side, critics such as Dusinberre, Berggren, and Rackin (as well

as Catherine Belsey in ‘Disrupting Gender Difference: Meaning and

Gender in the Comedies’

) see at least the possibility for an escape from

the constraints of femininity, an opening up of rigid gender distinctions,

a playfulness with ideas of androgyny. On the negative side, critics

such as Free and Howard reject the view of Shakespeare’s heroines as

proto-feminists and argue that cross-dressing on the stage was not in fact

a strong site of resistance to traditional assumptions about gender. In this

context, more than one critic has contrasted Shakespeare’s use of the

boy-disguised-as-a-girl-disguised-as-a-boy in As You Like It and Twelfth

Night, usually arguing that Rosalind is empowered by her disguise while

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Viola is trapped by hers: see Nancy K. Hales’ ‘Sexual Disguise in As You

Like It and Twelfth Night’

and Valerie Traub’s chapter on ‘The Homo-

erotics of Shakespearean Comedy’ in Desire and Anxiety’.

Peter Erickson

on the other hand has interpreted both the ending and the epilogue in As

You Like It as means of containing and even eliminating female power.

The mid-1990s saw the appearance of some major studies in this ﬁeld,

notably Michael Shapiro’s Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage,

Laura

Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing (a book incorporating her earlier essay,

)

and Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s

England.

More generally, studies of Shakespeare’s plays in performance, on

stage and increasingly on ﬁlm, are directly addressing issues of sexual-

ity, as is evident in the essays by Celia R. Daileader and John Russell

Brown in this volume.

Recent collections of essays such as Shakespeare,

Theory and Performance edited by James C. Bulman

and Shakespeare the

Movie edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt

contain several rel-

evant contributions, and there has been a focus on the sexual politics of

particular companies and productions in books like Elizabeth Schafer’s

Ms-Directing Shakespeare

and Penny Gay’s As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s

Unruly Women.

LANGUAGE

If sexuality is socially constructed, it is also, and necessarily on the English

Renaissance stage, verbally constructed. Language itself, as feminist lin-

guistics has shown, is far from being gender-neutral. Male/female stereo-

types are built into everyday language use as well as into more elaborated

literary contexts. In Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Patricia

Parker explores the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s plays through an

analysis of their rhetorical structures, arguing that the ‘women are words,

men deeds’ clich´e gave rise to an anxiety about effeminization associ-

ated with linguistic excess or ‘fatness’: Hamlet associates impotence with

talking like a drab. Speciﬁc tropes such as hysteron proteron, dilation and

delation, are seen as moulding the gender hierarchy in King Lear and the

destruction of Desdemona in Othello respectively. Women’s supposed lack

of verbal self-control is associated with other kinds of ‘ﬂuency’ or ‘leaki-

ness’ by Gail Kern Paster in ‘Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of

City Comedy’.

Men arguably control language, in the plays as in real life. In “The

Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, Nancy Vickers

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shows how female characters such as Lucrece, Desdemona and Innogen

can become victims of the blazon, the elaborated verbal description of

a woman’s beauty, a trope which originates in the male imagination

and functions in situations of male rivalry.

To somewhat similar effect,

though in relation to a very different text, Carol Cook claims in ‘The

Sign and Semblance of Her Honor: Reading Gender Difference in Much

Ado About Nothing’ that ‘what is at stake is a masculine prerogative in

language, which the play itself sustains’.

The contest in ‘phallic wit’

between Beatrice and Benedick contributes in the end to the survival of

the masculine ethos. Women can play with words but men own them.

Some critics have been more optimistic about the possibility of a more

positive feminine use of language. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino argues

in ‘Toward a Star that Danced: Woman as Survivor in Shakespeare’s

Early Comedies’ that the women in these plays have more adaptable

verbal skills than the men.

Taking a comparable line on Isabella and

Helena in ‘Speaking Sensibly: Feminine Rhetoric in Measure for Measure

and All’s Well That Ends Well’, Christy Desmet nevertheless concedes

that the women are ﬁnally consigned to silence in a male world.

Para-

doxically, as Philip C. Kolin notes in the Introduction to his annotated

bibliography of Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism, many studies of women’s

distinctive language in the plays have in fact focused on their silence.

Sometimes, however, Shakespeare’s women speak when male critics

and directors would prefer them to be silent, and this is especially evident

when they talk about sexuality. George Bernard Shaw revealed himself

to be a true Victorian when he remarked of Beatrice that ‘In her char-

acter of professed wit she has only one subject, and that is the subject

which a really witty woman never jests about, because it is too serious a

matter to a woman to be made light of without indelicacy.’

In Wooing,

Wedding and Power Irene Dash points out that the part of the sexually

outspoken Princess in Love’s Labour’s Lost has often been severely abbre-

viated, both on stage and in expurgated editions, in a series of attempts

to save her from ‘vulgarity’ and to make her speech more ‘ladylike’ by

post-Renaissance standards.

In his paper in this volume William C.

Carroll discusses the issue of female sexuality and linguistic obscenity –

an area which still poses problems for editors

– while Mary Bly exam-

ines the ‘bawdy puns’ of Romeo and Juliet and their transformation in the

subsequent dramatic tradition from lyric to burlesque.

There has been

a renewal of interest in the glossing and annotating of sexual language:

Eric Partridge’s 1947 classic Shakespeare’s Bawdy was followed by Frankie

Rubinstein’s A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns and Their Signiﬁcance.

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