Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality

305 Pages·2017·2.44 MB·English

by  Goran Stanivukovic (ed.)

Queer
Shakespeare
RELATED TITLES
Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media
Edited by Stephen O’Neill
Queering the Shakespeare Film
Anthony Guy Patricia
Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory
Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe
Shakespeare and Greece
Edited by Alison Findlay and Vassiliki Markidou
Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory
Neema Parvini
Shakespeare’s Fathers and Daughters
Oliver Ford Davies
Queer
Shakespeare
Desire and
Sexuality
Edited by
Goran Stanivukovic
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
A note about the text
Notes on contributors
Introduction: Queer Shakespeare – desire and sexuality
Goran Stanivukovic
Part I Queer time
1 ‘Which is worthiest love’ in The Two Gentlemen of Verona?
David L. Orvis
2 Glass: The Sonnets’ desiring object
John S. Garrison
3 The sport of asses: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Kirk Quinsland
4 As You Like It or What You Will: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and
Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus
Ian Frederick Moulton
Part II Queer language
5 The queer language of size in Love’s Labour’s Lost
Valerie Billing
6 Locating queerness in Cymbeline
Stephen Guy-Bray
7 Desiring H: Much Ado About Nothing and the sound of women’s
desire
Holly Dugan
8 ‘Two lips, indifferent red’: Queer styles in Twelfth Night
Goran Stanivukovic
Part III Queer nature
9 Queer nature, or the weather in Macbeth
Christine Varnado
10 Strange insertions in The Merchant of Venice
Eliza Greenstadt
11 Male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing in
Shakespeare’s plays and poems
Simone Chess
12 Held in common: Romeo and Juliet and the promiscuous
seductions of plague
Kathryn Schwarz
13 Antisocial procreation in Measure for Measure
Melissa E. Sanchez
Afterword
Vin Nardizzi
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The core of the chapters included in this book originated in the papers discussed
at the research seminar ‘Queer Shakespeare’, held at the annual meeting of the
Shakespeare Association of America in Vancouver in 2015. I am grateful to Vin
Nardizzi for responding to the proposal for the seminar with erudition,
enthusiasm and skill, and and for his support while the book was in preparation.
Will Stockton, Jeffrey Masten and Mario DiGangi responded to the ideas shared
in the seminar with generosity, encouragement and critical sharpness. Many of
their points shared in the seminar were helpful in the shaping of this book
afterwards. Anthony Guy Patricia made many useful comments on a draft of the
book. I am grateful to Natasha Hurley who ventured backwards in queer times
with intellectual verve typical of her quick mind, and suggested how one might
think differently and thought-provokingly about queerness in Shakespeare. I
thank John Garrison and Stephen Guy-Bray for sharing their critical wisdom and
practical advice with me. I am indebted to Mitch Redden for his help as an
exemplary research assistant. It was a great pleasure for me to work with the
superb editorial team at Bloomsbury. Margaret Bartley’s interest in this project,
her expert guidance on numerous matters and her quick e-mail replies made my
work on this book a whole lot easier than I anticipated. I acknowledge the
financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada at the initial stage of this project. Most importantly, I thank all the
contributors for writing intellectually inspiring, fresh and original essays.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT
Throughout this book, Shakespeare’s texts are cited from The Arden Shakespeare
Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan
(London: Bloomsbury, 2011). For specific purposes, Arden 3 single editions of
Shakespeare’s works are occasionally used in individual chapters.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Valerie Billing is visiting assistant professor of English at Knox College. Her
scholarship has previously been published in Renaissance Drama and The
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book
project titled Size Matters: The Erotics of Stature in Early Modern English
Literature and Culture.
Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. Her
book, Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature:
Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (2016) argues that representations of
male-to-female crossdressers in literature show models of queer male
femininities that are relational and beneficial. She has published articles and
book chapters on crossdressing and gender labour, gender and disability,
bathroom activities, ballads and Shakespeare, dramatic representations of
blindness and oath-making in ‘murderous wife’ ballads. Her next book project
will bring together early modern queer and disability studies.
Holly Dugan is Associate Professor of English at The George Washington
University. She is the author of The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and
Sense in Early Modern England (2011), co-editor with Lara Farina of a special
issue of postmedieval 3 (4) (2012) on the ‘Intimate Senses’ and co-editor with
Karl Steel of an essay cluster in Early Modern Culture (2016) on ‘Fabulous
Animals’. She is currently working on a book-length monograph that explores
the prehistory of primatology through the lens of Shakespeare and performance.
John S. Garrison is Associate Professor of English at Carroll University. He has
held fellowships from the American Philosophical Association, Folger
Shakespeare Library and National Endowment for the Humanities. With Kype
Pivetti, he is co-editor of Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England:
Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015). He is the author of Friendship
and Queer Theory in the Renaissance (2014) and Glass (2015).
Eliza Greenstadt is Associate Professor at Portland State University, where she