Table Of ContentSex before Sex
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Sex before Sex
Figuring the Act in eArly Modern englAnd
James M. Bromley and Will Stockton, editors
Afterword by Valerie traub
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
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Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available
from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8166-8076-4 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8077-1 (pb)
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-
opportunity educator and employer.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Figuring Early Modern Sex 1
Will Stockton and James M. Bromley
1. “Invisible Sex!”: What Looks Like the Act 25
in Early Modern Drama?
Christine Varnado
2. Death and Theory: Or, the Problem of
Counterfactual Sex 53
Kathryn Schwarz
3. Spectacular Impotence: Or, Things That Hardly
Ever Happen in the Critical History of Pornography 89
Melissa J. Jones
4. “Unmanly Passion”: Sodomitical Self-Fashioning in
John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy and Perkin Warbeck 111
Nicholas F. Radel
5. The Erotics of Chin Chucking in Seventeenth-Century
England 141
Will Fisher
6. Rimming the Renaissance 171
James M. Bromley
7. Animal, Vegetable, Sexual: Metaphor in John
Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” and Andrew Marvell’s
“The Garden” 195
Stephen Guy-Bray
8. Aping Rape: Animal Ravishment and Sexual
Knowledge in Early Modern England 213
Holly Dugan
9. The Seduction of Milton’s Lady: Rape, Psychoanalysis,
and the Erotics of Consumption in Comus 233
Will Stockton
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10. “How Human Life Began”: Sexual Reproduction in
Book 8 of Paradise Lost 263
Thomas H. Luxon
Afterword 291
Valerie Traub
Contributors 305
Index 309
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Acknowledgments
This book came together through a series of conversations about the
need to think a bit harder about what we mean by “sex” in the Renais-
sance. As editors, we would therefore like to thank all our wonderful
contributors, whose participation in these conversations has produced,
if certainly not consensus on each point, a stimulating, pleasurably
frictional set of essays.
We would also like to thank our editor, Richard Morrison, for his
expert guidance and support of this project. The readers for the Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, Melissa E. Sanchez and Ian Frederick Moulton,
provided generous, helpful reports to which we hope we have done justice
in revision. Erin Warholm, Anne K. Wrenn, Holly Monteith, Denise
Carlson, and David Fideler provided expert production assistance. Ross
Watson graciously supplied the cover art.
vii
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Introduction:
Figuring Early Modern Sex
WiLL stockton and jaMes M. broMLey
We open on an apparent misunderstanding. When Hermia and Lysander
get lost in the woods in the second act of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Lysander suggests that they stop and rest for the night.
Hermia tells him that they should sleep apart, yet Lysander has a different
idea: “One turf shall serve as pillow for us both; / One heart, one bed;
two bosoms, and one troth” (2.2.47–48).1 The knowing tone of Hermia’s
response—“Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear, / Lie further off
yet; do not lie so near” (2.2.49–50)—prompts Lysander to protest that
she has misunderstood him:
O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence!
Love takes the meaning in love’s conference—
I mean that my heart unto yours is knit,
So that but one heart we can make of it.
Two bosoms interchainèd with an oath;
So, then, two bosoms and a single troth.
Then by your side no bed-room me deny;
For lying so, Hermia, I do not lie. (2.2.51–58)
Hermia heard something other than what he meant, or so he claims.
He meant they would be joined in meta-physical union. Picking up on
Lysander’s quibble on “lie,” Hermia replies that she, too, has been mis-
understood: “Lysander riddles very prettily. / Now much beshrew my
manners and my pride / If Hermia meant to say Lysander lied” (2.2.59–61).
Lysander likewise heard something other than what she meant, or so
1
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2 WiLL stockton and jaMes M. broMLey
she claims. She never meant to imply that he was trying to deceive
her when he suggested they share the turf. She knew what he meant
all along.
But what was that exactly? When she repeats her request for Lysander
to lie apart, she explains, “such a separation as may well be said / Becomes
a virtuous bachelor and a maid” (2.2.64–65), but her appeal to “love
and courtesy” (2.2.62) does not clarify what she thinks his intentions
were. Does she mean “courtesy” as proper behavior, and thus she pled
for distance to avoid appearing unchaste (as perhaps happens when
Theseus and the hunting party discover the sleeping couples in Act 4,
scene 1) or even being tempted to do something unchaste? Or does she
mean that he should be courteous to her and respectful of her chastity
because his less than innocent intentions were plain to her even when
wrapped in metaphor? Where is the concupiscence? In Lysander’s sug-
gestion? In Hermia’s interpretation of it? In the temptations to which
an innocent intent can lead? In those who might see them innocently
napping in the forest and jump to the wrong conclusion? Furthermore,
considering that Hermia and Lysander “upon faint primrose beds were
wont to lie” (1.1.215) in the very same forest, why should this time be
more vexed and more sexed than previous times? Why was his virtue
her privilege then, but not now?
The sense of the suggestion to which Lysander perhaps too earnestly
objects now goes by the name “sexual.” This sexual sense is certainly the
one that most readily presents itself to any ear attuned to the rhetorical
tricks people use to get one another “in bed.” In the Renaissance, such
tricks include men promising marriage to gain sexual access to women
and then denying the existence of the de futuro trothplight.2 All’s Well
That Ends Well and Measure for Measure both pivot around such lies.
Yet Lysander is not like Bertram or Angelo; he is not lying about, or he
gives us no reason to suspect, his intention to marry Hermia when he
asks her to sleep with or near him. As the questions we have raised about
their exchange nonetheless suggest, his “honest” intentions, and her
interpretation of them, warrant scrutiny at the level of the act to which
this sexual sense refers—the level at which sex itself is defined. This
volume seeks to destabilize scenes like this one in early modern English
literature by pressuring the definition of sex that one might presume in
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